Interview on January 6, 2006 with
Lonnie Barbach & David Geisinger

Biographical Sketch

LONNIE BARBACH, Ph.D., a clinical-social psychologist is on the clinical faculty at
the University of California Medical School in San Francisco and has a private practice. She has received numerous awards for her work on sexuality and has written over a dozen books on relationships, sexuality and menopause in addition to a number of video tapes and audio tapes. Among her best seller books are: For Yourself, For Each Other, Pleasures, Erotic Interludes, The Erotic Edge, The Pause and Going the Distance, co-authored with her partner, David Geisinger, Ph.D.

DAVID GEISINGER, Ph.D., was formerly Assistant Clinical Professor of medical psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center, Co-Director of the pioneering Behavior Therapy Institute in Sausalito, Research Coordinator and Staff Psychologist and San Francisco’s Center for Special Problems. He is the author of the book, Kicking It, and co-author, with his partner, Lonnie Barbach, of the book, Going the Distance.

Currently he continues in private practice of psychotherapy with individuals and couples in San Francisco.


Introduction

Dan: What prompted your interest in looking at the way people make decisions in relationships, not just marriage but all different phases of relationships?

LB: So many of the people we saw in therapy had gotten into relationships that they might not have had they had better skills on the front end, or if they had thought about them differently, or if they had even understood what to think about at the front end of the relationship.

I had a young woman who was 20 come in very upset. Her parents got divorced when she was very young and she said, “I cannot have a good relationship now because I have had no modeling.” As far as she was concerned, that was it. And then she said, “My parents’ relationship was not meant to be. How could they get into a relationship that was not meant to be?” She had no way of breaking a relationship down to understand a problem, so she couldn’t deal with it. A lot of people have no way of understanding the problems in their relationship.

DG: For me, it came from a more theoretical reflection on what an intimate, monogamous relationship is based upon. And when I spent time reflecting on it I concluded that it was a number of things in the broad sense. My first reflection is that it is essentially a lifelong conversation, and the second is that the excellence or lack of excellence in a relationship in many ways depends on the quality of the sum of its negotiations. Every relationship between two people is predominantly a relationship in which differences need to be reconciled.

DC: It’s a very practical and also theoretical look.

LB: You see the difference between us? (laughter)


The Decision to Marry

DC: What are some of the ways that you look at the decision to get married? In the book you talk about several criteria that need to be met for a long-term commitment.

DG: When Lonnie and I were working on our first book, we were really trying to collect our thinking around what the primary categories or variables were that contributed to relationship quality and we came up with six categories: companionship, trust, chemistry, acceptance, respect, and shared values. I think we still consider those variables as cardinal considerations when you’re deciding whether you’re going to commingle your destiny with somebody or not – a fairly large decision. And many people don’t consider those things. They consider things that are premised on the kind of front-end infatuations that are so captivating, and then they jump forward and play it as it lays and hope for the best. And that’s a really dismal idea.

LB: If there’s a big hole in one of those areas David mentioned, it’s a red flag for a couple to start looking at the issues involved and decide whether the problems are so great that they will interfere with making a long-term relationship possible. There are always going to be little issues that are conflictual, and differences, but when you have a huge issue – like there’s no chemistry, or you really don’t trust or respect the person, or you don’t accept the person as they are, then there’s almost nowhere to go.


Emotional Literacy

DG: Since we wrote the book, I would say the overriding addition that I would make is emotional literacy. Emotional literacy casts its shadow and influence over every single aspect of all of those categories – every aspect of a relationship – and is inseparable from creating intimacy. If I were to suggest a hierarchy, I would place emotional literacy at the top.

DC: And how do you define emotional literacy? What are its characteristics?

DG: Emotional literacy means knowing how to differentiate your feelings from your thoughts, opinions, philosophy, perceptions, assessments and the like. That you are conversant with your feelings and can describe them to another.

LB: And also knowing that you have certain vulnerabilities and that those are yours and you carry them with you, as opposed to expecting that the other person is responsible for them. You’re not putting your own issues on the other person and you know yourself well enough to say, “there I go again” or “wait a second, I take responsibility for this half of it because of what I know about my own history and my own wounds.”

DC: Recognizing your own way of filtering information when you’re with someone.

LB: As opposed to “because I see it a certain way, it is that way and, therefore, there’s something wrong with you.

DG: I think that’s absolutely correct: emotional literacy brings up familiar adages – “know thyself,” “to thine own self be true,” and “the proper study of mankind is man and of womankind is woman,” and all those other things that almost every culture, at least in western civilizations, hold as the bedrock of how to be a human being on this earth. But the self, in my view, is delivered to the world by way of feelings, not by way of thoughts. The self system is a system in which the idiosyncratic essence of a person is primarily located in the accommodations and permutations of their feelings, not their thoughts or even their perceptions.

DC: Feelings are like a doorway, the first appearance of things?

DG: Feelings are the first language. Feelings are tied into survival and therefore they’re hard wired. That is, as an infant, if you can’t communicate feelings to a caregiver, you die. Feelings are the repository of your history on the planet in the sense that when something makes you laugh, but not me, it has to do with what has occurred in your life versus what has occurred in mine. Thoughts are very different from that. Thoughts are predominantly the product of received information.

LB: And they’re physically based. So your feelings come from within. Intuition, which is a kind of feeling, is often a first fleeting sense of something that you can then work with more – when you start to get your brain involved in it. Some push the feeling down and ignore it, as if it’s not there, and then your brain is operating without the help of this essential part of your information gathering system.


Balancing Intuition and Rationality

DC: One of the things that we often look at in decision making is the balance between intuition and rational thinking.

LB: I would say the marriage of the two.

DC: OK, the marriage. Say more about that balance in terms of relationship decisions.

LB: I think that both intuition and rational thinking have to be taken into account. People have their lists of criteria about whom they want to be with. For women it may be you know, x amount of dollars, six feet tall, and then they ask “how does my boyfriend match up?” Sometimes they find someone who matches up absolutely 100% who’s not right, and they wonder what’s wrong, because they have their list right there. But there is something that’s missing, something more emotional, intuitive.

And then there are the opposite – people who just respond with their feelings and haven’t thought to themselves: This is the most irresponsible person I’ve ever met, so how are we going to have any financial wherewithal? So they’re working from that place. But you need to have both the intuitive and the rational. You have to ask, “What am I really feeling?” and “Does this make sense?” Both. Is your intuition saying, “This just doesn’t feel right. He’s a great person. Everybody loves him. He’s just wonderful. But, I don’t know, there’s something that doesn’t feel right to me, even if I don’t understand it right now.”

Then there’s the person who says, “It feels great, it’s really wonderful, it’s passionate, but I know that this is not going to last. We can keep this kind of energy going for awhile but eventually here’s where it’s going to fall apart.”

JE: So part of the process of that marriage of intuition and reason, it would seem, is to rationally create the space to see that feelings offer valuable information. That‘s where the emotional literacy piece comes in. If you don’t pay attention to the fact that something feels off, you’ve left out a hugely important piece of evidence to consider.

DG: I think that’s correct. I think that at times thoughts are the wrapping of the feelings. So you could have a thought and it’s the rationale behind what you’re feeling. And then you try to be persuaded by the thought and it becomes very problematic because in some way it doesn’t parse, it doesn’t feel right.

LB: We hear some couples saying, “This was a problem from the beginning.” They knew what it was but had the idea that, “well, if we got married that will take care of it.” They were overriding their feelings and not resolving the issue. They assumed that somehow it would just get better, just go away without their having to actually deal with the problem. And, on occasion, problems do just go away. But in most of cases they don’t. It’s like, “well our sexual relationship will get better once we are married.” There is no logic or foundation to that.

MN: I am interested in your image – the thought wrapping the feeling, like a Christmas present.

DG: I think of it more like a snowball that has a rock in the middle of it. People will argue ideas without being transparent about where their feelings are. They can be very vigorous in their presentation of the idea without allowing you to know what their motive is, what their feeling is, what’s really driving the idea. I think transparency is a predicate of good conversation.


Communication Skills

JE: I like the way you talked about marriage or a long-term relationship as a lifelong conversation. Would you say that a really important factor for a couple thinking about getting married would be to look at their conversation, at their communication skills?

LB: Absolutely. How well are they doing at resolving issues that come up? Are they going around the same bend again and again and again and again and ending up feeling bad, forgetting about it, and then starting over again? Or are they making headway - starting to understand where their vulnerabilities lie, how they impact each other, what leads them down the trail that doesn't work and asking themselves how they might handle it in another way next time. Just getting couples to listen to the other person when they're talking is huge. People so often are building their rebuttal to what the other is saying and they are not really listening to what the other person is saying. They're having two different conversations and neither one is feeling heard. And it can't work. See, that's a part of the wrapping as well. You need to understand what the other person is saying before you can go on to the next step of being able to resolve something.

DG: In my work with couples who are in phases of courtship and considering moving forward into marriage I always want to know whether they've had an ample representation of good arguments that have come to resolution rather than stasis, silence, an impasse, or repetitive engagement. And whether they have noticed a fairly rapid de-escalation of tension once they express their differences.

DC: What's the fallout from expressing differences?

DG: Yes. Does the process lead to a resumption of intimacy and a relaxing into tenderness or sexuality and all those things that might come on the heels of the resolution, or is it leading to what I would call "trapped space," meaning the kind of atmosphere that is a bit frozen, civil, mildly or largely tense, careful, protected. And there are couples who are in that space for a lifetime or who regularly get in that space, and that's miserable. Of course everybody has been in that space; it's very unpleasant. You're not with yourself because you're so trapped in the irresolution of the issue. You're not with the other person. You're kind of nowhere. So it's a pathological space. Disease. Dis-ease.

DC: A key point is to look at not only the communication skills, but what happens as people have their conversations. What do they lead to? What are the consequences of their conversations?

LB: Many people mistakenly believe that if they have arguments or conflict it means something is wrong, and it is a real reframing for them to realize that, when handled well, those things can positively feed a relationship.

MN: You used an image in Going the Distance that working out differences in a relationship is like having some rocks with sharp edges in your pocket that rub together, eventually smoothing their edges.

DG: I have zero trust for any couple who says, "We don't argue." I know that they're in trouble. There's no such thing as a good relationship in which argument does not occur. And when it doesn't, I begin to wonder where are the feelings going about the differences that invariably arise between two people? I see people regularly who say, "Oh, my parents never argued. We had a great home life. But, incidentally perhaps, they rarely made love either."

LB: "They didn't talk that much, actually."

DG: "They didn't talk that much." So I see a well-done argument as a mark of health.

LB: I don't know if you want to get into that, but the qualities of good argument, the process of good argument would be …

DG: Quieting your emotions, so if you're really keyed up and the adrenaline is coursing through your body, you need to slow down. Because that will absolutely preclude any possibility of good argument. That's the first thing, you have to make sure you're in a good place. You have to solicit the other person's agreement that this is a good time and a good place for them. And then one person needs to talk at a time, without interruption, so that they're not feeling pressured; they're relaxed and know that they can get their point out, that the other person is listening, not just hearing, but actively listening, trying to participate in what the person is saying with empathy for the feelings - actively soliciting the feelings: "How are you feeling about this?"

LB: As the listener, this objective is wanting to understand what's going on with the other person more than wanting to be right.

DG: That's absolutely right. Good conversation consists of three parts: speaking, listening, and ratifying. On the part of the listener ratification and confirmation are key: "Is this what you're saying? Do I understand you correctly? Am I off on this?"

DC: Checking the understanding...

DG: Yes. Checking. Do I need to tailor it a little bit better? Am I missing something? And then the other person says, "Thanks. I got it." So then that reduces the tension and the other person is ready to be receptive. Without that the other person's receptivity is impaired.

LB: Often couples end up having difficulties with communication that they can't figure out themselves. One of them is where one partner unwittingly changes the subject. They're having a conversation about one thing and one person picks up on a detail within the larger subject their partner is talking about with which they disagree, and they're off and running down another track without having resolved the initial, larger issue. Or one person sees things so clearly from their point of view that they'll ask the other person questions aimed at getting their partner's experience to fit into their mindset.

DC: Sort of "leading the witness?"

LB: Right. They give their partner choices: "Is it this or is it this?" When it's neither, but they cannot imagine another alternative. And to even get couples to start to see how the process of the conversation can be getting in the way is sometimes very difficult without a third person present -

DC: - to notice not only what they're talking about but how they're talking about it?

LB: That's right, the process of how they're talking about it. It's hard for people, especially when emotions are involved, to stay objective. "What am I talking about here?" and "What is my partner talking about?" And then the third thing, "How are we missing each other?"

DG: This just triggered a thought. My dear friend, Claude Steiner has spent many, many years thinking and writing about emotional literacy. He has, apropos of the conversation, a kind of paradigmatic sentence that he suggests people, especially intimates, use when they are in an argument. Claude's sentence is "I feel __________ when ________ because ____________. Without getting too tight about it, if you begin to start thinking about your feelings in that way, you start creating forms of conversation that might lead somewhere. It's a handy device.


Feelings and Thoughts

DC: How do you distinguish, again, between a thought and a feeling? What’s the main difference for you?

DG: A feeling is a physiological event in that registers itself in a bodily sensation. It isn’t some metaphysical thing. It’s a physical thing, and it expresses itself, for example, in the tension of your muscles, in the gastric secretions, in the changing hormonal flow; that affects things like your heart rate, your sphincters tightening, your perspiration, your breathing rate, etc; it is something else that’s going on below your cerebrum and then processed by your cerebrum so you give language to it: joy, fear, sadness, anger, surprise, and the like.

LB: A feeling comes first, before thought.

DG: A feeling is absolutely first. Synaptically, I believe it is first. But it’s often de-processed or overridden so you don’t recognize your feeling, you just describe it as a thought because it’s safer to be speaking your thoughts than your feelings, since feelings are your self made manifest and you may want to be less vulnerable, less exposed in the most personal aspect of your being.

Feelings need to be practiced, because the world teaches you how not to feel. Essentially, you learn to cloak your feelings in language that really pertains to thought. One of the exercises I give my clients is to look at the news. And it’s inevitable: probably 90% of the time the word “feel” is being used, there is no feeling whatsoever being expressed. “The president feels that under the circumstances …”

DC: To give legitimacy to the thinking?

DG: Right. It gives legitimacy. So the thinking packages the feeling. I think it’s very important for the world to get back to a more orthodox language of feelings and thoughts because without that you don’t know what you’re feeling, you become more and more functionally illiterate with regard to your feelings. Sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking. Sloppy thinking leads to trouble. A lot of trouble, everywhere. So a thought is a synaptic event, but it’s not visceral. And it’s not primordial.

DC: Getting back to decision-making, do you think a similar process is involved whether you’re thinking of entering into or getting out of a relationship?

LB: If you’re thinking about leaving a relationship you’re going from a feeling of distress in the relationship, of unhappiness, and of not being able to resolve things. You’ve tried to deal with it time and time again and you keep coming up empty, so you start to see your future as a continuation of these problems unless something intervenes. Then at a certain point you say, “I can’t do this anymore. I’m too unhappy.” Your body gives you signals. You start getting sick. You get depressed. I have great difficulty with the use of antidepressants for people who are in unhappy situations in their lives. They’re taking antidepressants so they can continue to override their feelings. Their body’s trying to tell them, “this isn’t right for you.” You need to listen to yourself and antidepressants can get in the way of that for some people.

DG: When one person or the other in a relationship is unwilling to respect the other person’s feelings, the relationship is over anyway, since the feelings are really the self made manifest. So the relationship is either over formally and you call it a divorce or a separation, or it’s over in some informal sense. But a relationship is not a formal thing anyway. You’re not married because you happen to have a document that says you’re married. And you’re not unmarried because you don’t have a document that says you’re not married. So that if there’s been a lot of water under the bridge and the selves of each individual are so exhausted that they can no longer come back and become vulnerable again, then it becomes important to separate in fact so that people can get on with their lives and perhaps find more successful connections somewhere else.

It is really a terrible thing to consign yourself, in my judgment, to a relationship that’s not intimate and, therefore, limits your freedom on this planet. You’re not in a place that you want to be and you’re in a limbo and trapped. Most people suffer terribly when they’re in that place. They start drinking, they overeat, they have affairs, their blood pressure rises, they get terse with their kids. Children in families caught up in that dysfunction grow up having more divorces in their own lives, and the sorrows are perpetuated.


"Sunk Costs"

JE: There's a concept that decision analysts use about "sunk costs," the notion that people making decisions often won't make a rational decision because their decision is being guided by what they've already invested. I was wondering if that's a concept that you see played out in decisions about relationships.

LB: One thing I do about that is to have people imagine themselves on their deathbed, looking back at the rest of their lives and asking how they would feel if they had made the decision they are contemplating making right now. This enables you to see the decision as a more objective totality rather than your sunk costs.

DC: Advance them up in time.

LB: Yes. And see how they will feel about the rest of their lives, because that's what they have in front of them.

DG: On the positive side of sunk costs, there's something to be said about two people who perhaps have been in great difficulty for a period of time but have nonetheless established a culture together and a life together and children and the like, and the consideration of the costs are very relevant for the decision that may be in front of them. I do something like what Lonnie does as well, about advancing people to the idea of life being finite, and what are you going to do with the space and the time that you have left? Because that's all you get. What risks are you willing to take, because cost and risk are inseparably connected. Then the risks become the subject of the conversation, the upside and downside risks. And risk assessment has much to do in our work with helping people to feel safe while vulnerable again. Our next book is going to be called Loving Dangerously because we think that love ought to be dangerous, by which we mean love ought to be inseparable from exposure of the Self, that involve a certain risk or danger; I'm at risk, but my risk is protected by healthy, compassionate communication.

JE: It's that polarity of having the relationship be a safe container for taking risks because intimacy is all about taking risks.

DG: Exactly, yes, exactly.

JE: I've been married twenty years and I still am surprised that intimacy can still be scary. We'll connect and then we'll say, "Why don't we just stay in that place all the time?" But it's this dance of going back and forth.

DG: It's absolutely that. I am convinced that you can be married 62 years and have a really fine, working relationship and still not get to zero with regard to anxieties about being vulnerable, about risk and about the fluctuations of intimacy that go on all the time and are not fully resolved. And there are good reasons for that.

LB: Nothing's static. You're changing in your relationship and so what was may not be. So, then how's that going to work out? Are the two of you going to make it; are you not going to make it? Do you have to sublimate some of your self? Or can you be who you are and have the other person accept that, even though it's not the way you were? Otherwise you're dead; you're not evolving.

JE: I think the promise and possibility of intimacy is that it is a lifelong conversation full of lifelong learning. There are issues we're always working on, yet if you can work with them with a partner in this intimate way, that can be transformative.

LB: One of the things we say is that in a healthy intimate relationship, you can heal the wounds that you developed through your relationship with your parents and your early intimate relationships. You can actually be healed in the relationship; you can get beyond your wounds and really understand each other and you can be who you are and be accepted.

JE: If I'm paraphrasing it right, I think you've referred to marriage as a theater of transference.

DG: That's what it is. Everybody is walking into a marriage with a history and that history, is usually fraught with wounds, sometimes grand wounds, sometimes minor ones. I mean people have been raped or abused in horrendous ways, or been in wars, or been in interminable wars with their parents, or had broken hearts or this, that, and the other. Our first line in the book is: "We are all the walking wounded." So that begins to become part of the theater of transference. There's no relationship in which you don't project sensitivities and distortions and all kinds of things from your history, and so does your partner. So the quality of the dialogue that's the central tool of the relationship either makes or breaks that relationship. I think healing the wounds of each person is what a relationship is meant to do. On a grand scheme it's meant to return yourself to yourself, a less fractured self that ends up with scars instead of wounds.

LB: Which is why we pick a partner who has qualities like somebody we had a difficult relationship with, like our mother or father or brother or sister. It is an unconscious attempt to create a happy ending for the problem. And it's the healing of that wound that creates the happier ending.

Personal Applications

DC: I’m curious in terms of your own relationships, what are some ways that you have of working with tough decisions, or ones that bear on some of the things we’re talking about?

DG: Well, we try as best as we can, imperfectly sometimes, to engage in the forms of dialogue that we’ve been talking about. And where our differences seem at odds or irreconcilable, such as when we’re wanting to go on a vacation and I have a really strong desire to go to the top of a mountain somewhere and be quiet and Lonnie may want to be in the middle of a city and go to the theater, and we have only one vacation, then we have to come to one of the many third ways that we can manage to come up with. Okay, this year we’ll do this and next year that. Or we’ll take one week there and one week there or …

LB: …you go one way and I’ll go the other.

DG: Yes, exactly. So there are many forms in which the negotiation can lead to resolution.

LB: We try hard not to let things lie. And so if we go at it once and it doesn’t feel that it’s really worked through, then two days later we’ll be sitting down and having another conversation about it.

We each try to stay pretty current with each other. Certainly when I know something’s going on I try to stay on top of it but sometimes I’m not aware of it until later.

DG: Certainly one thing I think that’s very important is being emotionally literate so that you don’t not talk about feelings that are going on that are problematic and difficult because it’s scary, or because you’re going to deal with it privately, or whatever else it is. For me, it often takes not only a kind of deliberation to make sure that I’m not way off the map doing lots of mistaken projection or being very intemperate or not knowing myself well enough to ferret out whatever components I might do well to deal with privately, but it also takes courage to be vulnerable and to take that chance. You know, the heart beats a little faster and there’s a kind of guardedness and wariness in my psyche and a vigilance and the willingness to overcome that is courageous, I think.

LB: Talking about decisions and decision-making, I remember the day that I decided that I was no longer, when I was upset, going to pull back and feel bad and be quiet. I just literally remember the day, the moment, and I remember saying, “We have to talk about this.” Not that I still don’t have to consciously make the decision to talk about something, but it’s gotten easier to do that, as opposed to the other way, which I had always done before, that didn’t work as well.

DG: I had not talked about what I was feeling also, out of ignorance and fear, fear and ignorance being the biggies. The more you express feelings and find a successful reception, an honorable reception, a kind reception, an interested reception, a nonjudgmental reception, the next time it might be easier to do. Your psyche tells you: this is a little bit safer than I thought it would be. And the more times that happens, the easier it becomes, the more lubricated that path of vulnerability is and your relationship begins to do better.

JE: What you’re talking about is really an important point – that decision to act differently in the moment. I think that when we look at decision making, there’s a distinction between taking time to ruminate and think through choices and making decisions in the moment when we are often more reactive.

LB: Yes, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t undo that. In working with people I tell them that anytime you say something to your partner you don’t have to say it perfectly – it’s not the last opportunity you’re going to have to deal with it. You can come right back and say, “You know, I didn’t really mean that.” Or “I don’t feel very good about how I said that … or how I reacted.” Or come back two days later and move forward with it. People get stuck when they feel like they have to make the right decision. “This pattern’s not working and I have to do something different, but I have to know the right way to solve it before I can make a change in this pattern.” As opposed to realizing that by doing something in any way that’s different from the problematic way, you learn something. And this will lead to more learning about how another way might work better, because the one thing you’re sure of is the other way is not going to work.

Solicitation
DC: When you reflect on the things we’ve been talking about are there any other strategies or things that come to mind that you want to emphasize for people who are coaches or therapists or teachers?

DG: I want to emphasize solicitation. I think it’s an underrepresented form in all communications between coaches and teams, between partners in an intimate relationship, between teachers and students.

In my work with couples, I always encourage more interrogatory conversation. “How are you doing with that?” Or, “What went on for you when I did …” Because people need to be encouraged to volunteer stuff from inside them that they ordinarily, because of their experiences, have learned not to do. Saying, “I am interested in what you’re about” is a very humanizing enterprise.

Curiosity
DC: So the key to that would be cultivating curiosity.

DG: Curiosity is a critical component of all healthy relationships. And the healthiest relationships are the ones in which, if you were a fly on the wall, you’d hear, over the course of a year, far more inquiry. So I always think inquiry is the antithesis of judgment. There’s more inquiry going on in better relationships. “What’s going on with you?” The alternative is judgment, projection, and so forth. Replace judgment with wonder.

LB: I’d like to add that many of the people we see in therapy have been looking outside of themselves their whole lives, waiting to be told what to do, what’s right. They have not been taught to look inside themselves. I just had a woman the other day say, “I think I’m about ready to quit therapy because I just hear your voice saying ‘how did you feel about that?’ and ‘what is going on for you?’ and ‘what do you think about it?’ ” You interject that voice and then it’s about them looking to themselves; they’ve used you to learn to look inside.

DC: To develop a healthy inquiry.

LB: The other thing is that in working with couples, I think it’s essential to have the couple talk to each other in the session, because if they’re talking through the therapist it’s like having a translator. They have to come into the session to work on their issues. If they don’t, they don’t have the skills to be able to take the dialogue home because they don’t do it any better than they did when they walked into your office. You just have somebody who’s able to point things out and help them muddle through it. But it’s really much more important to work with them on how they talk to each other so they can have the kind of dialogue in which they are able to talk about their feelings and be heard by the other person. Then they learn the skills so they can have the same kind of dialogue at home that they have here in the office.

DC: They can build the skills by doing it themselves together.

LB: They can build the skills by doing it in here, so that they’re not looking to me to resolve their issues. It becomes a place to practice doing it differently instead of forever coming in saying how this went awry. And it is useful to have the couple set up a space in which they feel safe at home, having another physical space where they can continue the same process.

DC: Like a meditation space, a dedicated place for conversations.

LB: That’s exactly what it is. You go into there with a physiological state of positive expectation as opposed to, “Oh my God, this will never work out. We’re going to have a fight.”

JE: That’s what we’re exploring: How to create school, organizational, and community spaces to practice dialogue.

DG: The first premise that I have is “a relationship is as good as its dialogue.” That’s the first thing. Everything important follows the particulars of the ongoing dialogue, the lifelong conversation.