Conflict Communication for Couples

Having worked with couples for over 20 years from both  Psychodynamic and Family Therapy perspectives,  I have identified enduring patterns that many, if not all couples experience, regardless of culture, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.  The following outline may provide you and your partner with some useful guidelines on how to work through conflict when it arises in your relationship. This is not meant to take the place of martial or couples counseling, but instead to provide some tools for healthy couples to better understand how and why conflict occurs between them and what to do about it. 

Adolescents & Depression

I highly recommend a re-reading of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” for anyone struggling to help an adolescent loved one.

With its themes of identity confusion and alienation, it can help youth workers and parents to more fully understand the young person’s internal experience.

“Catcher” has been notoriously misunderstood, misinterpreted and maligned for generations now. Though it has many useful and accurate interpretations, including existential and Buddhist ones, I believe it presents an important, first person account of the very nature of adolescent depression.

Holden Caulfield, the seventeen-year-old narrator and protagonist of the novel, is often seen solely as the picture of teenage rebellion, or worse, as merely a spoiled rotten, prep-school member of the Manhattan “martini set” in late 1949, on a bender of meaningless bad days. This less then empathic view misses the fact that Holden’s younger brother has just died. And rather than being supported in working through his grief about the loss of his brother, he has been unceremoniously sent off to prep school by his parents. Many readers are put off by Holden’s constant state of irritability and his view that everyone, especially adults, are “phonies.” He tries and fails to connect with most everyone in his life. Adult characters try and fail to help him. The character is literally hard to be around! Does this sound like anyone you know?

The Logic of Going There: Men and Emotions

Have you had a Michael Monday? Boy, are they good for the Soul. Basically I’m talking about a good old-fashioned cry. They don’t have to happen on Mondays; that’s just the day a client of mine named Michael had his routine weekly appointments. Michael taught me what most every male client, gay or straight, has taught me over the last 15 years of being a psychotherapist: The logic of going there.

Michael would walk into my office, plop down on the couch and peer out at me through the eyes of a 10 year old boy that just so happened to be currently carried around in the body of a 30 year old, hyper-masculine, fully gym-bodied gay man. In order to avoid dealing with his sexual orientation in high school, he played football, ran track and wrestled. In what can only be regarded as drastic measures, he enlisted in the army after high school in a further attempt at not being gay. He then became a fireman and married a very nice young woman with whom he had a son. The perfect picture of a masculine man of the late 1990’s, until it all came crashing down around his biceps when his fellow fire fighters discovered that he was gay and drove him from the station house. After his divorce he spent 4 years drinking and tricking until his masculine body was as battered from denial as the sweet little gay boy inside him.