GAMES FOR BORED COUPLES – COMMUNICATION
The resolution to such an impasse is to communicate what is being repressed. However, this is not so easy. To simply tell my patient to express his anger or verbalize his taboo fantasies of strangling her or of having angry sex with her would do no good. He would think of a thousand reasons for not doing so.
His resistance to expressing such things, formed in relation to his mother, has become a deep character trait. Likewise, his constant complainer of a wife has a history of using whining to manipulate men into feeling sorry for her even while repressing her own anger and feelings of low self-worth. Her troubled history began with her relationship with her own father, a passive man who never took her seriously. And while consciously she would maintain that she’s all for communication and that it’s her husband who holds back, in actuality she too is resistant to genuine communication.
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