Married to a Marriage Counselor

Valery Rockwell, M.Ed, LMHC and Her Husband make major discoveries in the land of the Maya


By Louis Postel

Not long ago, I remember seeing headlines on a tabloid about a deranged-looking couple fighting over money issues along with the admonition: “Stop quarreling and Start Budgeting,” and I remember being smug about it, saying to myself: at least we don’t have those petty problems!

Then I put the tabloid back on the rack, as it was my turn to check out. I was doing the shopping now that my workload was down and my wife’s was up and her time busier than mine. You probably know the headline of this particular story already: Cupid Couple Clashes over Cash! We were doing the nasty petty stuff just like everyone else. Soon enough, we felt the love draining away like a 30 sec spot for Liquid Plumber, leaving nothing but a residue quarrels – or so it felt.

“That pair of gloves you bought yourself – how much were they?” She said one frosty day.

“OK, you want to question me about this – how about you walk the dog next time in minus 10 degrees.” When she would realistically have time for this was a mystery, but that wasn’t the point. I was mad, and felt betrayed. What if the shoe was on the other foot, or the hand in the other mitt? What if her business was down? “You spent what on hair spray?” I was headed for that sad, empty place I thought was reserved for others, but not us. Marriage meant nothing when the chips are down and yah de yah. You could read the whole script in one of those magazines I mentioned before.

“So now I have to get a preauthorization to get a pair of gloves? What about all the money I put in this household over the years? Just because you earned more money than I did in the last eight months, you are treating me like a loser. Just wait till the freelance writing market picks up! Then, you’ll see. I’ll buy myself disposable chinchilla lined mitts for every day of the week.”

And my wife’s measured, lethal response: “Well, fine. I always suspected I’m all alone here. If I get sick we’ll be broke and out on the street. Is that what you want?”

Finally, after we had a “time out” as to not scare the kids, we did as the tabloids advised: budgeting rather than quarrelling.

Instead of booking another expensive vacation in a Mexican resort with twelve swim-up pools, we booked ourselves into an expensive couples retreat in a Mexican eco spa. The place was in Tulum, in the shadow of an enormous, portentous Mayan pyramid. You could walk barefoot the entire week and not find a single cigarette butt. However, barefoot or not, the money issue lost no time checking into the cabana with us, like a zany college roommate showing up on a honeymoon (surprise!). OK, maybe that’s no surprise, the money issue shadowing us -- the real surprise was that it would go away – not far away, but it would certainly relax. By the end of the week, “it” the money issue, the zany roommate was pretty much off somewhere – snorkeling for doubloons in sunken chest. And while he was thus amused, you could heal. You could love. You could know yourself better than you ever did. And you accomplish all that in one intense week. You didn’t necessarily have to sit side by side bickering on a couch or combing through old stuff week after week hoping for some kind of breakthrough your therapist nods a sleepy approval of. That’s what we learned – but let’s back up.

Our retreat leader was a psychotherapist from Colorado named Toni Herbine-Blank. She was late to arrive, trapped in a snowstorm outside Durango. Now who’s wasting money, I slyly accused my wife, whose idea this was. What if she never shows? I don’t think we’ll get a refund. There were twelve couples joining us, mainly from New England all politely waiting; all wondering no doubt that if our leader doesn’t show maybe we can just play on the beach and return to Boston refreshed and beaming with revitalized love all the same!
Now you should know Toni Herbine-Blank is more than a couples therapist.

She trains couples therapists: shrinks, social workers, and therapists of all sorts. A therapist’s therapist her big drawback isn’t her exactly fault: there’s something a little too distracting about anyone working with out-of-sync couples who happens to be both beautiful and wise. … But there we all were, all the couples, a lucky, temporarily barefooted spin-off cluster out of the vast multitudes who are migrating to what’s called the IFS therapy model. Herbine-Blank is one of the principal avatars of that model. Let me explain, because it’s really quite different from the traditional sit on the couch forever model in which the guy vows to control his anger and the gal promises to make use of her three PHD’s and feel as though she counts for something. Whatever.

Herbine-Blank’s longtime mentor is the Chicagoan psychologist Dick Schwartz.

About twenty years ago Schwartz found himself stymied by eating disorder patients (how the tabloids relish that subject just like the one money issue, more even!) Schwartz found to his dismay that no matter how he tried to cure his patients that there was what he called a Part inside her or him. This Part would insist to a girl dying of anorexia, for example, that she was too fat, unlovablely fat. But just trying to do the typical psycho-surgery on that trouble-making Part didn’t work. The You’re Too Fat Part just rushed right back and the girl was in the ICU the next week. So it was Schwartz who figured out that this Part was actually there in the girl for a reason, a very good reason originally, telling this girl she was too fat. But that Part was also killing her, you might object.

And Schwartz would respond, yeah, it’s putting her on the brink of starvation but at some point in her very young life she understood that to be fat was to be unloved. And since then that Part has been on guard. Until we can talk to that Part and let it relax, it will keep trying to be heard. In fact, it will scream. It really wants what he thinks is still a little girl to be loveable and the protective Part want that more than anything.

Schwartz’s IFS model stands for Internal Family Systems, which is kind of misleading because it has nothing to do with your Uncle Bob. The internal family he’s talking about is all those Parts protecting you inside, a whole family of them. You may have outgrown them, you may be able to take care of yourself now because you’re an adult. Unfortunately, those parts don’t know that.

Now let’s return to Tulum where we sit on mats averaging four hundred pesos per square inch if you throw in the vegetarian meals and Mayan tummy rub. We are sitting on mats and there are all our parts sitting around with us as well.

For example, consider the Parts surrounding my wife’s and mine money issue. How easily my Parts would trigger her Parts and vice versa. I didn’t have a Don’t Be Fat Part I had a You’re a Loser Part that would inevitably bump up against her You’re Going to the Poorhouse Part. Wow, we were sore from all that bumping! The smallest word or gesture bruised badly. In fact, said Toni, whenever you have a strong feeling about money, relationships, your job, your kids, your folks, it’s probably a part. And my protective parts were pretty young, like around 10.

Because on the surface a You’re a Loser Part made no sense. In the eyes of the world, I’ve been a pretty successful guy (with a few inexplicable detours). And certainly my wife’s Part warning her about going to the poorhouse would raise an objective eyebrow. So what was going on that made these conflicting Parts feel so strongly?

When my wife asked me about those gloves a Part just went ballistic because as a kid “measuring up” was a the only way to survive; “not measuring up” carried penalties to fearsome to contemplate. And so there was a Part I found that was forever making these critical measurements, furiously counting up all the wins and losses. Are you still following me? Because here’s the key part: You’ve got to love that furiously measuring Part.

Old style talk therapy would say – “let’s get rid of that Part, let’s do a Part-ectomy right here and now with our ultra sharp analysis.”
But Schwartz and others he’s trained like Herbine-Blank would say, “Not so fast. That furiously measuring Part is there for a reason and we need to show it some curiosity and compassion. At one point, you were alone and nothing seemed to make sense much less be measurable – so here came this part to help you out. It would come to the rescue and make sense of all the chaos that happened to be around your little eight year old being – drugs, divorce, destitution, you name it. So show that Part a little appreciation. And let it know that you’re gown up now and have a pretty good sense of the world. It doesn’t need to do that constant measuring job anymore.”

Then my wife talked about a Part inside her, protecting her when her debonair Dad made a famously bad bet with life. From a house on the hill, the fates had ushered her to the curb below. The humiliations of that precipitous move never left her. A “Never Again” Part arrived to protect her from any future debonair Dad types – which included me, we discovered, or, more exactly, Toni helped us discover. That “Never Again” Part kept constant vigil on keeping me from making the same bad bets that brought her low – bad bets like indulging in shearing gloves just prior to Spring discount time. It was a slippery slope. What missteps would follow leading to ultimate ruin?

So when her Parts finally met my Parts in a calm space under the palms guess what happened? At first they were indifferent, then they kind of were curious about each other. In time, they started to really get along. They understood that they had been real lifesavers for both of us, protecting us in very young very vulnerable times. Now they understood that we are all grown up and they didn’t have to do their boring jobs anymore. We could take care of ourselves. They could go play in the sun; wade out to the tide pools where the pelicans welcome you with a little side shuffle – just as we did, hand in hand.
End