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.

“How often can I ask for a blowjob before I am just being an asshole?”

A client wants his female partner to perform oral sex more often. He has asked her many times over the course of their relationship and she has said that she really doesn’t like to do it. She finds it dirty (and not in a good way). It is a big turn off for her. He isn’t willing to leave the relationship over it but it really bothers him. And no, she doesn’t want to go to couples therapy. He asks the therapist, “How often can I ask for a blowjob before I am just being an asshole?”

Quick: What is your answer?

How did you formulate your answer?

How might it be different if the topic wasn’t sex? Or if instead of oral sex he wanted her to kiss him? Or to have anal sex?

How might your answer be different if the genders were different?

Does it make a difference if they have been together for six weeks, six months or six years?

When does advocating for something that is important to us turn into badgering or coercion? This question comes up in lots of parts of the life or a couple but it can be particularly provocative in the context of sex because power, gender and shame are so close to the surface. We also as a culture have a sense that the potential harm to a person and/or a relationship of being coerced about sex is greater than being coerced about other things. As therapists, we often encourage clients to assert their needs and wants, particularly in the context of romantic relationships. And of we think of ourselves as sex-positive therapists, we encourage people to do that in regards to sex. We also encourage people to set limits. The yin to the yang of the first question is “How bad does it have to be before I say, ‘Stop?’”

We can tell clients to ‘tune into their feelings’ but often people have conflicting feelings about another’s sexual requests/demands; I’m scared I’ll feel dirty later, I want to be accommodating of my partner, I want to be sexually adventurous, I resent that they are asking for what they want, I worry that my own hang-ups may be getting in the way of our shared fun etc. If our clients’ feelings were clear they would either say “stop” or “go.”

When clients are unclear about where assertiveness becomes coercion, or where accommodation becomes capitulation, therapists may apply a “I know it when I see it” approach, explicitly or implicitly applying their own standards (if you are tempted to tell a client “What your partner is doing is inappropriate” ask yourself if that might be a way of saying that you don’t like it). Or they may resort to tautologies; ‘well-differentiated people are assertive but poorly differentiated people are coercive.’

I think it is a misapprehension that there is a clear, bright line between these things. We can all agree on cases at one end or another but there is a lot of room for the therapists’s own subjective, value-laden ideas to come in in the middle. I find it one of the areas where I most struggle with how much or how little to bring my own values into therapy, because these questions “Am I just being an asshole?” and “How bad does it have to be?” are values questions.

Face Power

A few times in my life, at moments of great emotional intensity, I have felt that I could not look at a particular person in the face. It was as if looking at them caused my eyes and mind to burn with a weird emotional fire so that I felt compelled, actually forced as though from outside my own self, to look away.  It seemed to me in those moments that I was experiencing both my own and the other person’s emotions and hearing their ideas, not as voices, but as an unshakable certainty about how they saw me. In a milder form, sometimes looking people in the face, particularly making eye contact, can cause me an itchy uncomfortable sensation, or a feeling of intimacy, or both. This isn’t psychosis. In fact, it isn’t even unusual; I see other people react in much the same way all the time. Reading and responding to a face for signals about another’s mental states is a powerful impulse in infants that is probably biological prompted and that we retain into adulthood.

The psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen writes about how most humans, from a very early age and as part of a biologically driven process, develop a complex series of perceptual and psychological tools for “mindreading;” understanding first that we and other people have all sorts of inner states and second, for making good guesses at what those inner states are and finally for understanding that different people will have different inner states. We have a powerful natural drive towards psychology. This is also sometimes called “mentalization.” Baron-Cohen makes the case that much of this is done through paying close attention to another’s facial expressions, particularly, the direction of the other person’s gaze.

He posits that the sub-skills of mindreading are developmental. If you have a watched a 15 month old go up and down stairs over and over and over again, you know the power of development. Human (and other animal) babies at a young age spend a lot of time looking at other’s eyes to assess where they are looking. Later children will point at an object that interests them to encourage another person to share attention, then look back to see that they are looking both of which are ways for children to develop an understanding of what is going on in another person’s mind. They seem to do this without being taught to do so. Early on, we have an innate urge to build mental tools for accessing another’s mind via their face.

In many ways Baron-Cohen’s model of mindreading is similar to John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s model of attachment; the biological drive of infants to form a mutual connection with a caregiver. Both are biological drives of early childhood towards a social and psychological model of the world. It is interesting that Baron-Cohen doesn’t connect ‘mindreading’ with attachment since it seems that one of the early important functions of mindreading is being attuned with one’s caregiver. It would also help explain the intensity of emotional responses people have to facial cues from their partners in conflict; these are attachment responses.

When couples fight, I have observed a curious thing often happens. They often become very preoccupied with their partner’s state of mind. “Look, he’s so angry right now. Do you see how she’s thinking that I don’t do my share around the house?” Sometimes when people are talking about very hurtful experiences from their past, they will assume the voice of the person who hurt them and take on the voice of that person, mimicking it and amplifying its negative tone, its hurtful cadences, pausing to add in what the person was thinking when they said this. They also tend to exaggerate the facial expressions of the person. They particularly echo or exaggerate facial expressions that connote contempt.

Consider the eye roll. Holy smokes, can an eye roll ever escalate a conflict in couple or a family. The couple’s therapist and research psychologist John Gottman talks about the corrosive power of contempt deployed in arguments, usually expressed non-verbally such as an eye-roll, to poison a relationship. I suspect that there is something about the primal nature of face/mindreading and attachment processes that makes negative facial micro-expressions, particularly the eye-roll so dysregulating.

Partners are very good at reading one another’s non-verbal cues, particularly fast, involuntary facial expressions, or “micro-expressions” and most particularly their eyes. We have the idea that when we see these negative micro-expressions we are seeing the truest expression of our partner’s feelings about us. People believe that because these expressions are largely involuntary they have more weight than all the voluntary, willed behaviours of the other person, such as offering support or kindness. In this weird emotion-logic of arguments - ‘what is not willed is more true than what is done deliberately’ - the eye-roll has a special place because it is partially but only partially, involuntary, a silicon semiconductor of micro-expressions. A hurt partner can understand an eye-roll as both a willful act of cruelty and a revelation of a partner’s hidden contempt for them.

I once read a psychologist refer to “hypermentalization” meaning over-interpreting another’s mental states, particularly negative mental states. They went on to joke about “excrementalization;” meaning a shitty ability to read another’s mental states. That’s what we do when we are in a fight with our partner; we excrementalize. We tend to accurately see negative expressions that cross our partner’s face but completely miss or minimize expressions of neutral or positive mental states. If my partner thinks “I’d like to strangle him,” and that causes her to raise her eyebrow in a way which betrays her thought to me I don’t credit her for NOT SAYING a hurtful thing, for refraining from being nasty. If she then sincerely says, “I love you and I want to work things out” both in words and in facial expression, I will probably remain focussed on the eyebrow-raise as a true expression of her emotion and the rest as unimportant or even more destructive, as a lie.

If you understand from your partner’s look that they are pissed off or resentful of you, it may be useful to remember that your understanding of their expression may be very accurate, the product of a well-built and primal system for mindreading and checking on connection to the one you love. But it is almost certainly incomplete. When we are in conflict, with our attachment responses pumping and our mindreading on high alert for negative we see, correctly, that the glass is partially empty, and reject the 93% that is full. In that circumstance, force yourself to look for information that may disprove your idea about your partner.

Normative Masculine Marital Despair

Normative Masculine Marital Despair is the fancy name I have given a thing that I could probably do a research project on with 12 participants and then call it a thing-conclusively-proven-by-science, then trademark it and write a book and go on a speaking tour, but for now I will content myself with a humble blog post.

Never pick up a cat by the scruff of the neck

Many men, myself included, have moments where we feel that we are incapable of pleasing our female partner. Usually this happens when our female partner is telling us we have screwed up in some way. Sometimes we think, “Okay, fair enough, I blew it.” Sometimes we think “Hm. I don’t think that’s accurate. I think I did pretty well.” Neither of those is NMMD. NMMD is when we say “I will never be able to satisfy her. I will always get it wrong.” Women may have a similar feeling, but in my experience with couples most women may fear being a not being happy or that their partner will not be happy but it seems to me that is slightly different than fearing that you do not have the capacity to ever satisfy your wife or female partner. I have rarely seen a woman react in the ways that many men I have seen.

Margaret Atwood said “At core, men are afraid women will laugh at them, while at core, women are afraid men will kill them." Appearing incapable before one’s female partner is a powerful fear that subjectively holds some of the same terror of helplessness as the female fear of being overpowered and killed by a man. We can view this as silly and dismiss it or as so powerful that men should never have to experience it but I prefer to take it seriously as an element that may drive a lot of conflict in opposite-sex couples, but that does not have to.

This video may be a upsetting but it is a good illustration of the mammalian freeze reflex “freeze”

Lots of men take a deep breath, know that the feeling will pass and get on with their day. Some men get aggressive when they feel this way, some men seek to get away. Some men freeze. I once heard the feeling of hopelessly failing at marriage described as similar to a cat being “scruffed.” Not being a cat owner I had to go check it out and when I saw it I thought it was actually a pretty powerful analogy. Stephen Porges and others have theorized that extreme stress or the memory of extreme stress particularly when there is an element of helplessness or immobility can result in “dorsal vagal shutdown”, that is collapse. This is described as the same reflex that makes the springbok that gets jumped by a lion go limp when it senses that it cannot escape. Many men talk about feeling trapped, stuck or unable to breathe when they talk about this feeling.

When these responses have a lot of secondary gain, for example if a female partner backs off from asserting that something isn’t working for them, NMMD and the response may become more likely to recur. The feeling may also reactivate other, earlier traumatic experiences of being powerless from earlier in a man’s life which can amp up the emotional intensity of the response.

The reactions that can come out of this feeling can fuel a lot of crappy stuff in a relationship, as I think is probably pretty evident, particularly if they happen regularly. But feelings are always legit, worth noticing and breathing through. By calling it Normative I hope people will understand that it is common, both to take the shame out of feeling it and also to help men realize that while lots of other men feel this way, other men have figured out how to manage their responses to it in ways that don’t blow up their relationships.

Do we marry the wrong people?

An article about "How We End Up Marrying the Wrong People" in the Philosopher's Mail is wonderfully thought provoking, full of great insights and very wrong.  I probably should agree with it since it recommends that people undergo lots of self-reflection and guided psychological processes before they get married.  In fact, the last line is a call for "psychological marriages."  Sounds like it would be good for business. 

The good.  

The article -- which, oddly, is unsigned -- has many fantastic observations about relationships.

“We ‘project’ a range of perfections into the beloved on the basis of only a little evidence. In elaborating a whole personality from a few small – but hugely evocative – details, we are doing for the inner character of a person what our eyes naturally do with the sketch of a face.
We don’t see this as a picture of someone who has no nostrils, eight strands of hair and no eyelashes. Without even noticing that we are doing it, we fill in the missing parts. Our brains are primed to take tiny visual hints and construct entire figures from them – and we do the same when it comes to the character of our prospective spouse. We are – much more than we give ourselves credit for, and to our great cost – inveterate artists of elaboration.”

This is a lovely way of showing us how much we project onto our partners.  I spend a lot of time with couples trying to get people to disentangle what they want or fear or expect from their partners, from what their partners are actually saying or doing or feeling. 

“Prior to marriage, we’re rarely involved in dynamics that properly hold up a mirror to our disturbances. Whenever more casual relationships threaten to reveal the ‘difficult’ side of our natures, we tend to blame the partner – and call it a day. As for our friends, they predictably don’t care enough about us to have any motive to probe our real selves. They only want a nice evening out. Therefore, we end up blind to the awkward sides of our natures.”

In my experience, both personal and professional this is true.  Couplehood can make us to examine our faults because there is a lot at stake.  But is knowing oneself a prerequisite for a good marriage?  Of course a publication called the Philosopher's Mail thinks so.  Me, not so much.  

The Mistake

What follows from this smart, though pessimistic, view of human nature and relationships -- that a battery of psychological testing prior to marriage will enhance self-knowledge and knowledge of the other person and thereby fix what ails marriages -- is a mistake.  A whopper of a mistake.  A mistake on the order of picking a life-partner with eight strands of hair and no nostrils. 

The mistake is that it both underestimates and overestimates what psychology is. 

I recently saw a couple who had been married for 25 years in which the man was completely resistant to all my psychological blandishments, he wasn't hostile or 'in denial' or 'defended'; he just was completely uninterested in his own motivations.  As he saw it, over the course of a long marriage, he had forgotten to treat his wife well and now he wanted a chance to do what she was asking for; more attention, more romance, more sex.  I wanted to know 'why' but after three sessions he had changed and she was happy.  The surgery was a disaster but the patient not only survived but felt much better.  The lesson: Who cares 'why' if a relationship works?  There are plenty of couples who are happy enough, for enough of the time that they don't need to spend a lot of time reflecting on it.  (This is one of the great discoveries of John Gottman's research).  It is easy to extrapolate from unhappy couples in a therapist's office to assume that all couples are unhappy.  The dubious statistic (Philosopher's Mail, thankfully does not) about 50% failed marriages can re-enforce this idea (for why the statistic needs to be taken with a grain of salt see here).  Even if we grant it for a moment that 50% of marriages will last sixty years, it is worth noting that the vast majority do so without without anybody ever stepping into a shrink's office.  As I have remarked before, marriages, like people, are resilient.  A realistically optimistic focus on individual and couple resiliency is honest and healthy. 

The most serious problems people encounter in couples are not magnifications of the same problems they encounter in friendships or the work place.  The reason for that is that a couple relationship isn't the same as other relationships.  I see a lot of young couples, couples who have recently moved in together after a year or two of dating.  They fight, they hurt.  They come in bewildered because what they are experiencing is so different from what happens in the rest of their lives and what happened for the first year of their relationship. 

From what I have seen, after a year or two in a relationship, if and when we feel safe with our partners people sometimes do something different than they do in other relationships such as friendships.  My metaphor for this is: we come to our partner timidly, expectantly, filled with hope and reach out to them and offer them a beautiful silver platter filled with our shit.  When we feel safe and loved and secure enough we bring out things that we haven't paid attention to or thought about or reflected on for years, things that we are ashamed of, afraid of, mistrustful of, don't have any idea how to handle.  It is a paradox that the tribute of love is our own least loved parts.  These are things that psychological testing won't discover.  And our partner's reaction to us offering up our damaged bits can't be easily predicted. 

Couples can and should talk about their expectations: money, career, housework, children, sex.  People need to be honest with themselves about what is important in a partner but also need to know that will change over time. 

I don't believe in compatibility so much as I believe in kindness, flexibility and positivity.  Those qualities will see couples over a lot of hard stuff including a lot of incompatibility.  

What "The Americans" gets right and wrong about families, deceit and violence.

I have been making my way through FX's "The Americans."  (Spoilers ahead!)  It is about a seemingly normal couple, the Jennings, who are, in fact, Soviet agents living in a Washington suburb and raising two children.  The politics of the show are complicated; the Soviet agents at the centre of the show, Philip and Elizabeth, are very sympathetically portrayed but the very idea that Russian-born Soviet agents were able to successfully pose as native born Americans seems more like post-millennial sci-fi paranoia à la Battlestar Gallactica than cold-war Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy realism.  That aside, the appeal of the show is the marriage at its heart.  How can two people who are expert deceivers and trained to see deceit everywhere, trust one another?  Because they absolutely need to trust one another.  They are alone in enemy territory.  They are one another's only source of safety.

This is the dilemma at the heart of every relationship; No one can betray me like my lover and my lover is the only one who can heal betrayal.  The show manages this with great psychological realism.  Its creator is a former CIA agent. 

I have a serious quibble with the Jennings children though, Paige and Henry.  I am about nine episodes in so this may change but the kids seem ridiculously well-balanced.  This isn't meant to be an action-comedy like "Spy Kids" where the parents bring the diaper bag instead of the bomb disposal bag but the show can't shake the very American convention that to be likable, the spies need to be good, loving parents, with essentially lovable, if slightly troubled kids.  Paige and Henry hitchhike when the parents don't come to get them (because they have been abducted) and Henry smashes a beer bottle over the creepy driver's head to get away and the sibs pledge to keep it a secret.  They get mad and sullen when the parents separate.  This is the early 80s and by the standards of the time all this is pretty small potatoes as troubled kids go. 

Meanwhile Elizabeth and Philip are patient and present for their kids when they hurt over the separation and sneak into their rooms and give them loving looks at night.  These are the same people who stab, blow-up and shoot enemies of the motherland while living a double life as tour agents, people who have given up their pasts and country for an ideology they can never publicly avow.

I haven't worked with someone who lived a double life (any more than we all do).  But I have worked with families that have kept big, dark secrets.  I have worked with families where one or both parents are violent.  There can be protective factors that mitigate the impact of these things but their children are always impacted.  Granted, the Jennings kids' don't see what their parents get up to at night.  But it is very hard to shut off violence and deceit, to keep it hived off, prevent it from leaking out.  And the show recognizes that, plays with it... except when it comes to the kids. 

When Elizabeth and Philip tell the kids that they are separating, one of the kids asks, "Will you stop loving us?"  It would have been far more interesting (and chilling) to show how profoundly Elizabeth has been marred by years of constant deceit if we were offered the possibility of doubting her sincerity rather than seeing a model of connected parenting.  It would be far more interesting if, instead of staring off into space in class, Henry reacted to his parents' separation (and years of hidden violence) by becoming violent himself.  How would Philip and Elizabeth see their son -- and each other -- if Henry was beating the crap out of other kids every week?

It is interesting: The show's creator, Joe Weisberg, said in an interview that spy-parents usually have "the talk" with their kids at some point and let them know that they have been living a lie.  I suspect that if their parents are doing anything one-tenth as convoluted and violent as what the Jennings get up to, the kids already know.  "The talk" probably doesn't involve much listening by the parents or they would have learned that.  Like so much that has to do with children, we don't like to face the reality of the impact of lies and violence on them, so much so that a gritty show, all about the subtle, polyvalent impact of deceit and violence on human relationships, can't dare to get it right. 

Your therapist, Ron Swanson?

Men often fear that therapy is stacked against them.  Whether it is couple, family or individual therapy, they think that they are entering a domain where their skills and strengths will be counted as liabilities and they will be asked to do things that aren't just difficult or scary but unbecoming.  That isn't a man problem.  That's a therapy problem.  I was talking recently with another male therapist, Dr. Darrell Johnson, a friend and mentor.  I mentioned this campaign to him... (Okay, it isn't Ron Swanson but a Ron Swanson knock-off.)

It is from the Office of Suicide Prevention of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.  It's geared at connecting with men, particularly working-age 25-54 men who are twice as likely to commit suicide as any other age group according to the white paper that was used to develop the Mantherapy campaign (US stats).  Darrell and I talked about the idea that men are typically more resistant to therapy (part of what accounts for their higher suicide rates than women).  I joked that soon it would be possible for therapists to use cookies to give different design templates to their websites so that women and men would be presented with different web sites that are gender specific since too much "feelings" language might be off-putting for men, essentially presenting themselves as Rick Mahogany when men click through.  But the Colorado campaign doesn't seem to have been a raging success despite the high production values.  The Richard Mahogany video that has the most views on YouTube is at around 8,000.  Maybe those are 8,000 saved lives and if so, great, but I don't imagine that therapy's problem with men has been touched much.  I think the character seems inauthentic, not just playfully unreal, and for men or women authenticity in therapy is important. 

There were a few things in the white paper that I thought were really interesting for therapists to consider about working with men, things that hadn't occurred to me despite having worked with boys and men a lot.  One is the value men often place on fixing something themselves and how to make therapy an exercise in 'solving it myself (or ourselves) with help'.  One man said to the researchers of the white paper, "Show me how to stitch up my own wound like Rambo."  Okay, that's some pretty serious hyper-masculinity but the point is that therapy can benefit from emphasizing the client's efficacy in problem-solving with the therapist as trusted assistant. 

The other thing that I thought was really wonderful was the importance some men place on giving back.  I was in Hawaii last year.  A companion and I went kayaking.  We visited a small island and had a great time but when we went to get back in our kayak, we got hit by several waves in succession and my companion got knocked over in the surf and couldn't get up.  I watched, barely able to keep myself afloat trapped on the other side of the kayak thinking I might very well see this strong, capable person drown before my eyes in three and half feet of water.  But before that could happen two kayakers (much more capable than us) grabbed our kayak and my companion, hoisting him out of the water.  I thanked them.  They said, "That's what we do."  They viewed helping as part and parcel of who they were.  I, on the other hand, felt grateful but unsatisfied as they paddled away.  I couldn't pay back the debt I owed them.  Therapy is a uni-directional process as far as help goes; codes of ethics forbid outside relationships so it is very hard for a client to pay his debt with his skills through labour exchange or barter.  I never thought about how important it can be for some clients to be able to show their competency and mastery to a therapist by doing meaningful work or sharing their own products, to give help for help received, and that men might feel that more acutely.  The report points out how central the idea of repaying a debt is to AA, for instance.  Now I am considering requiring clients in some circumstances to agree to pay part of the cost of therapy by "paying forward" to others using their own strengths and capabilities (see the Milwaukee African Violet Queen).  Ron, would like the idea of paying off your therapy by carving duck decoys with kids in an after-school program? 

"I'm a a bit fearful that we are verging on what I call 'feelings territory.'"

The label of "sex addict" and sex negativity.

Dr. Marty Klein makes a really fascinating argument about the term "sex addiction" in an article in "The Humanist"; that that label  is a way for people not to have to reckon with the conflict between their desire for what certain kinds of sex gives them and the consequences of acting out their desires.    

“New patients tell me all the time how they can’t keep from doing self-destructive sexual things; still, I see no sex addiction. Instead, I see people regretting the sexual choices they make, often denying that these are decisions. I see people wanting to change, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel alive or young or loved or adequate; wanting the advantages of changing, but not wanting to give up what makes them feel they’re better or sexier or naughtier than other people. Most importantly, I see people wanting to stop doing what makes them feel powerful, attractive, or loved, but since they don’t want to stop feeling powerful, attractive or loved, they can’t seem to stop the repetitive sex clumsily designed to create those feelings.”

— http://thehumanist.org/july-august-2012/you%E2%80%99re-addicted-to-what/

He goes on to argue that this condition of wanting certain things sexually and not wanting to take responsibility for the consequences is made more troublesome by a sex-negative culture which punishes people for wanting any kind of sex or relationship that isn't socially sanctioned. 

“...the diagnosis of sex addiction is in many ways a diagnosis of discomfort with one’s own sexuality, or of being at odds with cultural definitions of normal sex, and struggling with that contrast...”

The culture today communicates two out-of-sync messages about sex pretty strongly; one, that we should be ecstatically sexually fulfilled all the time and two, that non-socially-sanctioned sex is highly dangerous and scary (gay, non-monogamous, kinky).  And there is the meta-message which says that commenting on the discrepancy between these two messages -- "Everybody may not be sexually and romantically fulfilled with one, opposite-sex partner for the rest of their lives" -- is not allowed.  A million romcoms have taught us that everyone will end up in a monogamous, same-sex couple and will never feel the desire to masturbate or fantasize about other people or look at pornography because they are so fulfilled.  According to Marty Klein, the label "sex addiction" leaves us stuck in that double bind rather than helping us step out of it.