Choice Theory (25 page)

They are unwilling partly because, in the beginning when sex is new, we don’t have to worry about being creative. But as time goes on, to keep it exciting, we all have to infuse it with a little creativity. If not, one or both partners may grow disinterested and start to take sex
with each other
out of their quality worlds. As they do so, they often start fantasizing about someone else when, with a little creativity, each could still satisfy the other. The idea
of sexual excitement with a new partner is the reason for all the sexual banter that frequently goes on between men and women. They want to reexperience the fantasies they had when they were starting out, and a lot of the flirty banter is creative.

Remember, creativity that helps you get closer to another person feels good no matter what it is attached to. In a good marriage you can attach it to sex with your mate and heighten the hormonal pleasure. Creative couples who follow choice theory are not afraid to do or say something different; do it in a different place; and be willing to use some kind of sexual aids, such as games, videotapes, and toys, to keep each other interested in sex. But a further problem may be that sex is simply not enough on their minds or is on the mind of one but not the other. They may not realize that in this hectic world, it is necessary for both to make an effort to have sex with each other on their minds to get the most out of it. Thinking a lot about sex need not be restricted to the unmarried or to someone besides your spouse.

What compounds this problem is that in many marriages, one or both feel that sexual aids should not be necessary—
If he or she really loved me, we wouldn’t need these aids.
They fail to understand that it is not the aids themselves, whatever they are, that are important. It is that when you use them, or even consider using them, they get sex on the minds of both participants. Once sex is on your minds, the aids become less important. Just thinking about them accomplishes a lot of what needs to be done.

Good sex is like planning to go to a great restaurant. To begin, it helps to make a reservation and to keep it. If you have to wait a week to get one, the interest may increase. When you finally sit down to eat, good food is on your mind, and you are in the mood to enjoy it fully. Do the same for sex. Enjoy it spontaneously, of course, but don’t be hesitant to make a reservation. Reserve the time and the place. Don’t be any more in a hurry than to finish a good meal and you will find that you can keep sex with each other active in your quality worlds for much longer than many of you think is possible now.

Long-term marriages that have used external control psychology
for years and are not very satisfying to either partner can also be helped if one or both partners are willing to take a look at their need strengths. In any long-term marriage, there is usually enough compatibility. Rarely do the differences in need strengths make the marriage impossible, but checking them out shows clearly where there may be difficulty.

When a difficulty is found, if both partners are willing to stop using external control psychology—willing to get in the circle and talk about what each is willing to give, not take—they may be able to stop the drift apart that has been eroding their marriage. When sex starts to go, it should be a wake-up call that you need to talk and plan. Just getting in the circle feels so good that it can lead to what has been put off for too long. Once you get started, you are setting the stage for more. But you have to start. It may be that your external control marriage is beyond repair, but there is no predicting. No matter how rancorous the couple has been, the solving circle may work. As I have said many times in this book, there is no downside to choice theory, really nothing to lose.

In marriage, as in all human relationship problems, someone has to take the initiative and stop using external control. This was Tina’s problem and, to her, it seemed to be unfair.
He’s making me unhappy, why should I change if he won’t?
was her refrain for months before we had that talk. But trying to implement choice theory can be a trap if the willing partner tries to
make
the other move to his or her choice theory way of thinking. Even with the best intentions, this is external control to the hilt. Besides, whenever we try to do anything to force anyone, we run headlong into
The harder you try to make me, the more I will resist.
Control begets control. To resist pressure is the norm in an external control world, especially for the underdogs.

In an abusive marriage, the husband is following the most destructive external control practice: He believes he owns his wife.
And to a great extent, the legal system of the external control society we live in supports that belief. Men can beat, abuse, rape, or exploit their wives and get away with it because the men who run our present society are, for the most part, afraid they will lose power if wives are legitimately protected by the law. If a man beats or abuses anyone except his wife or a long-term partner, the law steps in immediately and protects whoever suffered the abuse. This acceptance of spousal brutality needs to be changed, and teaching all people, including abusive men, choice theory may be a way to do it.

Wives are not chattel. No one has the right to beat anyone, and people who are beaten need legal protection. In some, but not enough, jurisdictions, this protection is being enforced. The abused woman’s testimony is no longer needed; the bruises are allowed to speak for themselves. It does little good if all we do is punish the men. That again is using control to deal with control, and too many men use the excuse
She got me punished
to be even more abusive. What is needed is a court-ordered diversion program that offers husbands and wives the chance to choose to learn choice theory and reality therapy together in a group setting with others who have the same domestic violence problem.

This diversion from traditional court-ordered punishment or even worse, court neglect, is being successfully pioneered in the
First Step Program
in Fostoria, Ohio.
^*
There, a community application of choice theory and reality therapy is made available to all who want it, regardless of whether they can pay. The program’s research
^†
shows that only 17 percent of the wives who participated with their husbands in the Passages Part of the First Step
Program reported threats of or actual violence since they finished the program, and half the men reported increased self-control.

Destroying marriages is the crowning achievement of external control psychology. Once this psychology has taken over a marriage, the best hope to overcome it is the kind of counseling that offers the couple a chance to move their marriage from where it is into the solving circle. Once the marriage is safely inside this protective circle, it is immune to the cancer of external control. But to be effective, the marriage counseling must be tailored specifically to the needs of the relationship, rather than to the individual needs of each partner.

In most instances, the partners in a failing marriage are not themselves failures. We all have friends and relatives who have divorced but who, individually, are competent. A large number of these people are even competent enough to succeed in a subsequent marriage. When they do, it is because, unknowingly, most of them have learned enough choice theory to avoid the mistakes of their previous marriage. But this is a haphazard process, and many continue the same control and ownership and fail again. If these competent people had been offered the structured marriage counseling I will now explain while they were still married, I believe many of these marriages could have been saved.

In this choice theory-based marriage counseling, the counselor takes an active role and asks specific questions or makes requests that each partner, in turn, responds to, or the counseling will fail.

1. Are you here because you really want help? Or are you here because you have already made up your mind to divorce but want to be able to say you tried to get help?

2. Very briefly, what do you believe is wrong with the marriage?

3.
Whose behavior can you control?

4. Tell me one good thing about the marriage as it exists right now.

5. Think of and then tell me something that you are willing to do this coming week that you believe will help your marriage. Whatever it is, it must be something you can do yourself. It must not depend, in any way, on what your partner should or should not do.

6. During this coming week, are you willing to try to think of an additional thing besides what you thought of here? And then do it following the same I-can-control-only-what-I-do conditions as in the previous question?

In answer to question 1, if both partners are able to say they really want help, then the counseling has a chance. If they are not able to convince the counselor that they want help, the counseling has no chance. Counselors should not try to help couples when both are not committed to seeking help. Individual partners seeking help for themselves is not marriage counseling.

The purpose of question
z,
in which one or both partners invariably blame the other, is to be able to point out later in the counseling that this is external control and it is always destructive to the marriage. If only one partner blames the other—a situation I’ve never seen—the counseling will be even easier than if both blame the other. In this situation, the counselor must monitor each partner’s responses to prevent this Pandora’s box from opening into a rancorous outpouring of accusing, blaming, criticizing, and threatening because that is what most people who come for marriage counseling expect to do and want to do. Following external control psychology, they both think they are right and both are looking for the counselor to support their positions. Their answers should be restricted to a few short sentences. If their answers are left to run unchecked, they will destroy the counseling effort.

The purpose of question 3 (Whose behavior can you control?) is to lay the groundwork for the essential requests, 5 and 6 (to do something positive at home). This is not a hard question. After the outbursts that are the answers to question 2 (What’s wrong with the marriage?) it should be obvious that each partner can control only his or her own behavior.

Request 4 (Tell me one good thing about the marriage) is difficult. Both partners are so into external control psychology that this request comes as a complete surprise. The counselor should be patient here and keep fending off their initial statements,
which will be what the other needs to do if the marriage is to become better.
In the end, most couples will come up with quite a few things that are still good about the marriage. If they couldn’t do so, they would not have come for counseling. As they talk about some good things, much of the anger and blaming will drain out of the session, and it should be smoother sailing from then on. They will be surprised by what they say, but these are all positive surprises.

Request 5 is just an extension of request 4, but it gives the partners something new to think about and build on and thus is very important. Again, the counselor should be patient, and they will come up with something positive and be pleased that they have. They will now leave the counseling session with something specific to focus on instead of the bad marriage. It gives them a little hope and, because it is so different from external control psychology, it is very powerful.

Request 6, asking the partners to come up with an additional helpful task during the week, gives them another positive focus to look forward to. If they do it, fine. If they just do request 5, the marriage is still well on its way to getting a lot of help. Both 5 and
6
give them a lot to talk about when they come in for the next session a week later.

If, toward the end of the first session, the partners are much more amicable and their interest in what has been going on has replaced the anger that they came in with, this is the time for the counselor to explain the solving circle and to point out that they
are now in it. And to point out further that whenever they talk about their marriage, they should make sure they are in the circle or else what they talk about has a chance of becoming external control and destructive.

Now I would like to demonstrate how this structured marriage counseling is actually done. Ed and Karen came to me for marriage counseling. Karen called, told me that she was very dissatisfied with their marriage and that Ed had agreed to come. Before I saw them, I knew that their quality world pictures of each other as husband and wife were very shaky, but as long as they still had each other in their quality worlds at all, there was a good chance that this structured approach could help them. If one or both had taken the other out, there probably would be nothing anyone could do to save the marriage. I assumed that they are both practicing external control psychology and that each believed that to help the marriage, the other had to change.

Ed and Karen are in their early forties, it is their first marriage, both work, and they have two children ten and twelve. As long as they are reasonable in handling their money, there are no major financial problems. They came in to my office and sat down opposite me, but before they said anything, I started with question 1. I include it in a prepared introduction that I use with all couples in this situation.

“I assume you are both here to try to help your marriage. By this I mean that neither of you has made up your mind that the marriage is beyond repair or that what you really want is a divorce. Is that a fair assumption?”

They both agreed that this statement was true, so I went ahead with my next prepared question. I use this question to make sure that the partners hear themselves blaming the other for what is wrong with the marriage. I do my best to restrict the answer to a few sentences; I don’t want a diatribe. I just want short examples from their own mouths so that later they can clearly see how they have changed, or how they haven’t changed if the counseling is unsuccessful.