Framingham Community Forum; Dr. Norman Paul: Rationale For Divorce Counselling

[Host] Welcome to the third lecture in a series of five on marriage in an age of social change. Planned by the community forum committee in Framingham, a suburb of Boston, this series explored marriage in the United States today. Dr. Norman Paul, the third lecturer, discussed the rationale for divorce counseling. Dr. Paul has an active private family therapy practice and he is assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Tufts Medical School. He also serves as a member of the committee on child development and mass media, part of the White House Conference on Children and Youth. Joining Dr. Paul for the discussion was Ed Dugan, one of his clients. And now, Dr. Paul. [Dr. Norman Paul] I will try and describe first of all what I think of about the rationale for divorce counseling. And then Ed can describe some of the points from his own experience that I will be alluding to in

this initial presentation. Now on this point about divorce counseling is sort of a tricky one because most people think of it in terms of legal divorce. I think it's important at this point for me to explain that I will be speaking about different kinds of divorce and therefore about different kinds of relationships people have with one another and in many ways I'll be speaking about every one of us, you and me and Ed, in terms of our respective attempts to achieve a sense of being one's own person, being one's own self, which is at times very difficult at best in a marriage. I'm primarily interested in a lot of the work that I'm doing in trying to figure out why there is an increase in divorce. Figures presently

are one marriage in three ending in legal divorce on a national average and one in two in the state of California. There must be certain kinds of features about the California ambience that accounts for the increased statistics there. These are the statistics on legal divorce in America. But I'll also be talking about emotional divorce. And before we get involved with the concept of divorce counseling I think it's important that I try to clarify my view of what happens in a marriage. Before a couple marries, they go through a period of ambivalence about the marriage, they're concerned about what their families think about them and the projected marriage to be. One major reason that people

get married is to escape their parental possessiveness. In more positive terms, a person marries to become independent of his family, to become a person in his own right, through an emotional divorce from his family. Once a couple has decided to marry they enter into a very peculiar state of oneness. In actual experience this state of oneness seems to occur concurrently with what I think of as the emotional marriage, that point in time when a couple makes a commitment to one another to get married, this is before it's announced to anybody else and this very peculiar state of oneness is expressed by the fellow and his fiancee speaking of himself and his

wife-to-be as thinking alike, enjoying the same food, sharing the same interests, whether in theatre or music or whatever it might be. This state of oneness is what I think of as a normal state of insanity. Because it is an essential state for a couple to live through as they're preparing themselves emotionally for the marriage by creating a bond that is more lasting than their ties to their parents. Now this sense of oneness is really designed to help the couple feel that they're together against the world, against comments, inputs from others who sort of question the wisdom of the marriage, against comments from even within oneself. It's a very intense emotional

blending, an amalgamation that occurs and, in a sense, it's this particular feature that I firmly believe that accounts for a lot of the grief that occurs in all marriages. There are the basic variations of this theme: parents object to the marriage, they may help to create a more permanent bond between the couple whom they tend-- seek to separate. You could call this rebelliousness by the couple against the parents, you can call it whatever you want, but it seems that the greater opposition that exists from the outside world and specifically from family, the more intense and determined the couple might be in getting married. I think it's one of the factors that counts for elopement. Now, when the

couple gets married they have different images in their heads as to what this marriage is going to be like. And in a sense this is also part of the problem because if you visualize something in your head that this marriage is going to work out and there's going to be love over a period of time, it's going to have to be that way. And there is a general reluctance on the part of every human being to give up the integrity of these fantasies that exists in his head. Good example of this that we've all lived through is what happened in 1964 after President Johnson was elected. He seemed to have developed, we infer this from behavior, the fantasy that he could pull off a victory in South Vietnam and there was no question about

it. The more there was opposition to him, the more determined he was. That fantasy was inviolate, it commanded tremendous determination on his part in terms of commitment of troops, materiel, money, and the nation's morale. And as he was determined to go about doing this, there seemed to be an escalation of crises at home to the extent that the only way that that fantasy could die was for him to make a declaration of intent not to run for public office as President. The fantasy, and specifically the fantasies that are going on in each of us that we not, may not even know about, dictates certain behaviors that make it very difficult at times to get some kind of sense of leverage as to what the problem is. In terms of the fantasy of oneness and "we're going to make this marriage

work" sort of thing, the price of parental intrusion into a couple's marital plans in terms of the destructive intent that the families may have about the couple's projected marriage leaves very often a lasting taste of bitterness between parent and child and the emotional separation is difficult to endure. We can't overlook the emotional importance of children in the lives of their parents but the marital process exists in part to separate the child from his family at a point in his development when maturation will continue and a certain kind of emotional distancing between the parent and the child. We might argue that a child can only grow with the emotional support of his parents. But this only reiterates the importance of children in the lives of parents who make an emotional investment in the future development of their children. In

terms of the business of the fantasy there are certain mythologies in this country. The principal one of which I've gotten quite bombarded with recently in this White House conference, there is a mythology that we care for our children and there's a great belief that we care for our children. And yet in terms of actual practice, actual experience, we really, more often than not, do not know how to listen to a kid and our kids tune into what the kids are thinking about or feeling. And this becomes most critical in terms of a child's ability to indicate where we may be failing the child, our children, because that would mean that we have failed in being a parent and yet the reality is, in terms of experience, that a parent, to be an effective parent, has to be a failure. I think that in a sense this is a place to start

because we can never meet all the needs and all of the wishes and all the whims that a child may have in terms of what we might be able to do for him or her but we can find out what they think and what they feel and when we actually have failed. My interest in divorce dates back to the time when some colleagues and I produced a series of recordings called "A Chance to Grow." The format included interviews of individuals living through different phases of the life cycle beginning with the birth of a first child and a death in the family. The marriage sequence was comprised of interviews with three couples, was sort of an ecumenical group. A Jewish couple, a Protestant couple, and a Catholic couple. Couples were interviewed several weeks before they were married. Asking them why they chose one another, what they wanted from the marriage,

what problems they anticipated. Then some weeks after they were married they were interviewed again and we found out what the experiences were. How did the marriage work out in terms of the differences between what they had initially anticipated? At six months after marriage the couples again were interviewed and we had them listen to edited audio recordings of their first two interviews. This experience was an extraordinary one for me because it began to provide me with many fresh insights about marriage and the forces which tend to shape a good or bad marriage. Interestingly though the couples were able to talk about budget problems, sex problems, living problems, problems with in-laws, at no time during the

interviews was there ever any reference made to the topic of divorce which in effect represents failure of the marital enterprise. Divorce did become a matter of concern as the Protestant couple was interviewed nine months after their wedding not to find out that-- they weren't concerned about getting divorced, wanted to find out why they didn't mention this before. The avoidance of the topic during the interview sessions pointed out very clearly the aversion that members of our society have to divorce and the problem in a sense I don't think is divorce. But if we were to look overall in the society, the aversion is to any evidence of failure or the fantasy of failure in any human enterprise.

We have a mythology that one has to succeed and we pretend that failure very often doesn't exist. And so it is with many marriages. There's a lot of pretense that's built up in order to maintain the integrity of that first fantasy that this marriage is going to succeed. The trouble with that is in order to delude themselves, many couples rear children who really get bombed out of their minds whether it's a sense of estrangement at school with their peers or at home. One interesting point in terms of this initial interviewing of these couples that are getting married is the initial enthusiasm that clergymen, lawyers, physicians had for our idea

for interviewing people about their experiences living through divorce or living through a death in the family. And it was very interesting to see what happened, they were very enthusiastic, these caregivers. But when it came to the point in time to deliver a sample of human beings living through these experiences it was impossible for this to occur. Now, I felt that their reluctance to actually be able to get people who were living through these experiences represented their own ambivalence about divorce in themselves and their own concerns about death. I remember once upon a time oh maybe about five years ago my own work with families. I too was very much convinced that I had to make marriages work and in a sense I was imposing my own

values at that time on the people that I was seeing. I share the aversion to divorce and I would guess that this aversion was a reflection about my own concern about my own marriage and the possibility of divorce in my own life. To pursue the concept of marriage in its emotional aspects, I begin with the wedding ceremony and in many ways a wedding ritual is a necessary performance by the bride, groom, friends, and family of the changing status, primarily of the bride, as she gives up her name, as she leaves her family and is given to her groom at the end of the aisle. Apart from the positive function of the ritual performance which clearly delineates the bride's separation from her parents as she joins her new husband, the wedding vow too should be examined for its effect.

I'm thinking in particular about the phrase "until death do us part." This concept creates in many couples considerable anxiety especially as they approach their middle years. In some ways death is viewed as the alternative to divorce. Obviously on both occasions there is an emotional loss. The similarity between death and divorce brings to mind the different kinds of relationships we form with people. For all of us there are any number of temporary relationships in our lives, quick casual acquaintances, school friends, coworkers, and neighbors. I can contrast these relationships to permanent party relationships which are relationships with blood or adoptive parents. The nature of the temporary relationship differs from the permanent relationship

not in the difference in duration of the relationship. In a sense you can have many temporary relationships with lifelong friends but the premise is that with a temporary party relationship they are subject to change. But in a permanent party relationship we never lose our status as father, uncle, cousin, nephew, son, daughter, husband, or wife except by death or divorce. Marriage is one of those relationships which I would call a permanent party relationship. The obvious dilemma now looms large before before us. Permanent relationships are not subject to change except via divorce or death. Therefore divorce, a change in marital status, would not be a viable solution for many with marital difficulties

in terms of marriage being a trapped when viewed in these fixed terms. In each one of our lives our parents' marriage is a model for our own marriage and part of the problem of making a good marriage of one's own begins with our perceptions of what we see and remember and maybe forgotten of our parents' observable behavior. Favorably we would view some aspects of the marriage. And at times maybe failed to approve of other aspects. We may deplore the lack of demonstrable affection between the parents and determine to set a different course in our own marriage. But with this vow to change the pattern of marriage as observed in our own lives and our own parents to our present mates, we often fail to distinguish between the reality of our situation and the fantasy we maintain

as a standard or as the standard of behavior. As an example a man may have a notion that his wife's function is to set a meticulous prepared table before him every night. And should she fail to give all her attention to this task, her husband's anger is thoroughly disproportionate to the extent of what stimulated it. Some people say that any time a married couple has a falling out, the reason is that one spouse is not meeting the dependency needs of the other. This is an idea related to the notion that one partner conceives of what he expects the other guy to do to keep him happy and what he expects to do in return. Couples work out a variety of ways of pleasing the other and yet maintain their own equilibrium. There are times however when the marital partners are so preoccupied with meeting the other's needs that the children's needs are forgotten. There are various combinations of this. Very often we notice a recurring

pattern in the difficulties couples have when they fail to meet one another's needs. Their marital problems are a reflection of their parents' difficulties but the couple denies the similarity because it is too painful for them to admit that their marriage proved no more successful and maybe very often worse than their parents, in spite of the fantasies about their being able to establish an independent and better way of life. Marital problems I find are very often difficult to analyze for a number of reasons. Foremost is the feeling each spouse has that he or she is the victim of the other person. There are times when a man will react to his wife as though she were his mother, not being aware of this, and he behaving toward her as though he were her son.

There are very mixed bags in this thing. It's like, taking it from the husband's point of view, he would be reacting to his wife as if she were his mother and he were the father. Then this can reverse, she were the father and he was like his mother. These combinations will recur with almost precise patterning without anybody knowing what the hell is going on. And at the same time each spouse maintains with a dogmatic fervor that he knows exactly what's going on. I think the spouse is really, oneself is the last person to know what the heck is really going on. Such marital difficulties are tenacious holdovers from the emotional ties the spouses form with-- the spouse forms with his

parents, had formed. In many ways I have redefined my counsellor role for marriage counselor to divorce counsellor. As I've become increasingly aware that my job is to help individuals who recognize what their fantasies are, especially those that have derived from the original nuclear family which in turn dictates the unstable nature of the marriage. I'm principally intent on helping each individual in a family to achieve a stronger sense of his own self for himself. So in a sense the problem becomes in many ways a clear one and that is to get the individual divorced from unrecognized fantasies that are dictating maladaptive behavior with the couple and screwing up the kids' heads.

In seeing a couple sometimes it's sort of a period of trying to figure out what the problem is, whether they're able to achieve some collective understanding of what is happening in their marriage and the fantasies dictating the nature of their difficulties. And if this doesn't work out I've come to use a technique that I call a freeze-split, f-r-e-e-z-e split. This is a moratorium on the marriage. It can last anywhere from a week to six months where the husband moves out, leaving the wife and children at home. The split is most effective when neither party dates anyone else and sort of simulates a monastic experience. Now the experience is designed specifically to recapture some of the behavior, some of the feelings that

occurred prior to the marriage. In many ways I see one of the main goals is to have each person begin to learn to bear his own aloneness and loneliness rather than requiring the other guy to entertain oneself and distract oneself from what one is about. Very interesting things occur in this setting. First there's a reduction of tension at home which is reflected at times in an increasing sense of comfort in the children. Each party is asked to reflect upon what happened before the split. And during this moratorium I will ask for the cooperation of siblings and parents of each spouse so as to revive awareness and recognition of the patterns of behavior that were translated and insinuated in the-- to the new family.

An interesting example of how this can work is that of a couple who had three children. The wife, feeling neglected by her husband, had a series of affairs. It was interesting to note that her first affair began after her first child's fourth birthday. When I saw them for the first time the husband was trying to live at home and was annoyed and hurt that his wife had served divorce papers on him a month earlier. During their freeze split, which, in this instance, lasted one month, I became aware that the wife suffered the loss of both of her parents from tuberculosis when she was four and five years old. She vividly recalled her mother's death when she was four. Dwelling on a scene where she was with friends when the welfare worker came for her to place her in a permanent foster setting. She screamed "Please don't take me away. I didn't do anything wrong." She knew her mother had died. It is

as though this woman's first affair coinciding with her daughter's fourth birthday was an attempt to remove herself from her daughter just as her own mother had left her. And this leads us to reflect upon the woman's envy for her daughter insofar as the daughter would have a mother with her and later a father that she didn't have. In other instances of parental envy and that is another factor that I think forms an invisible backdrop in making for tension between spouses. Parents very often, if they want to make a marriage work, will have to bear this sense of envy in seeing his child being parented better than he himself had been. One woman I saw some years back told me her mother used to claw at her whenever she tried to visit friends as a

teenager. Her mother would also deprive her of the accessories adolescent girls would like to have, such as clothes and cosmetics. The woman said her mother's behavior was very confusing. When the woman had a daughter who was 16 she would buy her cosmetics and then she would severely reprimand her, saying, after she would observe her putting on some lipstick, "Who gave you these cosmetics? Who said you should use them, or could use them?" It would be as if she would have forgotten that she had purchased them for her daughter in an attempt to be a better mother than their own mother and then just have this perception totally blocked, blotted out of her mind. This sort of behavior would occur without the mother really being aware of the strange contradictions in her actions. And this brings me to the whole question of whether we are aware of what we're doing. In my own mind I think most of us are anywhere from 90 to 95 percent unconscious

because we have no idea as to how we are observed by our spouses and our children. We like to think we know what's going on but one of the ways I've found that is very useful in confronting an individual with the - what I call every man's credibility gap - is to use closed circuit TV. And then you have an opportunity to see what the other guy's seeing all the time. One of the things that I've observed very frequently in the last couple years is the relationship between death and divorce. A guy or gal will lose a parent and there'll be a minimal degree of grief about it, but what seems to happen is there is a thrust toward dissonance in the marriage and this death of a parent can also

include the fantasy that the parent's going to die which can take the form of the subject who is losing the parent to get involved with a series of affairs. There are various combinations of this particular thing. I think at this point what I think might be useful is to have Ed Duggan describe his perception of the process of achieving an emotional divorce from his original family and in some ways I think of what he has been living through and some of the problems he has is really a reflection of something that we've all shared at one point in time or another. For myself I think that one of the things that has given me a considerable degree of personal pleasure is to see him begin to feel he has a second lease on his own life as things are getting re-sorted out.

[Ed Duggan] In agreeing to coming tonight, naturally nervous over a situation like this, I was trying to establish exactly what my role would be, and I'm beginning to think it's a little bit like a warm body at an Irish wake but sobeit, here I am. I think to understand my experience of about the last six months perhaps you'd have to know how I might characterize myself six months ago, and in terms of vital statistics I was convinced I was an adult. I was married and I was the father of three children and I'll return to those three constructs in a minute. But I was obviously faced with a marriage in trouble, my wife was determined that our marriage had failed. She in effect wanted me to leave or to do something, it was obvious that we couldn't make this work between us, and being the type of

person that I am, accepting this idea on the face of it and leaving, was absolutely impossible, it just couldn't be done, so it was necessary to somehow make this situation fail-safe, if you will, to come apart in an environment that provided me with a rationale for doing everything possible to keep it together, so this is basically how we ended up with the decision to introduce a third party and in this case it happened to be Dr. Paul. And I went into the counseling aspect of this convinced that somehow by by some mystical power which once I got the insight into it would be possible for me to operate with it and we would put this all back together and things would be just fine. I really couldn't understand what was happening to me to begin with and I'm sure that a little bit of this type of counseling would provide the necessary insight. I've been separated for two months now so, obviously I'll spare you the pain of the

transition but I guess I could best describe the situation I'm in now as that freeze that Dr. Paul alluded to earlier. As I see it now - and you're talking to someone who is viewing it with only two months' experience, so if my viewpoint changes in six months perhaps you'll have to allow me that - but clearly now I feel better about the situation, I'm much-- I'm able to come here and I can talk about it which is a test of something in terms of my view of it, if you will. My children are at least accepting it and seem to be operating, as best I can judge, quite well, and my wife is I think clearly happy as she certainly seems less strained and the relationship between us operates, even on a day to day basis, clearly in a much more adult, normal manner, if you will.

I'd like to come back to the three description points that I gave myself and how they bore on this transition from married to separated, if you will. The concept of being a parent was terribly important in this situation and still is, but it was important in a strange way. It had a hang-up and I couldn't, view being a parent and not being married, if you will, in other words, if you were divorced or separated somehow your biological relationship was also dissolved as well as the logistics of being in the house. And it took me a while to realize that even if I were not living with my wife or divorced, or what have you, that the relationship to the children in terms

of being a parent would still have continuity. Now, that may seem trivial to many of you but it was an extremely important facet to my understanding, why I had to succeed. Being a parent to me meant being in the house, to a large degree, being the arbitrator of their [the children's] grievances to my wife, if you will. It was loaded up with the idea of being a successful super-daddy, if you will. To some degree this goes back or is related, it's clearly related, to the fact that I was an adopted child so that I had no biological model in which I grew up. My frame of reference was adoptive parents. There is a distinct difference there, there's a missing something, a naturalness, if you will. And once you become a parent in a true

biological sense then you're not really sure what this relationship is dependent on. And it seemed in my fantasy coming out of my childhood you had to be something super in this thing and it was something intimately tied up with being married; you couldn't be a parent unless you were married. The same was true to to a large degree about the marriage itself, I was brought up in an orthodox religion in which marriage was considered a singular event and it was not dissolvable. It had to succeed in any definition you'd like to apply to that word. But it seemed to have to have continuity and perpetuation, if you will, in the face of any kind of trouble. My parents and myself in that framework lived through a severe amount of trouble. My father was alcoholic and I became

a fairly strong male figure in that role. So in effect as a child I had somewhat of a quasi, or fantasized, marriage relationship going. And so naturally surviving in that situation the thought of not surviving one which was brought about through the normal routine of dating and falling in love and getting married and having children was absolutely unthinkable, it just couldn't occur to me that something could go wrong when this was entered into in such a logical fashion. So the fantasy of marriage as a success-oriented business, if you will, was something that I clearly carried with me from a long time ago. Also, the concept that there was some enormous punishment involved with this separation or this divorce, if it comes to that. I was

relating a failure in this aspect, if you will. Somehow, or I am, to some degree, I was modifying my behavior with an illusion that the sky would fall down, if you will, or some terrible punishment was awaiting me in some sense now these things are not things that I was daily dealing with but they were certainly part of my cultural background that failure in this area represented an end of me as a person in any viable sense. So that the confrontation of "this marriage must change" was one which came to me loaded with the idea that I was going to lose my position as a parent, I was going to fail as an adult - not being able to have an adult relationship in this one case,

and I was going to end up damned as a person. So I brought to the marriage, if you will, these fantasies from my background which, understandable as they might be in their own context, were obviously carried with a great deal of continuity into my day-to-day experience. And I was not able to separate my reluctance to do anything about this with the thing that was actually modifying it, which came from my background. and so it was necessary when faced with this confrontation to somehow put myself in a position where I could at least say, if it became a reality, that I had done everything possible and I ran into a rather shocking experience when the 'everything possible' turned out to be to "get the hell out of the house." And it took a while to accept that. And but once it was done there was this enormous

sense of relief that perhaps that all of these things just didn't happen, I was beginning to be able to see the partition between what was effecting my current behavior and how it was tied in clearly, but there was a discontinuity and it was not part of the same experience. It was a childhood which affected the way I was now. But it was not continuing to dictate it once that separation became clear. Maybe I should stop at this point and allow a continuance of other things. [Paul] I was sort of thinking about the role of, you say, visiting your mother's grave - [Duggan] it may be tough to talk about, but I alluded to it in effect adopting a role as a first marriage, if you will, an alcoholic father who didn't always make it-- in any sense of the word, he didn't make it to work, he didn't make the supper table occasionally, an adopted

child who felt that there was a vested interest in survival and as these two people that had to go because if it didn't go then what was my alternative, was very selfish. But it's the selfishness that comes with a child thinking of survival and of himself not-- but I'll leave it there. Clearly I took on a role as head of a household long before I had any concept of what it means. I took it on as the head of a rather strange household because it was one that first, that allowed this kind of death to be carried on consciously or verbalized, that, uh, "where would I be if it weren't for you" and that was an accepted thing. And secondly it was a role that a child can't possibly carry out in any in any true sense. So it put me in the position of in effect to be my mother's husband and to some degree in many, when I said "work is hard" I would try to mitigate circumstances within the household

as much as I could. And what it would do in a marriage sense would obviously make any new marriage I entered into obviously a situation where the woman involved as my wife was obviously competing in a clear and a very real sense. I know I-- when my wife would argue with my mother, and this didn't happen very often because she avoided it almost as much as I did, the thing that struck me as being the painful alternative in this, in fact I once said to her "don't make me choose" because I had these two marriages to keep going at any price. And it's it's a role it's absolutely impossible, obviously, and once they both failed then I can start reconstructing myself as an individual. Is that reasonable representation--? [Paul] What I was thinking

about really is the freedom in a sense to have a much clearer reflection on your premarital experience, going to pre-school and thinking about the recognition of the importance of your mother in your life. When you visited her grave. [Duggan] All right. I've tried to avoid telling this twice now so I guess I'm going to have to. Being separated if you will puts-- has put me in a situation where the day to day logistics of keeping a marriage together in terms of shopping and house cleaning and complaining about laundry and the usual things that go on in a marriage and car pools and so forth suddenly disappear and it actually turns out to be quite a pleasant experience, I've

found. [laughter] I went home tonight to to pick up the car to come out here and while I was there two of the kids spit up and the other one was in bed so there's some relief and peace in the situation because you can turn your back on that because you've got an appointment but you have this this free time and I think what Dr. Paul is asking me to discuss a little bit is what what are some of things you can do with it and if you're involved in this type of counseling and one of the things that has happened, there was a fairly precipitous experience, it was a request made of me by Dr. Paul to visit my mother's grave. On the face of it this sounds like a Memorial Day type of traditional experience which is the way I viewed it. And he asked this first in June and again in July and kind of casually in August and it came up again in October and at that point I

was convinced that I had it sufficiently in hand that I could do this without any real involvement. And and it was about three weeks ago I guess that this actually transpired and I came apart at the seams. It was a singular experience in my life where really what was involved here was a purging of that emotional involvement that I'd carried pretty much with me all my life and then really a decision point is to "OK where you going to be, are you going to stay me in this kind of a situation where the commitment, if you will, is to a person that is first of all dead and secondly probably you never really knew as a person but more as the construct of mother?" And if you ever get in a situation here's something you can do in your homes. A rather

traumatic but an extremely revealing experience and it became necessary for me to, to right then and then decide "do I live or do I die," I mean do I stay in this kind of tie or do I move out of it and try to reconstruct what's-- to live in a now sense, either living, rather than living with my childhood or living in what I might become at some point in time. Is that a fair representation? [Dr. Paul] What I'd like to do is to read you a poem. It's from a underground newspaper in a sense to tie up very nicely the the relationship between child development and what goes on in the family and principally what goes on between parents as spouses. It's written by a 15 year old. The title is "A Reading On Love." "Once in yellow paper with blue lines he wrote a poem and he called it Chops

because that was the name of his dog. And that was what it was all about. And his teacher gave him an A and a gold star and his mother hung it on the kitchen door and showed it to all his aunts. That was the year Father Tracy took them all to the zoo and let them sing all the way home on the bus. And that was a year the girl around the corner sent him a valentine with a row of X's and his mother and father kissed a lot. That was the year his baby sister was born with no hair and tiny toenails and his father tucked him into bed every night. Once in white paper with blue lines he wrote a poem and he called it Autumn because that's what it's all about. And his teacher gave him an A and told him to write more clearly. And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because it had just been painted and the girl around the corner laughed at him for going to Macy's to see Santa Claus. That was the year his sister got glasses

with thick lenses and black frames. And his mother and father argued a lot and his father never tucked him into bed anymore. Once on a paper torn from his notebook he wrote a poem and he called it Question of Innocence because that was the name of his girl. And that's what it was all about. And this professor gave him an A and a strange look. And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door because he never showed it to her. That was the year father Tracy died and the girl around the corner wore so much makeup and made him sick to kiss her but he kissed her anyway and he caught his sister necking on the back porch and his mother and father never kissed anymore or hardly ever talked. And he came home at 3:00 in the morning and tucked himself into bed while his father snored loudly. Once in the back of a book of matches he wrote a poem and he called it Absolutely Nothing because that's what it's all about. And he

gave himself an A and a slash on each damned wrist and he hung it on the bathroom door because he couldn't reach the kitchen. Reading it on love." [silence] Anybody want to ask any questions? Any thoughts, comments? "Please compare the effects on children of a legal divorce as compared to an emotional divorce." I think that the the increasing incidence of problems of kids in school, out of school, trying drugs, experimenting with various kinds of would seem to be newly emerging behaviors

to me is evidence of the failure of the functioning of a family as we know it in terms of a couple sticking together for their kids. I think in the long run that is one of the biggest mistakes that one can do because you hang on the kids' necks a sense of responsibility for keeping two unhappy parents together. The idea of failure has to do with this business of the fantasy of being a successful parent. What tends to happen is that you get an idea in your head that you're going to be a better mother than your mother was to you and you can remember all the indiscretions and humiliations that your mother provided for you when you're growing up.

And then you get this idea that indeed you're going to be a much better mother than she was. And so what tends to happen and I think in many ways this is a very common thing that unbeknownst to yourself you're not going to pay attention to your daughter, as an example, because you have high stakes in proving yourself a success, more successful than your own mother. Now think about grandmother, mother, and daughter, that triad. And so you're not going to find out or if the daughter tries to tell you where you fail, you're going to tune it out because you're determined to prove yourself a better mother than your own mother. And where this business of in a sense death and these fantasies merge together because in a sense for

this mother who has this image of being the very successful mother, she has to kill that fantasy often, has to die. Otherwise she cannot tune into her daughter. It's impossible. And what tends to happen in terms of practice, when the daughter will begin to tell the mother something that she has felt for years, being concerned about hurting mother, I'm thinking about, let's say, a kid of 15, mother's initial reaction is that of startle, shock, and beginning grief because she's confronted with evidence that what she's got in her head as to her own mission in life, vis a vis her daughter, has failed. So my point is I think it's preferable to start off with the idea you're going to be a failure then you're going to be able to be more

responsive. It's really I think a matter of becoming acquainted more clearly with some of the actual facts of the living process and in many ways what I think in reference to that is that more attention should be given to making better use of mass media radio and TV to get some of these ideas across to the general public. I think my sense of people is that they're desperately hungry for information as to what the whole damn show's about. Question: "why has the divorce rate been increasing in recent years?" I think in many ways there are many reasons accounting for it. A lot of people feel that it's the ease of getting a divorce is the main factor. I think that one of the major factors is

that couples are becoming much more intense in what they want from the other guy. A husband wants his wife to make up for all of the deprivation he experienced as a kid. She's supposed to be super and make up for everything that didn't occur in his life. Well that's impossible. That's too much of a burden to put on anybody. And yet if she doesn't meet all his needs and whims then the thing is "well who needs her." Question-- before I get into that I wanted to pursue this oneness, oneness, the state of oneness that occurs between the emotional marriage and the legal marriage. What happens very often with couples after the

wedding, immediately after the wedding, is they begin to become aware that there isn't this oneness, one, and two they have the idea that the other guy should give up his or her values for self. "Why can't you be like me?" Well that isn't going to work. I've seen a couple diddling around with that for 70 years still having hope that one day the other guy's going to cave in. [laughter] So there is some merit in having hope. Just keeps you going, where you're going, you may not know. The assumption is when you get a legal divorce you're going to get a concurrent emotional divorce. That doesn't happen and that's why there's bitterness. There's the expectation that you get a legal divorce, everything's going to be great. At times the emotional bond between the separated and

divorced couple becomes much more intense. And this is why I think that in many instances if you can help a couple achieve an emotional divorce they don't have to go and leapfrog that dimension to try to get a legal divorce. I think that what this really boils down to is that each person is in his own trap and there isn't any magical ways out of the trap of the one way street of life. And I think it's characteristic of the human being to try and weasel out of whatever difficulties he or she finds himself. And what happens is people try and get away with whatever they can get away with until things cave in and then they usually startle as to why things are going to hell in a handbasket very fast. [Host] You have heard Dr. Norman Paul and Ed Duggan speak on the rationale for divorce

counseling. Dr. Paul is assistant professor of psychiatry at Tufts Medical School and a family therapist. Mr. Duggan is one of his clients. This was the third discussion in a series of five held in the fall of 1970 by the Framingham Community Forum on the topic "Marriage in an Age of Social Change." This program series was produced by Didi Doran and prepared in the studios of WGBH-FM in Boston. This is the Eastern Public Radio Network.