Bill had just turned 55 when he called me for therapy, and he got right to the point. He was at a transition point in his life, he said, and “I want these to be the golden years.” I got a sense immediately of the optimistic and forceful energy Bill brought to his life. His face darkened only a little as he added, “I’m afraid it might not work out.”
Bill and his wife had happily raised seven children, and now the last of them was off to college in the Northeast. They were settling into the life he had always dreamed of, a life of freedom and travel — plenty of family time with their growing brood of grandchildren, a little golf (they both played), lots of reading, lots of just hanging around. Bill had been an engineer/inventor during his working years, and he also planned to do a little tinkering in the garage.
Unfortunately, the years of parenting, business travel and long hours came at a price. Bill and Emma had lost the intense closeness that had marked their relationship before the children. Now he wanted it back. With retirement approaching, Bill turned his engineer’s mind to the problem. After a few rocky attempts, he realized Emma wasn’t going to just slide back into the role of doting wife, or even doting best friend. She had changed in ways that seemed almost permanent. Bill was determined to recapture the magic and, as he phrased it to me, “one thing you can say about old Bill, he doesn’t take ‘no’ if he can help it.”
Bill read books about intimacy, and he learned the rules. He changed his behavior and softened his attitude, which had become a little imperious over the years. He initiated five positive interactions for every criticism or argumentative one. He learned to speak the language of personal responsibility rather than blame — “I” rather than “you” statements. His efforts paid off, to a degree.
Emma and Bill didn’t fight, and they found it pretty easy to be together for long periods. But that wasn’t enough for Bill. Once, when they were newly married, they were sharing a glass of wine on the cramped balcony of their tiny Silicon Valley apartment. It was just after sundown, and a shooting star streaked over hills to the west. Bill began a little dissertation about the chemical composition of meteors, but Emma put a finger to his lips to quiet him. In a billion years, she said, their souls would still be traveling the galaxy together — long after their bodies had disintegrated into just so much stardust.
That was what Bill wanted, but things had changed with the years. “She’s got a wall up now,” he said. Everything he had done to break through it with skillful communication, to circumvent it with affection or to undermine it with expressions of love hadn’t worked. “Actually, no,” he said to correct himself after thinking about it. “Everything I do just makes it worse.”
Bill had been struggling with the problem for a long time — a couple of years, in fact — before he came to see me. During the next two months, we explored what might be going on inside of Bill — childhood wounds, self-critical attitudes or unconscious drives — that would cause Emma to shut him out. Of course, we also talked about what might be going on with Emma, and how Bill might interact with her to break down the walls. To be honest, Bill had covered so much ground in his reading and self-reflection, and tried so hard in so many ways to understand himself and Emma, that I felt a little at a loss — and, frankly, a little ineffectual.
It was 1788, and James Watt was trying to figure out how to keep his steam engine running at a constant clip without a paid worker standing there to adjust the steam pressure up and down. He came up with a device he called a centrifugal governor. It used the spin of the engine shaft to open an escape valve to release steam pressure from the boiler. As the engine went faster, Watt’s escape valve automatically opened wider, letting greater and greater volumes of steam pressure escape. Since it was steam pressure that powered the engine, the escaping steam caused the engine to begin losing power right away. Then, as the engine slowed, the governor automatically began closing the escape valve again, causing steam to start building pressure again. Then a new cycle began.
By calibrating the governor carefully, Watt was able to establish a range that would keep the steam pressure (and therefore engine speed) stable between limits. It worked exactly like cruise control on a car today: Speed up to 60.5 mph, slow down to 59.5. Speed up, slow down, keeping you within a tight range. You may not notice it in your car because the range is usually pretty narrow — a fraction of a mile an hour between the upper and lower limits.
If you want to think poetically, you could call it a kind of dance between the upper and lower limits: more gas, less gas — too much, too little, too fast, too slow. Cha-cha-cha.
Early in the 20th century, pioneering mathematician Norbert Wiener labeled the mechanical principal behind Watt’s governor a “feedback loop,” and distinguished between the kind of screeching feedback produced by a teenager’s garage band (positive or runaway feedback) and the kind that keeps a car between 59 and 60 mph or the room temperature between 67 and 69 degrees (negative or self-limiting feedback).
Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” to describe this feedback principle, and it became a cornerstone in the conception of “systems theory,” a new view of scientific reality concerned with the interrelatedness of things and events, rather than phenomena in isolation. In the field of psychology, theorists used cybernetics and systems theory to revolutionize the way we think about human behavior — a revolution that usually goes by the name Family Systems Theory.
An example: To apply cybernetic thinking to Bill and Emma’s situation, you would start by ignoring their inner motivations, emotions and drives, and just observe their moves. Bill and Emma are dancing to music that the rest of us can’t hear, but we can see it in their steps. Bill advances, Emma retreats. Bill advances again, Emma retreats again. Then Bill retreats a little, a little more, and Emma snaps back toward him, closing the gap … closing … then correcting.
Thoughts, feelings and moods come and go, as do birthdays, anniversaries and deaths. Whole stages of life pass by, but somehow the dance stays the same, and — through feedback — the emotional distance stays within a range. Taking this view eliminates all of the noisy complexities of Bill’s feelings, efforts and desires, or Emma’s conflicted personality, her childhood or anything else. The process is easy to see and understand. Emma’s and Bill’s moves are perfectly calibrated to keep a stable distance between them, as if one of Watt’s centrifugal governors was invisibly at work.
The engineer in Bill immediately saw how the system operates. “But what do I do?” he asked. “I get the idea, but how does that change things. How does that get me what I want?”
Some of the most fascinating writing in the history of psychology came from the generation of systems therapists who were leading the field from midcentury on. They were addressing just this question: Now that we see them, how do we break up the dysfunctional patterns of relating in order to have happier and more satisfying lives? Schematics were produced to illuminate the gravitational vectors of human systems. Strategies were evolved and tested to “unbalance” dysfunctional systems, to allow them to reorganize in less anxious and stressful patterns.
Jay Haley, one of the giants of the movement, filled a book with prescriptions for transforming family dynamics through “ordeals” — extended and often unpleasant exercises that forced couples or families to break free of old patterns and find new ways of relating. Unpsychological-sounding formulas about “paradoxes” and “double binds” were composed and tested in training centers here and in Europe, where young therapists huddled behind one-way mirrors, sending notes or calling their ideas to the therapist in the room. It was an exciting time for psychotherapy.
One of the early systems therapy pioneers was a psychoanalyst named Murray Bowen, who answered the question of the dance steps this way: The music of the dance is anxiety. Stressful conditions increase anxiety, which has the effect of turning the music up louder, drowning out our more fluid or spontaneous rhythms, and making us more automatic and rigid in our moves.
Bill’s approaching retirement was taking away one of the foundations of his self-esteem: his success as an engineer. Though he would never have described it that way, he was anxious about the void of purpose in his future. Emma, too, was facing a stage-of-life transition, from mother to empty-nester. But her husband’s recent intensity about their relationship was more stressful by far. Bill dealt with his anxiety by focusing on the connection with Emma. Emma responded by pulling away, completing the first step of their dance.
“So I should step back,” Bill said. “I should give her the space to come to me naturally.” Bill described perfectly the second step of the dance: Either through discouragement or a desire to open the door for more closeness, Bill pulls back. And, yes, Emma eventually senses the space between them and steps forward to fill it. I ask Bill: “OK, then what?” His face falls. “I get it. It’s Watt’s governor — the feedback loop. I move away, so she steps toward me a little. I get excited and move back toward her, and … OK. We’re back where we started.”
Unfortunately for Bill, he’s right. Another move away from Emma — whether calculated or just discouraged — merely perpetuates the dance for another cycle, another false hope, another discouragement, another week or month or year of their lives gone by.
Relationship expert David Schnarch defines healthy functioning in couples as the ability of at least one partner to “self-validate” his or her emotions and emotional expressions. To be authentic, in other words, even in the face of our anxiety about our partner’s response. Schnarch — whose relationship classic The Passionate Marriage is being reissued this year — identifies the two impulses that energize the dance as togetherness and individuality. In anxious couples, these tendencies express themselves as the desire to merge and the desire to run. Balancing these impulses — and expressing them in healthy ways, according to Schnarch — is the only realistic way to stop the old music, exit the feedback loop and free our inner bandleaders to invent new rhythms to the dance of relationship.
That wasn’t the answer Bill was looking for. In fact, it wasn’t a solution at all. But it did provide a door for him to enter a new kind of dialogue — at first with himself, later with Emma. What he came to see was that the connection he wanted with Emma would be possible only if he didn’t lose himself in it, or use it as a substitute for his own sense of purpose and meaning.
That meant facing his anxieties about life and the end of work, and finding new outlets for his creative energies outside the relationship. It meant being honest about his yearnings for connection, without making Emma responsible for them. It meant finding peace with the fact that Emma might never completely satisfy his every emotional need, and accepting that his most primal longing for the deepest kind of connection might be echoes from an irrecoverable past, or even a spiritual need that would never be satisfied by Emma — or anyone else. It meant tuning out the music of the dance and tuning in to himself.
As it turned out, Bill grappled effectively with his anxiety about aloneness and death. He spoke honestly to Emma about his yearning. He found new fly-fishing buddies and went backpacking in British Columbia for a month. Emma, too, reached out, to her brothers in the East and to her kids. She felt less secure in Bill’s intrusive though reliable need for her, but at least a little more open to his love.
Over the years, as she felt his growing strength and his waning dependence on her, she allowed herself to drift quietly, comfortably into a new dance of intimacy with Bill.
— Russell Collins is a Santa Barbara psychotherapist and divorce mediator. Click here for more information.