session6.pdf

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction

Homework

Week 6

• Practice mindfulness formally for 45 minutes every day for 6 days this week

using Sitting Meditation CD and alternating every other day with the Body

Scan or one of the Yoga CDs.

• Practice mindful sitting meditation for at least 15-20 minutes a day on Body

Scan and Yoga CD days.

• Read and reflect upon the article by psychologist and sex therapist, David

Schnarch about the deeper workings of intimate relationships (also see the link at

the end to an optional interview by him)

• Continue to cultivate your intention to increase your level of awareness during

daily activities such as: eating, showering, brushing your teeth, washing dishes,

taking out the garbage, reading to the kids as well as awareness of the body and

opportunities to practice yoga and cultivate mindfulness during the day.

Reflections

“Wild Geese”

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Mary Oliver, Dream Work, Grove Atlantic Inc., 1986 & New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press,

1992 .

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

Passionate Marriage: Forever an Oxymoron?

By David Schnarch, Ph. D.

Betty, a designer in a high-powered advertising firm, and Donald, a college professor bucking for

tenure, had been married for 15 years. They spent the first 10 minutes in my office invoking the

standard litany of our times as an explanation for their lousy sex life--they were both just too

busy. Not that this focus precluded blaming each other for their difficulties.

Betty gets home from work so late that we barely see each other anymore, let alone have sex,

said Donald resentfully. "We're collaborators in child raising and mortgage paying, but we're

hardly lovers anymore. I've taken over a lot of the household chores, but she often doesn't get

home until 9 p.m.--and most nights, she says she's just 'too tired' for sex."

Betty sighed in exasperation. "Sometimes I think Donald wants me to leap from the front door

to the bedroom and take care of him," she said. "But I'm being swallowed up by a sea of

obligations--my boss, the kids, the house, the dog, Donald, everybody wants a big chunk of me.

Right now, I feel there's nothing left of me for me, let alone for him. He just doesn't get it that I

need more time for myself before I'm interested in sex."

I asked them to be specific about how the stress from their very demanding lives revealed itself

in bed--exactly what happened, and in what order, when they had sex. Several moments of

awkward silence and a number of false starts ensued before another, much more intimate, level

of their marital landscape revealed itself.

Betty looked hard at Donald, then at me. "The fact of the matter is, he doesn't even know how to

kiss me!" she said grimly.

How would you know? It's been so long since you let me kiss you! hissed Donald.

When I asked them to describe their foreplay, Betty looked embarrassed and Donald sounded

frustrated. "During sex, she turns her face to the side, and I end up kissing her cheek. She won't

kiss me on the mouth. I think she just wants to get sex over with as fast as possible. Not that we

have much sex." Betty shook her head in distaste. "He always just rams his tongue halfway down

my throat--I feel like I can't breathe. Besides, why would I want to kiss him when I can't even

talk to him! We don't communicate at all."

Over the years, I've worked with many couples who complain bitterly that the other kisses--or

touches, fondles, caresses, strokes--the "wrong" way. I used to take these complaints at face

value, trying to help the couple solve their problems through various forms of marital bargaining

and forbearance--listen empathically, give a little to get a little, do something for me and I'll do

something for you--teach them the finer points of sexual technique and send them home with

detailed prescriptions (which they usually didn't follow) until I realized that their sexual

dissatisfactions did not stem from ignorance, ineptitude or a "failure to communicate." On the

contrary, "communicating" is exactly what Donald and Betty were already doing very well, only

neither much liked the "message" the other was sending. The way this couple kissed each other,

indeed their "vocabulary" of foreplay, constituted a very rich and purposeful dialogue, replete

with symbolic meanings. Through this finely nuanced, but unmistakable language, both partners

expressed their feelings about themselves and each other and negotiated what the entire sexual

encounter would be like--the degree and quality of eroticism, connection and intimacy, or their

virtual absence.

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

Donald and Betty had tried marital therapy before, but their therapist had taken the usual

approach of dealing with each complaint individually--job demands, parenting responsibilities,

housework division and sexual difficulties--as if they were all separate but equal situational

problems. Typically, the clinician had tried to help Donald and Betty resolve their difficulties

through a skill-building course on compromise, setting priorities, time management and

"mirroring" each other for mutual validation, acceptance and, of course, better communication.

The net result of all this work was that they felt even worse than before, even more incompetent,

inadequate and neurotic, when sex didn't improve.

Knowing that Betty and Donald were most certainly communicating something via their

gridlocked sexual styles, I asked them, "Even if you are not talking, what do you think you might

actually be 'saying' to each other when you kiss?" After a minute, Donald said resentfully, "She's

telling me I'm inadequate, that I'm not a good lover, I can't make her happy and she doesn't me

anyway." Betty defensively countered, "He's saying he wants me to do everything exactly his way

and if I don't just cave in, he'll go ahead and do what he likes, whether I like it or not!" I asked

her why she was willing to have intercourse at all if she didn't even want to kiss him. "Because

he is such a sullen pain in the ass if I don't have sex, " Betty replied without hesitation. "Besides,

I like having orgasms."

Donald and Betty perfectly illustrated the almost universal, but widely unrecognized, reality

that sex does not merely constitute "part" of a relationship, but literally and metaphorically

embodies the depth and quality of the couple's entire emotional connection. We think of foreplay

as a way couples establish connection, but more often it's a means of establishing disconnection.

Betty was a living rebuttal of the common gender stereotype that all women always want more

foreplay; she cut it short so they could get sex done with as quickly as possible--and Donald

understood. Donald returned the compliment by "telling" Betty he knew she didn't like him

much, but he was going to get something out of her anyway--with or without her presence, so to

speak.

Clearly, foreplay for this couple was not simply a mechanical technique for arousal, amenable to

the engineering, skill-building approach still dictated by popular sex manuals. Nor were they

likely to improve sex just by being more "open" with each other, "asking for what they wanted"--

another popular remedy in self-help guides and among marital therapists--as if they weren't

already "telling" each other what each did and did not want, and what each was or was not

willing to give. Instead of trying to spackle over these normal and typical "dysfunctional" sexual

patterns with a heavy coat of how-to lessons, I have learned that it makes much more sense to

help the couple analyze their behavior, to look for the meaning of what they were already doing

before they focused on changing the mechanics.

Rather than "work on their relationship" as if it were some sort of hobby or home-building

project, Betty and Donald, like every other couple I have seen, needed to understand that what

they did in bed was a remarkably salient and authentic expression of themselves and their

feeling for each other. The nuances of their kissing style may have seemed trivial compared to

the screaming fights they had about money or the long days of injured silence, but in fact it was

an open window into their deepest human experience--who they were as people, what they really

felt about each other, how much intimacy they were willing to risk with each other and how

much growing up they still had to do.

As in any elaborate and nuanced language, the small details of sex carry a wealth of meaning, so

while Donald and Betty were surprised that I focused on a "little thing" like kissing, rather than

the main event--frequency of intercourse, for example--they were startled to find how truly

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

revealing it was, about their personal histories as well as their marriage. I told Betty I thought

she had probably come from an intrusive and dominating family that never dealt openly or

successfully with anxiety and conflict. "So now, you have a hard time using your mouth to tell

Donald not to be so overbearing, rather than turning it away to keep him from getting inside it.

You've become very good at taking evasive action to avoid being overwhelmed," I said. "You're

right about my family," Betty said softly, "we kids didn't have any privacy or freedom in my

family, and we were never allowed to complain openly about anything--just do what we were

told, and keep our mouths shut."

Like grains of sand

funneling toward the "narrows" of an hourglass,

marriage forces couples into a vortex

of emotional struggle, where, to grow up,

each must hold on to himself or herself,

in the context of each other.

On the other hand, I said, I imagined Donald had never felt worthwhile in his family's eyes. He

had spent a lot of time trying to please his parents without knowing what he was supposed to do,

but he got so little response that he never learned how to read other people's cues--he just forged

blindly ahead, trying to force his way into people's good graces and prove himself without waiting

to see how he was coming across. "Come back here and give me a chance to prove myself!" his

behavior screamed. "Are you so used to being out of contact with the people you love that you can

successfully ignore how out of sync you are with them?" I asked. To Donald's credit, he didn't

dodge the question, though he seemed dazed by the speed with which we'd zoomed in on such a

core issue.

Nevertheless, Donald and Betty discovered that their discomfort in describing, in exact detail,

what was done by whom, when, how and where, was outweighed by their fascination at what

they were finding out about themselves--far more than was remotely possible from a seminar on

sex skills. Betty, for example, had suggested that once kissing had stopped and intercourse had

started, her sexual life was just fine--after all, she had orgasms and she "liked" them. But when I

asked her to describe her experience of rear-entry intercourse --a common practice with this

couple--she did not make it sound like a richly sensual, erotic or even particularly pleasant

encounter. During the act, she positioned herself on elbows and knees, her torso held tense and

rigidly parallel to the mattress while she protectively braced her body for a painful battering.

Instead of moving into each thrust from Donald, she kept moving away from him, as if trying to

escape. He, on the other hand, clasped her hips and kept trying to pull her to him, but never got

a feeling of solid physical or emotional connection.

In spite of the fact that both were able to reach orgasm--widely considered the only significant

measurement of successful sex--Betty and Donald's minute-by-minute description of what they

did made it obvious that a lot more was happening than a technically proficient sex act. I told

Betty I was glad she had told me these details, which all suggested that she thought it was

pretty hopeless trying to work out conflicts with people she loved. "I suspect you've gotten used to

swallowing your disappointment and sadness without telling anybody, and just getting along by

yourself as best you can," I said. "It sounds very lonely," At that point, much to Donald's shock,

Betty burst into tears. I said to Donald that he still seemed resigned to chase after people he

www.BeMindful.org Steve Shealy, PhD 813-980-2700

loved to get them to love and accept him. "I guess you just don't believe they could possibly love

you without being pressured into it. In fact, I think both of you use sex to confirm the negative

beliefs you already have about yourselves."

For several seconds Donald looked at his lap, while Betty quietly cried in the next chair. "I

suppose we must be pretty screwed up, huh?" Betty snuffled. "Nope," I said. "Much of what's

going on between you is not only understandable, it's predictable, normal and even healthy--

although it doesn't look or feel that way right now." They were describing the inevitable struggle

involved in seeking individual growth and self-development within the context of marriage.

Betty said she used to enjoy sex until she became over-involved with her job, but I suggested that

the case was more likely the reverse--that the demands of her job gave her a needed emotional

distance from Donald. Her conscious desire to "escape" from Donald stemmed from emotional

fusion with him--she found herself invaded by his worries, his anxieties, his insecurities and his

needs as if she had contracted a virus from him. "You may feel that you don't have enough inside

you to satisfy his needs and still remain a separate, whole person yourself," I said. "Your work is

a way of keeping some 'self' for yourself, to prevent being absorbed by him. That's the same

reason you turn your head away when he tries to kiss you."

I suggested that Donald's problem was a complementary version of the same thing: in order to

forestall the conviction that he had no worthwhile self at all, he felt he had to pressure Betty, or

anybody he loved, to demonstrate they loved him--over and over. Donald, of course, did not see

that he was as important to Betty as she was to him, but their mutual need for each other was

really a function of two fragile and insecure selves shoring each other up.

Like most of us, neither Betty nor Donald was very mature when they married; neither had

really learned the grownup ability to soothe their own emotional anxieties or find their own

internal equilibrium during the inevitable conflicts and contretemps of marriage. And, like most

couples after a few years of marriage, they made up for their own insecurities by demanding that

the other provide constant, unconditional acceptance, empathy, reciprocity and validation to help

them each sustain a desired self-image. "I'm okay if, but only if, you think I'm okay," they said, in

effect, to each other, and worked doubly hard both to please and be pleased, hide and adapt,

shuffle and dance, smile and agree. The more time passes, the more frightened either partner is

of letting the other know who he or she really is.

This joint back-patting compact works for a while to keep each partner feeling secure, but

eventually the game becomes too exhausting to play. Gradually, partners become less inclined to

please each other, more resentful of the cost of continually selling themselves out for ersatz peace

and tranquility, less willing to put out or give in. To the extent that neither partner has really

grown up and is willing to confront his or her own contribution to this growing impasse, however,

would prefer to fight with or avoid the other. It's less frightening to blame our mates than to face

ourselves. The ensuing "symptoms"--low sexual desire, sexual boredom, control battles, heavy

silences--often take on the coloring of a deathly struggle for selfhood, fought on the implicit

assumption that there is only room for one whole self in the marriage. "It's going to be my way or

no way, my self or no self!" partners say in effect, in bed and out--leading to a kind of classic

standoff.

Far from being signs of a deeply "pathological" marital breakdown, however, as Donald and

Betty were convinced, this stalemate is a normal and inevitable process of growth built into

every marriage, as well as a golden opportunity. Like grains of sand inexorably funneling toward

the "narrows" of an hourglass, marriage predictably forces couples into a vortex of emotional

struggle, where each dares to hold onto himself or herself in the context of each other, in order to

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