Marriage as nuclear reactor

I recently saw this great video about the partial nuclear meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania that got me thinking about how a nuclear reactor is like a long term relationship.

Each is a highly complex system. They both generate energy. They both have fail-safes, self-regulatory properties built in to ensure that the energy stays within manageable parameters. They work off of feedback loops (such as an atomic chain reaction in the reactor, emotional responsiveness in a couple). Feedback loops by their nature can quickly lead to the release of too much energy (meltdown, meltdown).

A schematic of a long-term relationship

The presenter, Nickolas Means, talks about the stories that people tell about systems failures (he calls himself a “disaster storyteller”). This is where the interest for me as a therapist really kicks into high gear. Based on the work of Sidney Dekker, Means talks about ‘first stories’ and ‘second stories.’ The first story is essentially a assigning blame. Who failed? Who made the critical error? Means is at pains to show that if we look for human error we can find it but that we won’t learn much that is of use for avoiding future failures if we do. The Presidential commission into TMI could have thrown the operators on duty under the bus and been done but that wasn’t what they did and they learned a lot about the system as a result. People generally act in ways that make sense to them with the information they have even though that may lead to bad outcomes.

‘Second stories’ are about figuring out how a system failed given the assumption that people generally act the best they can, given their circumstances and knowledge at the time with the aim of improving the system to avoid a repetition of the failure.

Moving people from ‘first stories’ to ‘second stories’ is a big part of my work, getting people from assigning blame to thinking about what changes they could make so that they avoid a similar systemic failure.