Dovi

Well, that came out of nowhere. Mom was being Mom; she made a comment to Faigy during sheva brachos, something about how she considers it irresponsible we’re not investing our wedding money, and my sweet new wife blew up at her, yelling and crying.

And then somehow, I’m the bad guy because I didn’t “stick up for her.” Go figure that one out. I told her that Mom was just being Mom, that she shouldn’t take it to heart, and that we should just low-key politely ignore her, but somehow, that was the wrong thing to say.

Faigy

I’m super embarrassed that I lost it like that. I explain to Dovi, my voice shaking, that yelling and pointing fingers is a totally normal reaction in the Shapiro household. He nods and says he understands, but his voice is flat the whole way back to the hotel. Omigosh, I ruined everything. I look out the window of our sheva brachos BMW and try not to cry.

Three months later…

I see that Dovi can’t handle it when I get upset. He likes the dating version of me: young, naive, happy. When I get upset or emotional or hormonal, he backs away. I get it, emotions and feelings were a big no-no in the Fuchs home, but he’s hurting me. I tell him we need date nights; we need to reconnect, bond, recapture the magic we once had.

Dovi

Faigy tells me she wants to move from Boro Park to Lakewood. It’s not like she has family here; they all basically shunned her after the wedding, nebach, saying she became “too modern.” And my family is no great attraction either. They give Faigy the “nothing you ever do is good enough” vibe, too.

So I say yes.

Apparently, that’s not what she wants. I’m supposed to sit and deliberate and debate and cry and scream and make Venn diagrams and pros-and-cons lists. Well, guess what? I just want her to be happy. So let’s move. Simple, clean.

But she never wants simple.

It was the same thing when she told me a few weeks ago that she wants to change careers. “Whatever you want,” I said.

Big mistake.

It’s like there’s a sinister translation of my words, one I’m not privy to, that Faigy hears, and she reacts like I’m trying to stab her in the heart, every single time.

You know who doesn’t act like I’m a coldhearted monster? My coworkers and chavrusas. Is it any wonder that at some point, I’ve found myself preferring to spend time with them than at home with Faigy?

Therapist’s Take

W

ell, the sheen came off that new toy pretty quickly. Unfortunately, tragically, it’s becoming an increasingly common phenomenon in the frum world today that young couples find themselves with serious challenges in their marriages right from the starting gun, in their sheva brachos week. Dovi and Faigy are typical of this worrisome trend. Both present as sweet, kind, and wholesome. They both want their relationship to work. They’re intelligent, self-aware, and good- hearted.

And yet the cracks that will grow into chasms between them are already emerging.

Faigy had an unhappy childhood home and has abandonment anxiety. I’ve seen a pattern like this with women whose fathers are difficult. They either marry men who are just like their fathers — unhealthy, strong, and dictatorial — or they’re drawn to the opposite kind of husband: passive, easygoing, and compliant. These women invariably end up unhappy. The difficult husband is abrasive and conflictual, and the meek conciliator is unfulfilling.

Faigy has married the “meek conciliator,” and she’s deeply dissatisfied. Both Dovi and Faigy are stuck in what relationship guru Terry Real calls their “adaptive child.” As a young boy, Dovi learned to shut down his emotions and function very practically and adaptively, pleasing the adults in his world by being very good at doing tasks, being kind and helpful and not making waves.

However, his outward obedience causes him deep inner resentment. He’s angry at the ones who impose this servitude on him, and he’s angry at himself for being powerless. As the process self-perpetuates, he becomes more antipathetic to the other and filled with shame and self-loathing. These negative feelings are going to come out. They will come out as passive aggression, as short-temperedness, as emotional distance. His feelings of low self-worth will come out as depression or anxiety, OCD, or G-d forbid other maladaptive coping behaviors like addiction.

Faigy’s adaptive child learned to take everything personally, to yell and get angry as a way of simply being heard. Nothing Dovi does can please her because his not pleasing her is not the problem.

These inner children need to heal so they can start reacting to their spouses instead of to the phantom impressions of their difficult childhood emotional experiences. Otherwise, this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Half a year later…

Faigy

I’ll never be happy again. I can feel it. A deep, gray tiredness has crawled into my brain. It’s hard to get up for work, and I call in sick way too often. Dovi doesn’t say anything, but I feel it. He’s disgusted by my inability to function. He wants me to do it all, to be everything, despite the fact that my gas tank is long empty.

Eventually, he walks out on me mid-sentence and only comes back a few hours later, flowers in hand, with a sincere speech about being there for me. That lasts for six weeks, before he does that again.

Temima, my fresh-out-of-seminary classroom assistant, sends me to her therapist. If that’s not rock bottom, I don’t know what is.

Dovi

Dr. Hirshkoff, Faigy’s therapist, wants us to go to therapy together. I’ll go, but I know it’s not going to help. Nothing ever does. I try so hard to make Faigy happy. I moved to Lakewood for her, I was supportive when she wanted to change careers. I listen to her cry, and all she does is get mad at me. But I really want her to be happy, and I’ll do anything to get there.

Dovi

I always knew I wasn’t good enough for my parents. That no matter how hard I tried, I’d never meet their expectations. I didn’t lein loudly enough, clearly enough, confidently enough at my bar mitzvah. Nor when I gave my pshetl. I could see the smirk on my father’s face. He didn’t even bother to hide it with his hand.

What I didn’t realize was how much this affected my relationship with myself and with Faigy. I think my attitude always was, “No matter what I do for her, it’s never going to actually succeed,” so I wasn’t fully there with her, I just went through the motions of what a supportive husband is supposed to do, like book a table at a restaurant for date nights and buy flowers. I didn’t realize how much feeling like I would never be good enough anyway fed into me giving up so easily. And I wanted to give up, give up on therapy, give up on our marriage. I couldn’t imagine things ever being good.

There was something really relieving about understanding this. And I think it made Faigy feel and act softer to me. Like she understood where I was coming from instead of seeing me as someone out to hurt her.

Faigy

Yup, everything’s my fault, as usual. If I would just stop getting angry and hysterical, we’d have perfect shalom bayis. At least that’s what Dovi and Dr. Hirshkoff think. Or I thought they think. Now I’m not so sure. That EFT session we did. I felt so good after. So relaxed and grounded. Like I was gliding along the carpet of Dr. Hirshkoff’s office. After that I felt calm enough to hear that maybe Dovi wasn’t being as insensitive as I thought, and that him tuning me out or getting quiet was more about him not knowing what to do and say than about him not liking me. And Dovi, bless him, when he saw I wanted to weep in one session, he made some stupid joke that I cracked up at. It was almost as if we were on a date again.

Sometimes I felt bad that I pushed him to come to therapy. Even when he didn’t want to go. But I’m pretty sure in the end he realized it was really helping us, realized we were going to come good… eventually.

Therapist’s Take

D

ovi has always tried to do right by Faigy. He moved to a new city, leaving his job and starting a new life so soon after their marriage. He tries to fulfill every request she makes of him. Part of what Faigy needs to learn to do is to appreciate Dovi’s strengths as a husband and stop being dissatisfied with him. If she could recognize the good side to his even temperament and steady emotional baseline, it could provide her with more security, not just be a source of frustration.

With a couple like Dovi and Faigy, their differences in personality, temperament, and upbringing are fairly intractable. The tension that results when those differences bump up against each other is going to be a recurring theme in their relationship. Over time, it can get better, slowly but surely, through the couple building security and love by constantly working together, getting outside help for their issues, and prioritizing each other and their relationship.

In therapy, I used Attachment Theory and EFT to help Dovi and Faigy recognize their insecurities and express them, and validate each other’s feelings. After that, we used CBT behavior modification interventions and Behavioral Activation Therapy to help Dovi and Faigy break some of their bad relationship habits. Finally, we spent some painful but rewarding sessions exploring their families of origin and their childhoods to help them understand why certain situations were triggering for them, why they had, at times, such paralyzing insecurities, and how they could work on rebuilding their own healthy sense of self-worth.

Faigy

Dovi left for work without saying goodbye again. I see the coffee stains on the table, the coat on the floor where someone must’ve knocked it off of a hook. I take a deep breath. He was in a rush. That much is obvious. Probably stressed as well, especially if he was running late.

I pull out my phone, text: Well, have a great day, too and then stop.

Passive aggression has gotten me nowhere. I need to “be uncomfortable and vulnerable,” huh. Well, here goes.

Have a great day, Dovs. Wish we had said goodbye this morning. Can’t wait to see you later.

I think and then delete the last sentence. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Baby steps and all that.

Three dots appear and then disappear, indicating he was typing a response and then stopped. They appear again and then stop. I smile, thinking of Dovi trying to work out how to respond.

When his reply comes at long last, it was worth waiting for.

Wish we had said goodbye, too. I hope you have a great day, Faigy.

Baby steps.

Therapist’s Take

IN

the final frame of Dovi and Faigy’s story, Faigy made the decision to reach for connection rather than the short-term, self-defeating illusory payoff of self-righteous resentment. For couples struggling in negative feedback loops, young and old, learning to step toward each other rather than away from each other can often be the first step on the road to recovery.

It’s a puzzling phenomenon that couples so often make the choice to fight and be miserable rather than be understanding and affectionate. There is often no rhyme or reason to it. You can either choose happiness or misery. In marriages, unfortunately, many of us choose unhappiness.

There is no secret to having a good marriage. Dovi and Faigy will hopefully “make it” and live (eventually) happily ever after because they hung in there, they stayed committed to each other, and kept working on themselves and on their relationship. That is mostly the moral of their story.

In one of our last sessions Dovi and Faigy came in with their newborn daughter. The babysitter had canceled and they didn’t want to cancel the session. They kept her up through her morning naptime so she would hopefully sleep through the session.

When they came into the office, they set up the stroller in the corner and Chayalah stirred a little. Faigy looked inside the carriage, then in the baby bag, then clapped her hand on her forehead and said, “I left her pacifier in the car seat.”

The briefest flash of annoyance blinked across Dovi’s face, and then he said, “No, Faig, I forgot it.”

She looked at him a little startled for a moment, and then she said, “No, I forgot it.”

Dovi said, “No, I forgot it. You sit down and start and I’ll run to the car and get it.”

Faigy smiled.

And I was smiling, too. “I think you both got it.” I said.

Minimizing Shanah Rishonah (and Beyond) Challenges

M

arital conflict can be avoided if young people are better prepared for marriage, or really for life. Being able to manage a) emotions b) relationships with others c) a relationship with Yiddishkeit d) essential responsibilities such as school and work, are basic prerequisites for a healthy, happy, stable relationship. If someone can’t function in one of these essential areas, they’re not going to be able to manage life with the added pressure of adjusting to the needs and personality of another person, and the additional responsibilities that come with having a family.

In the vein that you have to stand before you can walk, you have to be a healthy person before you can be in a healthy relationship.

Let’s look more closely at these four basic areas:

1. a) Emotional health. Is there an unmanaged emotional condition such as depression, anxiety, OCD, or other? If so, seek professional help before marriage, even if this prolongs your entry into shidduchim. All these conditions are treatable with good help and support within a very reasonable time frame.
2. b) Relationships. Are there negative people in your life? Are there positive people in your life? Run from one and pursue the other. Are there open conflicts with parents or siblings? Do your best to resolve these with the help of a rav, rebbetzin, or mental health professional. Learn how to make healthy boundaries and how to be comfortable with your own needs in a relationship.
3. c) Yiddishkeit. Where are you holding in terms of your davening, Torah learning, mitzvah observance, and relationship with Hashem? What kind of person you are in relation to these areas of avodas Hashem must be worked out before you can figure out what kind of home or spouse you want to have.
4. d) Essential responsibilities. Do you have a parnassah direction? Does your financial future make sense and is your plan reasonable and realistic? Don’t wait until the rent is due or you have to pay tuition to figure this out. I wish there was more support for young couples in this area. Chassan and kallah teachers don’t provide financial planning guidance, but they should.

Marriage can be quite overwhelming. Just ask Dovi and Faigy. But it can also be sublime and magnificent. Doing the work and being prepared can go a long way in getting you to the good part.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 918)