Remember that intimacy is not about being sexy, intimacy is about being with the truth.
Giving voice to the truth, even if your voice cracks & your arm-hair stand on end.
The thing most couples therapists get wrong is falling into the trap of remaining neutral.
I can’t tell you how many men have told me that they went to couples therapy & it was useless to them, they didn’t even know what was going on.
I’ve gone to couple’s therapists and have found it a rich & useful experience, some of the time. The rest of the time, if the therapist is not a good fit, it’s definitely a waste of time.
What separates the effective couples therapist from the useless (and potentially harmful ones) is a matter of skill & presence.
The Dangerous Myth of Neutrality
It’s actually taught in many schools of therapy, to remain neutral is to become a safe space & become a nurturing attachment figure to both individuals.
But neutrality us also a good way to collude with the problematic dynamics a couple is facing, so you actually don’t facilitate any real transformation.
The best way into the truth
is creating space
for courageous presence.
Slowed-down space.
A space in which you notice the feelings & sensations in your body & freely say what’s on your mind.
Therapist & Writer Terry Real coined the term joining through the truth.
I won’t lie, I wish I had come up with that.
I have a deep respect for Real’s body of work as it has affirmed my own style of practice, because he’s not afraid to buck the sacred cows of orthodoxy within the stagnant groupthink of therapeutic practice.
(See summary of we’ve had 100 years of psychotherapy & the worlds getting worse)
Real is a distant mentor of mine & an elder in the field of both men’s-work & couples therapy.
Real points out, in the context of couples therapy,
“we aren’t doing our clients a favour by soft-pedalling difficult issues.
It’s actually disrespectful to client to NOT let them in on the truth about what we witness regularly in our offices as they play out their relationships in front of us.
Especially if the ways they deal with their partners is self-centered, unfeeling & counterproductive.”
This way of breaking neutrality
& telling the truth
might be considered confrontational,
but a better word
is
directness.
Straight Line Leadership.
Real describes this very quality of directness as ‘joining through the truth’.
Real says first you hold up a mirror to help people see themselves & their role in the dysfunctional dance of the relationship … with as much accuracy as possible.
Second, you show them the difficult truths about themselves in a way that leaves them feeling not only that we’re on their side, but that we’re actually rooting for them
It’s a delicate art, but it’s entirely do-able & gets easier the more you practice.
The approach lives somewhere between traditional psychotherapy, with its emphasis on creating a nonjudgmental, accepting, holding environment to bring about change,
and the more rough-and-tumble, challenging, psychoeducational discipline of coaching.
“Therapeutic Coaching is based on the idea that I can coach clients towards intimacy, teach them how to be more psychologically evolved, and mentor them into transforming their character.” - Real
TAKING SIDES
The biggest pivot – the biggest AHA moment – for me, as a therapist working with couples, is the stance that partners do not share 50-50 responsibility for ALL of their issues with each other.
Some couples might be 70-30, others might be 90-10.
Often, but not always, a couple will present as one ‘latent’ and one ‘blatant’.
One is more often in an enabling position, perhaps resentfully so, and another is more clearly anti-relational.
Usually the fed-up latent partner
will drag the other
(the often clueless blatant partner)
into therapy.
I’ve seen this happen so many times, AND I’ve also seen the latent partners attempts fail because the other just wasn’t willing to look at their shit.
Sometimes a woman will even send her man to me for 1:1 coaching with the ultimatum that if he doesn’t get help to fix it, the relationship is over.
And my bias is that it’s always the man’s responsibility.
I work from the assumption & conviction … that
You have the power to transform your relationship with anyone or anything.
When a man commits 100% under these conditions & executes 100% of my coaching, 100% of the time, the resulting transformation is guaranteed.
Because I meet you where you are & we go deep.
And you’ve gotta be willing to
DIE EVERY DAY
to the man you were,
in order to show up
as the man you’re BECOMING.
A couple goes from fighting regularly to f*cking regularly.
Everything transforms when a man get’s not only his balls back, but also locates his backbone & heart, fully.
Because I also break the rules of orthodox couples therapy by teaching my clients about sexual polarity, masculine versus feminine communication, seduction & masculine containment.
It’s more than therapy, its’ a therapeutically delivered curriculum.
I appreciate Real’s take on Grandiosity & Leverage
(subjects very few therapists dare to even approach)
Grandiosity & Leverage
Real: “Another way of saying that someone is blatant is that they stride through life feeling superior, looking down their nose at others, or ignoring the rules and feeling entitled.
Grandiose clients bring to therapy the same privilege they bring into their living room and bedrooms--the privilege to blow up or flee.
Encountering the threat of such volatility, we're taught to go gingerly.
Under the rubric of "forming an alliance," or "gaining the client's trust," we learn, in essence, to replicate the traditional spousal role: we reason, we cajole, we seduce--we do everything except tell the truth and put our foot down.”
“Therapists fear that if they push too hard, the client will explode or leave treatment--not unreasonable fears--so we play tough clients like fish, alternating between giving them enough line and reeling them in.
There’s an old saying that captures a pattern of anger work between couples:
I’ll stay silent while you blow up for both of us.
Therapeutic coaching deals with this issue a little differently.
It begins by removing the power of intimidation.”
I’ve been so direct with a couple who started fighting in an out-of-control way in my office, that I laid out ultimatums that they needed to meet in order to keep working with me (which, ultimately, one partner was unwilling to do, so I effectively fired them as my clients).
Healers in ancient times had an oath:
do no further harm.
Which is why I lay out strong terms of engagement, to include the code of ‘telling the truth’.
And, to borrow Real’s term directly, joining through the truth.
In other words,
in order to show up powerfully
in the commitment to
‘do no harm’,
one must
take no shit.
If I’m not modelling that with appropriate disclosure, as a the guide, then how deep can my people go?
Real says “Leverage means that therapy must offer the grandiose client either the prospect of something he wants--a warmer, sexier wife, for example--or a buffer against negative consequences he distinctly doesn't want--like losing his marriage.
This is a necessary first step with entitled clients because grandiosity impairs one's sensitivity to others and ability to assess negative consequences.”
In the pressure cooker
of conjoined therapeutic coaching,
a deepening happens.
An empathetic witnessing presence, that also has the power to be direct & confront when necessary, is the ultimate change agent.
Real writes: “For more than 50 years, the mental health field has focused on helping people come up from the one-down position of shame. But we've done a poor job equipping therapists to help entitled clients come down from their one-up perch in life. Many current forms of couples therapy invite therapists to listen empathically, reflecting back what we hear, to be non-directive, to serve as a secure attachment figure, a safe holding environment.
Such a nurture-based, facilitative therapy can work with a shame-based person because lack of empathy to oneself is central to the disorder.
But the grandiose client has no problems being empathic toward himself.
His missing trait is empathy toward others--and an appreciation of consequeces.”
Another name for joining in the truth, comes from the Wake Up Warrior Movement (in which I am a trainer).
(Because Warrior Cultures always Live By a Code or Creed)
We have this:
The Code: Tell the Truth
Stop F*cking Lying ….. & …. Tell the Truth
It’s based on the premise that we’re all liars, on some level.
You’re a liar.
I’m a liar.
Everyone is a liar, on some level.
Because we all put on masks to play along with parts of this world that are not aligned with our deeper, raw & real truth.
Psychology calls it the ‘false self’ & defence mechanisms.
But too much psycho-babble is draining.
Call it what it is, a lie.
But staying in the lie, eventually, takes MORE energy, than allowing the truth to move through us and eventually become us.
Our secrets make us sick, eventually.
Joining in the truth is aligned with the directness required to go into the most intimate relationship in our lives, our marriage, and transform it into a more harmonious union.
Remembering intimacy is not so much about being sexy, it’s about the truth.
And as Mushashi reminds us:
Truth is not what you want it to be;
it is what it is,
and you must bend to its power
or live a lie.
It’s easy to lean on meme’s & quote’s like this one, but the real truth is that relationships can be hard.
The three greatest vehicles for personal growth: 1. relationships, 2. the health of the body & 3. business & money.
I believe they all take turns bringing us the challenges we signed up for.
But that doesn’t make telling the raw & vulnerable truth, any easier.
Sometimes the truth’s we need to face are intergenerational trauma’s & problematic relationship patterns that are larger than us.
And in those cases, asking for help becomes a power move.
The thing about shame is that, it breeds in silence.
The more the thing I am shameful about, is shrouded in silence, the more another layer of shame grows around the shame, creating a calcified mega-lie.
This is how inner problems can become Goliaths.
Which is why the only way through them is through joining in the truth.
“Sometimes the struggle to confront difficult truths may not come in the present, but in the past, where a particular relationship stance was learned.
Most Professional life coaches aren't trained to pursue family-of-origin or early childhood issues, but therapeutic coaches are.
As much as I respect Terry Real, there are places where he loses me.
Specifically, he has no praxis that includes sexual polarity.
If we’re going to join in the truth, we must include our primal, embodied nature.
Sexual polarity is not a theory.
It’s an embodied practice that recognizes the primal & primary differences of how men & women communicate, specifically in unconscious & embodied ways.
The core of it, is a working knowledge of masculine versus feminine communication.
In a time of boss girls & nice guys, powerful women & passive men, knowledge & working practice of sexual polarity is the most liberating force of truth we can join in, that has the power to transform the most common dysfunctions facing relationships, marriages & families: namely the systemic sedation of men & the loss of fierceness & the fear of power.
So fire your therapist if they don’t have working knowledge of this aspect of relationships and keep your heart posture & mindset poised towards the courageous & imperfectness of your human relationships,
by
living by the code:
Stop lying,
Tell the truth.
Do no harm.
Take no shit.
Gabriel Keczan is the author of Alive On Purpose, a therapeutic coach on a mission to revive initiations for men & rites of passage for boys that lead to a revival of the traditional & integral qualities of character that have become demonized in the modern world. Join his Alive On Purpose Brotherhood here to access training portal, connection, clarity & group coaching calls for men.
