Chaya Feuerman LCSW-R Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, LCSW-R

The frustrations people experience in marriage are actually opportunities. According to Chazal, when Man was first created, he was a double being, with two faces and two sides. One side was male and the other was female (Rashi, Bereishis 1:27). This suggests that a human being is not complete unless he or she has successfully integrated both the male and female aspects of his or her personality. Marriage is the playing field and testing ground for this important development.

From a religious point of view, there are no accidents in creation. The difference in attitudes and emotions, and the fights, frustrations and disappointments that men and women experience in their efforts to find and maintain love, are not imperfections. They are sharpening stones and learning experiences that allow us to become fully human. When you enter into a relationship with that perspective, you will grow and learn.

According to some Jewish mystical philosophies, everything in the world has a male and female dimension. These dimensions can only be perceived if you train yourself to see everything from both the male and female mindset. How can this be accomplished? By absorbing and developing a full appreciation for the other. The conflicts and differences you experience in your relationship are not problems to be bypassed and detoured. They are like road signs and markers, reminding you where you need to work on yourself to develop your sensitivity and awareness.

Some people feel that they should not need the help of a professional to solve their problems in their relationships. One spouse might turn down a request to go for counseling with the argument: “All we need is to study a little mussar, learn self-control, or make more time for each other.” Often, this is true, at least theoretically if not actually. In fact, a big part of couples therapy is educational and not really psychotherapy. It involves working collaboratively with a couple on various communication and self-management skills to allow each person express their needs and respond to the other’s needs in a fair and realistic manner.

If It Were Only So Simple!

There is a common thread between mussar and therapy in that both seek to restore a sense of emotional and behavioral balance to the individual’s spirit. However, there are great differences as well. Torah guides a person’s behavior and suggests that if one follows a set of prescriptions and adheres to a set of prohibitions, it will be beneficial to the individual and society. It is obvious that a person who loves his neighbor as himself, avoids bearing grudges, abstains from lashon hora, trusts in God and strives to do chessed, might very well end up with satisfying relationships and a sense of peace. And there certainly are therapists who adopt some of these principles and encourage their clients to follow them.

On the other hand, there can be problems with this approach. If therapy was only a matter of educating or encouraging people to behave in accordance with healthy principles of life, no one would need therapists in the first place. Many people know that they should do; they just can’t seem to be able to do it. Psychotherapy relies on various techniques to help a person overcome resistance to change, and learn how to adopt new patterns of thinking and behavior. One of the techniques that many therapies rely on is taking a values-neutral stance. Meaning that the therapist limits the imposition of his or her personal values upon the client, so the client becomes less defensive and more able to see him or herself objectively. In that way, it may not be possible to practice a Torah therapy because, part of a therapist’s technique involves being non-judgmental, while a person providing Torah counsel can and should be judgmental (to the extent that the listener can tolerate it). It therefore is difficult to provide Torah directives and mussar while being a therapist. As the saying goes, you can’t walk like a duck and quack like a duck and then say “I am not a duck.” A therapist who goes too far in projecting Torah values onto the client may be “quacking” in more ways than one.

One way to think of the relation between Torah values and therapy is to compare it to the relation between vitamins, exercise and medicine. If a person is generally healthy, vitamins, diet and exercise can help. This is like mussar; it will help a person think and behave in ways that will promote emotional health. But when a person is ill, the vitamins alone cannot work. So too, when a person is emotionally ill, mussar prescriptions are not powerful enough to heal.

What is Couples Therapy?

In some respects, couples therapy cannot accurately be described as a therapy because there is no diagnosis or provision of treatment to an individual. In this case, it is the couple or the relationship that is unwell. It might be more accurate to say that one or both individuals have a problem that interferes with their ability to form and maintain a healthy relationship. However, if that were absolutely correct, then one or both of the spouses should obtain individual treatment. Many spouses do come into couple’s therapy complaining that the other spouse is crazy and needs help.

A marriage also can be seen as a single entity, greater and different from the individuals who comprise it. Almost everyone has some problem or craziness, but that doesn’t necessarily doom them to an unhappy relationship. A person can suffer from anxiety, OCD and a whole host of disorders, and still have a meaningful and fulfilling relationship with their spouse. In couples therapy, it is the relationship, the style of interacting, that is identified as problematic.

Consider this: Most married people, at one time or another, argue about the same things: in-laws, money, religion, children and intimacy. Tempers flare from time to time, frustrations grow. How is it that some couples find a way to get past these issues and enjoy each other’s company, and others do not? We don’t think it is because the functional couples feel less strongly about issues, or agree more. People are people, and over the course of a relationship there will be strong and emotional disagreements. This is almost 100% certain. Once again, why then is it that some couples cannot seem to get past them?

The answer to this is basically one of two problems – one being easy to fix, and the other much more complex. At times, one or more spouses may be relatively unschooled and naïve about communication. He or she may have had poor models for how to conduct conversations, or manage conflict by trying to stubbornly control instead of also remaining calm and respectful of other viewpoints. In such situations, effective couple’s therapy can be completed within a few visits. A good therapist has a number of techniques that can be taught and a couple can enhance their communication, listening skills, and build intimacy in a relatively short amount of time.

However, there are times when various suggestions or techniques of communication just do not get traction. One or both spouses may even admit that he or she knows it is smart to say or not say something, but “I can’t control myself,” or “I just get too upset.” In situations such as these, there may be one or more personality disorders piggy-backing on the marital problem. A personality disorder is when a person has a particularly distorted and dysfunctional way of interacting with the world, based on certain deeply held beliefs. For example, a narcissist on some level, deeply believes that he or she is entitled to whatever he wants. Or a controlling person cannot accept that there may be more than one way to view a situation, and must have things go his or her way. If the person is very motivated to improve the marriage, with effort and coaching the problem can still be solved. People with personality disorders can change, but it takes time, patience and commitment.

When one or both spouses have moderate to severe personality disorders, the couples therapy will be time consuming and exhausting. However, it still is worthwhile, as long as everyone knows what they are getting into. Often, individual pathology gets in the way of allowing a person to stay calm, to listen with empathy and to respond reasonably. It’s not that mussar or plain willpower cannot work; it’s merely a matter of asking yourself: Is it working? If the problems do not seem to be going away or getting better, professional intervention may be very helpful; there are certain techniques, skills and approaches that a well-trained therapist can use that can overcome, bypass or even “re-wire” pathological behaviors and thoughts.

Sometimes, a marriage can be terribly painful for one spouse but the other refuses to admit there is a problem or refuses to go for help. What can be done in those situations?

When Divorce Can Save a Marriage

How is this for a riddle? How can divorce save a marriage? The answer has to do with how people think about divorce and marriage, and how ironically, their fear of divorce may actually prevent them from making progress and repairing their marriage. The fear of divorce leads people to avoid making constructive changes, having sober and mature dialogue about roles, expectations, disappointments and facing unacceptable but necessary thoughts and feelings. This avoidance leads to marriages that are "brain dead," and they reach a point where they are so far gone, where it feels that the only option is to "pull the plug."

Respect AND Love

A strong marriage is built on the emotional independence of each party, so that they have the right amount of ahavah (love) AND yir'ah (respect) to have regard for each others' boundaries. Many people are bullied emotionally (and physically) by a spouse, because, deep down the other spouse knows he or she "ain't ever leaving." But that is not completely true. There are all kinds of “leaving,” from eventually getting fed up and actually leaving, or milder forms, like checking out emotionally and entering into a dark depression, or passive suicide such as eating or smoking oneself to death. In unbearable relationships such as this, though the person may be too afraid to contemplate divorce, the pain reaches a threshold where the person truly cannot tolerate it, and so they run away, have a breakdown, become ill, or have an affair. Sometimes, that is the point when the problems finally get discussed, but it is often too late to easily rekindle love.

There is a fascinating Gemara (Megilla 14a) that says: "Achashverosh's removal of his signet ring did more to bring the Jews back to Hashem and teshuva than all of the 48 prophets and 7 prophetesses." The point being, only when the Jews intensely felt they were in danger, only then, did they finally take stock of their behavior and relationship with God and worked on repairing it. This could be seen as a metaphor for a troubled marriage, and perhaps Chazal were hinting at this: Only when the spouse "removes the ring" and truly shows the independence of spirit and willingness to divorce, only then does the other spouse get the message and begin to reform his or her ways.

Looking at it from a hashkafic perspective, one cannot do a mitzvah properly if one does not feel the free choice to also sin. The bechirah (ability to choose) makes the mitzvah, because otherwise it was not a moral act. So too, one cannot be truly married and committed, if one is too afraid to think of divorce. But thinking of it, and feeling free to do it if necessary, is very, very different from being cavalier and taking marriage too lightly. Divorce can be compared to an amputation. Sometimes, if the infection has gone too far, it is necessary – but it will hurt awfully, it's only a very last resort, and there will be phantom pains. Still, if it has to be done, to save a life, so be it.

Giving Up Too Quickly

People today are getting divorced more frequently, and while some of that may be due to increased education and ability to be independent (which is not a bad thing if it helps a person leave an abusive marriage), one also has to wonder if some people aren’t giving up too quickly. We do not dispute the existential right to choose, and we would not say that any particular person is "wrong" for getting divorced. It is a highly personal choice, and since so much emotional pain is at stake, we do not believe that a person can be held morally liable if he or she chooses to bail out of a horrible marriage, even if in theory, it could be fixed. Such tzaar (pain) is halachically equivalent to at least choleh sh'eyn bo sakana (serious illness), if not choleh sheyesh bo sakana (mortally dangerous illness). A chaotic, dysfunctional marriage is dangerous to a person’s health in so many ways, emotionally and physically. Still, even the worst marriages are fixable if there is sufficient motivation and open-mindedness to the possibility of repair and change. Marriages are developmental processes that allow people to change. Though it won't work if they don't have the motivation, they can't be motivated if they do not have the right information and direction. If they are, at the very least, open to the possibility that they are "wrong" and need to change their thinking, even people with personality disorders can, at times, see their illogic and distortions. Also, it helps if they "hit bottom" and are suffering terribly. They may need tremendous willpower and lots of individual therapy to reduce their reactivity and heal past traumas – but they can change, and it is worth it. The love that comes after a repair is deeper and more meaningful, much as our Sages tell us that ba’alei teshuva occupy a place that even tzadikkim cannot achieve.

Rabbi Simcha Feuerman, LCSW-R and Chaya Feuerman LCSW-R maintain a private psychotherapy practice in Queens and Brooklyn, NY. They also write a weekly column for the Jewish Press on Relationships, Family and Torah.

Simcha Feuerman serves as Director of Operations for Ohel Children’s Home and Family Services, and as President of Nefesh International.  His practice specializes in high conflict couples and families, as well as addiction-related marital and family challenges.

Chaya Feuerman is a level II EMDR practitioner, and Internal Family Systems practitioner whose clinical work focuses on treating trauma, addiction and their impact on individuals, couples and families.

They can be reached at 718-793-1376 and simchafeuerman@gmail.com or cyfeuerman@gmail.com.