Following up to Lilliepearl’s thread on differentiation, I thought it might be helpful to start a new topic on Schnarch’s idea of the crucible. As background, he uses this term to mean the process of self confrontation, either for yourself or your spouse. Schnarch describes several steps as prerequisites to entering the crucible. One of the basic requirements is differentiation. Lils thread explains this concept which is important to identifying issues that are truly yours versus those that aren’t, to avoid getting stuck in a tit-for-tat struggle, and to stay on-message hen applying pressure without getting side-tracked. If your spouse is the one in the crucible, not staying focused on the issue at hand can allow him/her to escape the crucible.
Schnarch defines a few activities of differentiation that he terms “holding onto yourself.”
• Maintaining a clear sense of who your are as you become increasingly intimate with a partner who is increasingly important to you… (which may require the FOO analysis) • Maintaining a sense of perspective about your anxieties, limitations, and shortcomings so that they neither drive nor immobilize you. • The willingness to engage in self confrontation necessary for growth. • Acknowledging your projections and distortions (again requiring FOO work) • Tolerating the pain involved in growing… (see chapter 12 for a complete discussion)
Schnarch describes constructing your crucible as “extracting your unresolved personal issues embedded in your gridlocked situation and confronting them as an act of integrity.” Basically this means making a choice, such as tolerating less sex and maintaining the status quo or pushing some sort of confrontation in order to raise the level of sex.
As we have seen on so many of these threads, and now most recently Fighting4Wife, pushing your spouse into the crucible before you are able to handle the resulting reactions can be disastrous. I believe it is critical to have a good handle on your own issues before turning up the pressure, otherwise YOU are bound to erupt (and you should EXPECT your spouse is going to erupt). If you cannot hold onto yourself, then possibly irreparable damage can occur. F4W is there. I was almost there too. Mojo has been gracious enough to let us see the process firsthand and understand the personal pain we must go through to learn differentiation, to begin to identify our two choice dilemmas, or determine if the issue is even important enough to put forth to our spouse as a dilemma.
We all are working on ourselves via this board and the advice we learn here. But our spouses generally are not doing this and many of us seem frustrated that their spouse will not grow or confront their own issues. Since I am not a fan of sitting back and waiting forever for my W to confront her issues, I believe applying a certain amount of pressure is often necessary. But not matter how much or what kind of pressure is applied, I believe it is critical to keep focus on the objective you want to achieve. It is not uncommon for an alternate path to open up that will still meet your objective, but people get hung up on trying to take THEIR preconceived path only. Not a wise strategy.
So how do we put out spouse into the crucible? What types of strategies have you used for what types of issues, situations and personality types?
Since I pose the question, I will go first. Long ago I watched a very experienced realtor negotiate a new office lease for my company. His strategy was to first get both parties to commit to achieving a common objective – signing a mutually agreeable office lease. As issues and disagreements came up, the question asked each time was whether compromising one that point was worth losing the lease. Consistently each party met each other half way and we signed a very good lease.
In my marriage, I tried to do the same thing. It took some time to work through my anger and that of my wife, but we were eventually able to agree that we did not want to divorce. This agreement was long in coming and very painful, requiring me to retain a lawyer and begin drawing up papers. My wife, who had usually been the one throughout our marriage to threaten divorce, was suddenly trying to find a way to “get out of this mess.” This allowed us to work out some of our disagreements and make compromises to hold to our objective.
The problem I experienced in the past is that she was not truthful with herself when she would threaten divorce. When I called her bluff, she realized it was not something she wanted to do. The major factor was the kids, but they were not a concern before. Her own deception contributed to us staying in gridlock.
As we went through this struggle, neither one of us was sufficiently differentiated to maintain the ground we had gained. The anger and resentment were also still present. We had another blow-up, pushed each other’s buttons, and this time I called the cops on her. Had we both been more differentiated I think this situation could have been avoided. We each needed the ability to hold onto ourselves in order to not react to those pushed buttons as well as helping us to better understand the other’s requests rather than denying the validity of those requests.
This second incident was an even larger crucible for both of us. This is where we dropped the games and started listening to each other. She especially began to listen to me. I am still working on this in counseling, trying to present contradictions to her about her denials and also teaching the kids to speak up for themselves. The added benefit of this is that she will listen to hard truths from them when she will not listen to the same thing from me.
