Your Mind Matters – Mitchell Smolkin, Relationships, Confession, Betrayal, Realisation, Repair

Love, love, love, sang the Beatles. Love is all you need, written by the Lennon and McCartney duo and exemplified the utopian dream which followed post war tension, where the depression, fallout, austerity, loss, mourning became the transformational crescendo to the summer of love. But is it true that love is all you need? Or is it true that the real process of life is that disaster leads to euphoria and love begins with utopia and incrementally disappoints? It is becoming clearer that what we want and need are not the same thing and that relationships are under too much strain. Since the emergence of social media, particularly in the past 20 years, there's an emphasis on fitness, love, sexual connection, motivation, self assertion and just being is enough. Are these themes making relationship topics too flimsy, too shallow, too narcissistic? Is everyone looking for the utopian dream of love? And do psychotherapists feel the burden of supplying the answer to the eternal love? Like Dante's search for Beatrice, Elizabeth Bennet for Mr. Darcy, and Julia Roberts for Hugh Grant with the immortal line, I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her? Is that simple dream of love disintegrating? Are the media not serving society by showing the manipulations and psychological abuse in such programs as Love Island? And are all relationship dramas geared towards the heady heights of meeting the one falling in love, committing to the partnership, followed by narcissism, betrayal, torment, arguments and even murder? Do they encourage or reflect modern behavior? Do we really expect too much from our partners? Today I will be discussing the social impact on our expectations, religious connotations, romantic love, and the deep psychological issues that are brought into the psychotherapeutic Sessions. I am Dr. Maria Kompinska, and today I have the privilege to have the eminent, experienced and gifted psychotherapy therapist Mitchell Smolkin joining my discussion on relationships, confession, betrayal, realization and repair. So thank you so much, Mitchell, for joining me. Now, first of all, where are you based? I am based in Stockholm and Sweden and thank you so much for having me on and that lovely introduction. I'm so excited to have you joining this discussion today because I must say, I am sure that doesn't matter where you're situated at the moment. Relationships, Relationships are extremely under pressure. There's a lot of tension, especially with COVID and what's happened there. But first of all, can you give us some of your background? Sure. So, specifically to relationships, my dream was always to train as a Jungian psychoanalyst, and part of that dream was Started by doing my master's in psychology. And then during my internship, I was asked to see couples at the clinic. And I realized that there really wasn't a great deal of support or knowledge or structure of. As your introduction, I think, beautifully surmised, the complexities of romance. And so I found a lot of research that was going on in Canada in Ottawa and Toronto. And there was an institute that has now become world famous in Ottawa that I immediately flew to. My son was only four months old and I left my wife at home and I said, I have to go here. And so I commuted there over two years and trained in emotion focused therapy with couples and have since worked with Sue Johnson, who was the sort of pioneer in Canada in this regard and have seen couples from around the world and taught. And I look forward to jumping in with you a bit more today. Mm. And so all your work now is around couples and it's Jungian based. Now, Jungian is very different, isn't it, in relation to couples than Freud. And that was. Sorry, I should. Sorry, I should clarify. No, my work with couples is very much centered in interpersonal neurobiology, but we can get into how it overlaps perhaps with some of the relational aspects of psychoanalysis. I just wanted to clarify that, just to. Yeah, because they all seem to have started the godfathers, let's say, of psychoanalysis, Al, Freud and Jung. And both of those had very different tenets of their, you know, sort of the. Of their philosophies or their psychological philosophies. Freud obviously used the myth of Oedipus and Jung used the Amfortus wound. And Oedipus was very much the young boy who was banished from his parents and later grew up and without knowledge, married his mother. And yet Jung used the Amfortas wound, which was all about the trials and tribulations of Parsifal growing up not knowing his father, then meeting the king and actually healing the king. So his whole principle was much more elevated, more to do with the spiritual, the intention of life. And frankly, it was at this point that they both split. So they had big arguments in 1913 about what are the basics of life and the principles of life. And I think the reason I'm saying this, because I'm sure you understand it plays a big part in relationships and life generally. So if I can ask, is there. If you go back to let's start with confessions and betrayal and so on, let's go dive in at the deep end. Is betrayal the main reason people come into therapy as A partnership. You're asking if betrayal in relationships is the main reason that people seek out therapy for their love for help. Well, I certainly think it is one of the most difficult wounds to heal. And if we think about betrayal not just limited to sort of, as your introduction said, some of these superficial betrayals that we might think about, I don't mean superficial in the pain or the damage it causes, but just the one that comes to mind, such as having an affair. I think there can be chronic interactions over time that amount to betrayals. We call them attachment injuries. So, for instance, you know, somebody being very avoidant and shutting down around their pain, I certainly feel like over time leads to this feeling like I have been betrayed by you, you know, which. Which is in some ways a bit easier to help couples heal than the classic betrayal of somebody realizing maybe they were living their partner, was living a double life. So certainly the more conventional betrayal, often couples come in very lost. And we can talk more about what that looks like or how people heal from that. And to go, I think, more to what I loved in your introduction about a more philosophical or existential betrayal, as in, you've betrayed the ideal, you've betrayed, you haven't lived up to this Garden of Eden that I. My expectation of who you should be. Yeah, quite. And don't you think, before we go, dive in even more deeply, but don't you think that's all part of the myth that is being thrown at us? I mean, if you were growing up without the media, you'd be reading books, and particularly over in the continent and Europe. And then you've got Russian writers like Tolstoy and the ones that really got into the grip of Anna Karenina. The depth of the pain of idealized love. And we all knew that there was always that, the rigor of love. It's always painful to get what you want. And even with Dante's Inferno, how he searches for Beatrice, that he never quite got there. And we aren't given that at the moment. It's almost like on the UK TV programs, it's always search for the one. And it's got to be done quickly. And there's no. It's almost like you don't have to do anything to fall in love. You don't have to pass any tests, whereas before. And still in certain societies, you have to pass a test or your parents would have to pay a dowry to win the maiden's hand or the man's hand. And nothing like that has to happen anymore. And isn't that A tragedy. Well, I certainly think our disconnection, if there is one, but our disconnection from the very rich narratives that you are highlighting, that not being perhaps such an immediate part of our discourse and what we're faced with every day, I certainly think that that can cheapen at least what we expect in the arc of intimacy. Although I wonder if, you know, the note, you know, just even the notion of Freud having the Oedipal myth as a background for human development, or of course, Jung, you know, really accentuating the sort of archetypal drama in our life. My sense in some ways is that these falls from grace, the wounding, it's in the present tense. You know, the whole point of these, you know, literary leitmotifs are to give us some comfort when we too, in our lives are, you know, are in it. And certainly, I know it's a bit of a cliche, but I do certainly feel like that old notion that was certainly something associated with Jung and Robertson Davies, a great Canadian author, you know, fictionalized in a book called the Manticore, about this middle aged businessman flying back to Zurich in midlife because he had a crisis. I think that I see that a lot, that the midlife failure of our attempt to adapt. And I don't really see it as a failure so much as you're pointing out, each of us has our own inheritance in a way of how that unfolds. And so I don't know, I don't know if it's been cheapened by social media. I do think you're right that it takes us longer in some ways to connect to the viciousness of that arc. You know, like the grim fairy tales used to be so close to people's bedrooms and children would read these stories of violence and failure and almost like it was waiting in the wings to appear. But yeah, please, I do think that, as you say, sort of the tradition still is there that people do find the one, they do fall in love, they do get married, they have married or they decide to become partners. I know that we're not going to. Well, let's just stay with the standard relationships for the moment. And then suddenly the children are born and then everything kicks in, I think once the children are born, because they have both change from being totally embraced in that onetoone relationship. And suddenly a child is born and the mother or father, they change because suddenly there are four more people in the room and that is the father's parents and the mother's parents, and suddenly the wife or the lover is no longer just the lover wife. She is a lover wife, mother. And the husband is now the husband, the lover, husband and father. So they take on different roles. Who are they to the children? Who are they to each other? And that often separates a family, right in the early days. And I think people struggle to stay with that very often. I think there are a large number of divorces that took place within the first year of life. They then struggle to stay together. I want to stay together. I'll make this happen. But then the person doesn't live up to expectation as a lover or a father or as a lover or a mother. Because suddenly you're exactly the same as my mother or you're exactly the same as my father. Because those traits rear their heads as they would. And that's almost a hormonal kick in that these behaviors aren't apparent when you're in love and just the two of you. But once the family get together, they start kicking in and the mother can start saying something that reminds the now, now father of the mother that they had that they were pleased or displeased with, or their mother becomes the sort of the archetype for them, or they didn't have a mother, and so they feel lost and neglected. And it just exacerbates those feelings. Then it comes into the period that you're talking about that midlife. I'm now so devoid of the affection that I deserve. I expect that I now start playing it out. And that's the midlife crisis, isn't it? What the hell am I doing all this for? Where am I going? What's going on? And is that the age that people start coming to you when they're in their midlife? Well, I think you're right. I love the way that you, you know, pulled out so many the other psychodynamics of how the child just changes things so dramatically. And I do love the interplay of both, as you're pointing out, this kind of ancestral inheritance that is at our door in those moments. And I also love thinking about. You mentioned hormones and just the neurobiological shifts take place. I'm very humbled and frankly, I'll defer to you in this conversation, me being a man and what I've witnessed in my wife and others, other women I've worked with, the just seismic emotional, physical shift of giving birth to a child. And I'm humbled sitting with women and hearing their stories of how that changes. And this goes back, I think, to your pointed. The differences between Freud and Jung, because Jung talked about libidinal energy sort of writ large. And what I find is that when all that energy then goes into the survival of this child, as you pointed out, it is a massive shock to the relationship because it literally just. And understandably, it goes towards survival. And there is this huge loss of elements of the romantic relationship. And I see couples sometimes very, very soon after that. I've had the fortune of seeing couples come in before, and I've worked with them leading up to that. And it's amazing to watch how much better they're able to handle the immense demand on. The need to talk about it. Right. The need to talk about these changes. I think that for me is the single biggest obstacle, is that if you go into it and all you can do is sing Happy Birthday with your emotions and you need to sing an aria, be in Wagner or something, it really is impossible. I mean, that's why affairs happen. Alcohol, drugs. It's just impossible to talk about the loneliness and the devastation without some kind of symptom emerging. And do you think it's a loneliness and devastation that happens to both parents? I do think it is a loneliness and devastation because I often will hear, you know, from women that they'll be confused, that they'll also feel a certain loneliness and a loss. But the overwhelm is so complete of taking care of a child. And of course, I realize it's a partnership, so there are many facets to this. It's not like it's just the mother taking care, but they'll be confused and stuck and not really knowing how to come out of that and communicate to their partner that they're still there, in spite of the exhaustion, in spite of. Of feeling they need to keep this human being alive. And if we just speak about sort of traditional heterosexual for a second here, even though I've seen many, many couples in gay relationships and other permutations, and the dynamic is very similar. It's just a loss of communication. The partner who is maybe not breastfeeding or not involved, struggles to articulate the attachment panic. And the last thing I want to say, which we don't often talk about, is that I think there's an element of mortality here, that if you've been in a hospital ward and watched labor and seen all the complications, it's often the first time that a person comes close, sometimes to death. And that changes people, period. It just changes them. And it's also. I totally agree. I think that whole birth moment, however long it takes for the child to be Born that moment. Let's just talk about the child that does is born and not anything to do with children that are, you know, sort of that we lose at that point. But the child that is born, it's so powerful. Suddenly this wonderful being is a miracle, as far as I see. I remember when my son was born, I'd already been in psychotherapy. My mother had had five children, and she had two miscarriages, and they were prisoners of war. So war, mortality, birth, life was all around my upbringing. But as you bring it in, you know, the whole point of life and death is so powerful at this moment. And I phoned my psychotherapist a couple of days later, and he said, so has he got all his bits? And I said, no, John's just gone to the chemist to get them, clearly misreading what he was talking about. And I do think that we're not given enough instruction on that. So do you think, therefore, taking that a step further, that psychotherapists like yourself that understand this. I'm not talking about counselors. I'm talking about deep psychotherapy, which is what we're talking about here. We're not just talking about somebody who understands and allows the other, the client, to come and, you know, just release their emotions, release their feelings, but truly understands the emotional complexity of the mind and the internal framework. Do you think more psychotherapy should be engaged in schools to teach this? Well, what's crossing my mind, and I hope it. It comes back to your question. But what's interesting about my practice is that I see couples literally not only from around the world, but often who have literally just arrived from, let's say, rural parts of Southeast Asia, places where vulnerability is literally met with violence, honor killings. You know, I can go from seeing a couple from California at 10am to seeing a couple that just came from rural India, where it would be still accepted if someone steps out of line to physically punish them, that it might be condoned to do an honor killing. And I'm bringing this up to your question because there's a profundity of culture, emotion. You mentioned earlier the superficiality of relationships. And that's interesting because if you think about it the other direction, where relationships are, you know, you are so tied to the point of losing any of your emotional or physical rights can also obviously create tremendous problems. And so I'm a little bit taken aback. You know, Sweden is extremely economical when it comes to relationships and gender. And so you often hear stories that people here that will sort of tire of a relationship and because there's a huge social network. You know, you can get divorced and still get quite a lot of support. And so to answer your question, absolutely. Because the intergenerational forces that basically either predict or play into what's going to emerge in us when we go through these rites of passage, such as having a child. I mean, I'm just humbled, frankly, by the. By what I see, by how this. What this brings out in people. I've seen women that have been estranged from their mothers for years call out mummy, you know, on the table and something. I know I'm going back to my earlier comment, but it ties in because, yes, if we can't, on a cellular level, access, you know, some of these emotions, I don't know if you're gonna help someone feel safe. And sometimes, frankly, you know, you can't. It's just too guarded by trauma and culture to put it even to a Western context, which is a bit of what you and I are, you know, you know, dancing around here a bit. There are some cultures where you do not talk about this. And that chasm sometimes I find just humbling where I'm in a whole other frame in language and expectation than someone who, for generations, men, for instance, would never, ever even imagine talking about their internal emotional, psychological experience. That's something I'd like to come to shortly. But coming back to the birth moment, because what people don't realize, and I know you would realize this, is that when a child is born, that moment impacts on a child. So the early work after Freud was Klein and Anna Freud. But let's talk about Klein. You may or may not know her work, but she talked about. Yeah, she talked about greed and envy, the disappointment of the mother giving or withholding, and all those unconscious aspects of our psychology that come forward from a parent, particularly from the parent who gives birth, the mother in this case, and how that impacts on the child. But also if you're talking about the support mechanism, if the father is afraid, the power of a birth, is that responsibility. Not only is it a wonderful, I think, a miracle this new person is in the world, but they're so vulnerable, as you know. And everybody panics when you give the bath and everything like that. Those first stages, which are wonderful and also disarm and are you doing the right thing? So if your mother's not there, or you don't have a mother figure or you don't have a nurse that can see you through, you really are tackling this on your own. And the fear factor actually kicks in let alone for yourself, your partner, but also for the child, without the other cultural implications of that child. And how do we teach parents then to understand these? I remember when I was talking to. Actually, and I said, without you giving the mother, who was a stay at home mother, the support, that if you can give her the support to tell her that she's doing the right thing, then she will do the right thing for her baby. At the moment, she's struggling to find what is the right thing to do because parents often split up and mother lives far away from the child and isn't to hand. And those cultures that do have women around can be so supportive because they'll walk in and they'll take the child off the parent to nurture that child for that moment, to take the stress away so the mother can sleep. None of that seems to happen, particularly over here. Couples are isolated and I think the pressure of that isolation is crippling certain relationships. What is it in your experience, especially with different cultures? Oh, yeah, no, I had a couple this morning in my office that came in with a smile on their face. And this is a blended family, actually. So one of them isn't the biological parents. And they got away for the weekend. And I said, oh, with the grandparents. And they said yes, the first time in a year and a half because of COVID that they actually were able to. To get away. And it may seem like again, a simple, you know, because we're not about, you know, some of the things you and I are talking about are character, logical, they're very deep, you know, but just being able to get away and have some time to yourself and recharge. And this ties to Klein, I believe. I think she's very, very important in many ways, because as you pointed out, I think every parent should at least have some understanding of her contribution around that, you know, just disappointment in the child, of losing, you know, the good and bad breasts and losing, you know, you know, this sort of infantile, narcissistic need, understandably, to be always taken care of so that when parents encounter that anger and rejection, they can keep their feet on the ground and be like, of course you're rejecting me, of course you're upset. But we can't do that if we are exhausted, under slept, malnourished, and no one's around us. We can't. None of us can. Think about whatever line of work you're in. Think about a long day with long meetings when you're exhausted and you have nothing left and you go home and Sometimes you're like, I can't think about this anymore until I get some sleep and I get some perspective. Because we are no good if we are exhausted. We can't think straight. And that ties to climb for me, because her whole work was going into the paranoid schizoid position, which was, you know, what we. I think in contemporary neuroscience, that goes into fight and flight, that goes into freeze when you can't understand. So I love what you said. For me, the parents being around, taking the child away, the aunt, the uncle, the neighbor, that's to allow the human organism to reset, to get perspective and come back to the child to give them mind again. Because if you lose the mind, there's no child anymore. They are now basically an equal, which children really can't be when it comes to their emotions. Yeah. I do think that obviously the attachment. You were talking about, the different types of attachment that take place, the care, the love. I often do mention the work that was done in Romania about the neurology of the children that were devoid of. Of physical attachment, physical love. The orphans there under the Ceausescu regime. Yeah. The PET scans of their brains. Yeah. It's how their brains just didn't develop. And there's a period of time when the brain stops developing. And I know we do expect a lot from these PET scans, and I know some people have taken them too far and played with them too much and tried to find out if you're a psychopath with the various PET scans. And it just doesn't tell the truth in that respect. But what it does tell you is, is without a doubt that those early stages of nurturing and loving, the love nurture, of looking after the child, touching the tlc, the tender loving care that is given to a child, helps the neurological pathways to be born, to expand and then gradually over time, by the time they're five, it all did contracts. I don't need this one. I don't need that. And they're there and they're in the world. And this is the big picture of love, isn't it? That is the big picture. That is love. Because love changes from the eros of love to the familial. This is my family. And do you think that when children are born, sometimes because they don't understand or because it's not part of our culture, I'm talking about here in the uk, in the Western culture, that the culture of loving the child for both parents, that how important that is? Do you think that exists or it doesn't exist? In your clients or should it be taught? Does the culture of love exist in my clients? The culture of loving the child as an expression of your love as parents, how important that child is. I mean, for me it's fairly straightforward. When you brought up these experiences of children not having a primary caregiver, I mean, the evidence is. It's overwhelming and we don't really have to study a lot of that anymore. For instance, Bessel van der Kolk in the United States looking at borderline personality disorder. So basically, people that, as Klein would say, just split into good and bad. I think it's something like 75 to 80% of them say they never had attachment figure they felt safe with. So the neurophysiology of that is simple. For me, it's the neocortex that grows until you're 30 years old. And how it grows is we can go to Lacan, you can go to so many others here around mirroring and language. You have so many in Britain that, you know Winnicott and Bowlby and just all of them that spent their life just saying, look, you need a facilitating environment where you can play with the child's emotions and their brain will grow and that connects to the moment the parents come home. Now I'm talking about the parent's brain, right, the moment the child comes home. And can the parents brain psyche be playful? Be playful in the moment with negative affect, with disappointment. And if they can't, if the parent themselves did not have that good enough. Heinz Kohoot the optimal frustration just if the parent does not have the capacity to play within themselves and have that transitional space. I'm sorry to digress here, but Donald Women has the best quote ever. He says, you never ask a child, right? There's a gentlemanly agreement between you and a child. You never ask them why they have their blankie and where they got it from. Meaning the child needs this space to experience themselves and have safety. And so to your question, yes, I mean, I think that for me what your question just links back to can the parent have both a capacity to love their child and. And to experience disappointment, guilt, failure and hold all of those together and still remain connected and not punish and react the child and confuse what is their disappointment and what is responsible for the child's own maturation development? If an adult can't do that, no idea of love for me is going to transcend that. It will continue through generations because there just isn't the capacity to hold those tensions. That's for me where I sit and it's so important. The area we're talking about now, so powerful, so important, because this is exactly what Klein talks about. If you pick up your child and the child at some point does hit you because they're not getting what they want, what they need, not what they want. This want and need at this point of this age is mixed together. They have to have certain things. They have to thrive. They have to be given the blessing to live. And if a parent doesn't give that, they feel they have no value, they have no right to live. Right. And apart from the, you know, borderline personality, which I totally agree with, there's also that point of depression because the paranoid schizoid went into the depressive state where, oh, my God, I'm not going to get everything that I asked for, you know, and as the child grows, so the need for more experiences grow. But also, do you think during, if parents understand the intensity and the vitality, the ilan vital for a child, if they understand this part, do you think that they could bond together better and that divorce wouldn't happen so easily? Oh, 100%, you know, I mean, that's the symbolizing function in the parent, right? There was this great. There was this great psychiatrist. He was from India, but he gave a lecture in the States. I don't remember his name, but it's this, you know, he was very humorous, and he was talking about this very thing. And he said, you know, your child doesn't hate you. You know, they're not mad at Suzanne or Frederick or whatever your name is. They don't know where you went to school. They don't know what your university education's about. They don't know what you like to eat. They don't know how you like to have sex. They are not mad at you. They're mad at Mummy and they're mad at Daddy, you know, as you're pointing out. And when you talked about the depressive position of child. Of course it's about the depressive position in the adult. Can the adult, you know, be somewhat okay with the disappointment of, you know. And this was a struggle for me as a parent. I remember I wanted my child to have everything. And. And there's guilt and it's a learning curve, right? Because you don't want to see them unhappy. It's so powerful. Can I tell a very quick story of just where I thought I got this right? Because for me, it was a moment for me where I was like, oh, this is what it's about. And it was Just putting my son to bed one night and we turned the lights off and I heard a whimper. And I was like, oh, I think he's crying. He must have been. He was in junior kindergarten, which would mean around six, six years old. And so I put the lamp back on and I say, hey, is everything okay? And he says, oh. He says, Jonathan, Jonathan is leaving. And I'm like, who's Jonathan? This boy he knew for two weeks. And so it turns out a boy had started kindergarten at school and was moving to the United States and was leaving their class. And my son was devastated. He'd only known this boy for two weeks. And a part of me, I remember a part of me was like, oh, but you've only known him for two weeks. But I didn't say anything. I just realized that at 6 years old, obviously it meant something to him. And you know what happened? My son cried so hard he almost vomited. He was like that kind of cry where he was so overwhelming. And there was some voice inside of me that said, don't overlay any, any adult, mature. Don't you know this is devastating for this child in his six year old. Ms. And he needs to just like punch the pillow cry. What I noticed was when he got through it, he calmed down, his body calmed down, and then he fell asleep. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. I love the fact that you told that story because alongside Klein's work, there's Julia Siegel, who talks about the fantasy of everyday life and what happens inside a child's head. As you say, to take, amplify that, let's amplify that. What happens inside a child's head. If parents can see that, as opposed to seeing I'm not good enough, I wasn't good enough for my mother, I'm not good enough even for my baby. Doesn't matter what I do. You hear this, doesn't matter what I do, I cannot soothe my baby. You know, and it's always that we, number one, expect so much, but expect so much perhaps more than what we were given. And that's another psychological drama that plays out. But coming back, let's talk about the child and what happens inside their own world. And Julia Siegel picks up on that, those Kleinian aspects of the space in between, of what really was going on inside your son. And as you say, just accept it, allow it to happen, allow his pain, his loss, his sorrow for somebody perhaps he was attached to quite quickly, that he enjoyed that they unconsciously just linked in, had the same laughter or who knows what connection children Have. But there's also a wonderful story of a child about your son's age at that time, who was playing with a bow and arrow. And he kept shooting this bow and arrow. And one day he shot it at the local milkman. I don't know if you have them in Europe in the same way. They used to come round on calves and give out the milk. And this child shot the arrow at the milkman. And the mother said, don't shoot the arrow at the milkman because you might shoot it at him and he could die. Anyway, it just transpired that a couple of days later the milk didn't arrive because the milkman had died. In the child's mind, he had shot the milkman and the milkman had died. So it wasn't until a while later did the mother realize why the child changed, why the child became distressed because in his head he put together shooting the bow and arrow that he had actually killed the child. And this again, isn't recognized. And sometimes the child doesn't know, but it stays within us all. It stays so deep with. Right. The way we amplify vulnerability to these sort of morbid ends, sort of in a reactive way, it plants this incredible fear. I do want to say, just as a more humorous moment, I did take my son to meet this boy where they moved in California, because I have good friends there. And we drove out and let me tell you, this boy paid no attention to my son. And my son and I actually laughed about it. We were like, oh, my God, this is hilarious. We came all this way and. Yeah. To see him. Well, the funny thing is it actually has nothing to do with the objective relationship. It has to do with the fantasy. You know, it's just. And I knew that I wasn't mad at myself. It was like, oh, it was fun to go out there. But it had nothing to do with really what the relationship was about. It's that, you know, we can get into the neurophysiology of it, but it's just, you know, and I love your point, and I'll be brief, but I love your point about just what it takes for a parent. And I struggle with this all the time. When your child is upset or sad or back to partners, for instance, you know, when your partner is in a bad way, I think that. And people are trying to resist it all the time. People will say, oh, I'm codependent, or why am I so sensitive to you? And it's like, well, of course you're sensitive. We're mammals. We, you know, we hear the tone of our partner's voice, we see their physical inflections. It's very hard to tolerate, I think, the misery of another person in your relationship. And I'm still learning every day how to, you know, how to be present and not go into my own fear and past when my own partner is struggling. I find that a continual learning experience, to be honest. Yeah, because suddenly you've got a new child in the room who is growing in their way. Because they are unique. They do come in with different traits. And people say, really the difference between one child and then two children after that, you know, the difference by the time my daughter was born, and she was totally different to my son, totally different. But the change for a parent is vast because you've got two totally different types of children, all vying for attention, all needing you, and you think you're the only one that can do this. And to some extent, it's true, until they gradually grow to trust the world outside. So who gives them the trust from the world outside? How do they get that, in your opinion? Well, I think that how they get it is. I mean, I was just reflecting, you know, you and I talking about this and people listening, and you and I reflecting on ourselves, on our patients, on these situations. The capacity to tolerate disappointment. This is Jack Panksep, the American neurologist. He says we have to learn how to be depressed. We have to do depression well, actually, because if we can, if we can tolerate these arcs of disappointment as our children get older. It's not about these sort of cliches of, oh, it's a tough world out there, and I have to teach you how to survive it. It's watching the parent survive the child's distress through osmosis, through the brain going, oh, when Tarzan is swinging from the tree, the tree is also not swinging. With Tarzan, it's when the child says, oh, I'm having an existential crisis, like my son at 6, or I'm trying to decide about university, and my parent is not collapsing, is not losing literally their mind because they're worried I'll become an actor. Or they hate lawyers and they think lawyers are lying. Sobs. If a parent, as you're saying, can hold the psychological difference of the child, I think that breeds internally what we call kind of interoception in the child, an internal capacity to monitor and accept a whole range of negative affect and disappointment, which is teaching the child to fish and not giving them a fish. It's not like, oh, go, please be a Doctor And I will die if you don't marry so and so. Right. This is just handing them a fish. But to teach them a fish is to manage our own dread and be like, I am planted in the ground. And, yes, this is scary for me to see you, I don't know, come out as gay or choose a profession that scared me, but I'm going to stand here and hold this anxiety and still be in contact with you. And so then when the child is there with their own child that's physically in their body, they're like, oh, I don't have to collapse. I don't have to worry. I can both be disappointed and exhausted and also stay in connection. But so many people have never, ever seen even something remotely close to being able to hold disappointment and somebody not either getting reactive and angry or pulling away and having chronic withdrawal and avoidance. I think people walking around have never seen this. I know I had to learn in many ways. My father was good at it. You know, he found a way to let me know that maybe I was different, but he'd have my back. That's so powerful. Oh, yeah. But coming back to. Because this is such a big subject, and I knew it would be, but it's a delight to talk in the therapy room. You've got couples there. At what point does the confession come in? If somebody has had an affair or something, at what point does that come in with a couple? Is it the immediate part of the session? Does it take a number of sessions so it can vary? And I'll just rule out one exception to the rule for a second, which is, as part of my assessment, I thoroughly meet with the individual and check the edges of all of these questions around injuries to trust and betrayal. And there are times where somebody will not tell me either and I'm not aware. And you can. I mean, I don't know, but I have had instances where six months, a year in, you know, something happens. And just so people listening know. I have also seen people recover from that instance such beautiful ways. So there are times where I don't know and I can't know. I'm not a magician. And people are very good at dissociating and hiding things. When they tell me, if somebody says, for instance, if their partner doesn't know, and they tell me individually, look, this is why I'm here. That has to happen at the beginning in some way. And an example was a couple where I said, look, do you want to tell them yourself? Do you want us to find a way together to make that safe. Now, that is very different from us processing it. Right. So it being known is really actually to protect me, because I can't. I won't hold that. So I won't sit somebody in the eyes knowing that there's a monster under the bed and that there's this huge injury to their relationship that they're not aware of. I will not come back to a session unless it's brought out in some way. But when it actually gets spoken about in an embodied, restorative, heartfelt, you know, that that takes time. And often depending on the relationship, we have to do a lot of work first to build the capacity so the people don't lose their minds. I don't mean that in the colloquial sense. I mean that in the therapeutic sense that they can hold, not become too ashamed, not disappear, but actually be present for the intensity of that pain. But for me, if it's known, at least, it needs to be acknowledged at the beginning. Yeah, I think it's so powerful when we talk. It's almost like when people talk about going to aa when I've had clients that have sort of betrayed their partner and they both know about it and I'm just dealing with one partner, then it's, how does the other partner deal with this? Are they forever going to punish? Yeah. Are they forever going to punish? And this is what somebody was saying when they go to AA as an alcoholic or recovering alcoholic or recovering, you know, drug user or something, that they always go home and the wife or husband are always picking up on this, don't drink that. How could you do that? Why did you do that? And so the punishing process continues. Do you deal with that aspect? So when I've had clients, I try to deal with that so that, yes, it must be brought out. They've got to be able to talk about it. They've got to be able to talk about it until they are exhausted to some extent before the repair can take place. But then they've got to also stop, not punish all the time. I mean, I think you are talking about one of the most complicated, nuanced situations that exists, and we touched on it at the beginning of the interview around how to transcend that. And if I may just to. I think you're right to highlight it the way that I view the other partner who is vigilant and hyper vigilant. And basically it's some form of what we might call in a contemporary sense, some kind of post trauma where the, you know, every action is symbolic And I've seen, you know, I have seen the most typical, you know, sort of, you know, men who have climbed the Himalayas sort of sit in my office who have been cheated on. And when we get down to the bedrock, they are so frightened around the hurt that was caused to them. And so I have a tremendous amount of respect for the mammalian response to the loss of that safety and for someone's world to be turned upside down. And so you're right, the fatigue that can set in where the person is always checking, can be devastating. On the other hand, to actually get to a point where the person who has hurt somebody is not so overwhelmed with shame that they. This is, I just want to try and articulate, if I can, because this is a very beautiful moment. The vast majority of people I have worked with that have injured their partner through alcohol or an affair or some way that they have maybe tried to soothe themselves. And I want to say that too, it's not a disease. It's not a disease if you pick up a glass of wine to get yourself out of pain. That's logical to me. If it hurts your relationship because you had to pull yourself away, well, then that also makes sense to me. But the hardest thing and the most tender thing that I see is when the person who has caused the hurt actually opens up and allows themselves to be taken care of in the sense that the shame is so big. Often the low hanging fruit is, oh, I have to repair this. I have to make this better. I'm the one that caused hurt. But actually, the way to helping your partner feel safer again is actually by opening up about your shame and saying, I need you. It is so hard for me to feel like I deserve to have dignity. And so often people will not feel like they have the right to ask for help. So they feel like a three dimensional human being. And that actually has to happen first. That has to happen first. So they feel like they are a dignified person and they're healthy in some ways. So they're ready down the road to be there for their partner who's been hurt to receive them. Because the tricky part is that if it just elicits shame, if when the person comes and says, you hurt me, I can't trust you, and the partner goes into shame, there's no person there, right? Shame is, I am bad. Right person is bad. So that has to happen first. And I know it's a bit technical, but for me it's a very beautiful moment. The person feels like they are deserving of love, which Will help the person be less vigilant down the road. But I have never seen it happen without that. And coming back to the vigilance, I think it is exactly that. And with one client that I see spoke to, it was after they had. He had confessed, if you like. And I spoke to the wife about them getting back to make sure she really wanted him back. We then talked about him and his behavior, the openness that he had to be much more open. He couldn't be hiding away, couldn't be making phone calls, couldn't stay away. He had to get back to being trustworthy, show the safety. But also, he then became much more vigilant. Once we identified his own triggers into being seduced, he could then identify her responses, his wife's responses, and when they went out, if he was behaving incorrectly, he was then able to identify through her smaller behaviors, I've upset her. What have I done? But he also learned to say, what have I done? What have I done in this moment to upset you? So he actually took it on his shoulders and said that because she was also willing to say, this is what you've done, without constantly punishing him. And I know that is a really big transformative, as you say, transcendent moment. The partner who has been betrayed to accept the betrayal and also want to move on. The only way it can be done, as you say, is through accepting that and knowing that the person has, if you like, fallen on their sword. The shame is still there. And you can't have shame totally to be part of the future relationship because it will be so destructive. Yeah. And what I love about what you just said is that. That, first of all, there's a sensitivity there that increases between them, but also it moves the relationship out of this view of the relationship, that they're enemies in this. When one partner feels triggered, it's as if they're micromanaging them. And it turns it more into a reach. What we call a bid for attachment, where it's like, I'm hurting right now. The other partner, instead of saying, oh, my God, I can't believe you're criticizing my behavior, or you don't trust me. The other partner says, no, hold on. If I open up and I ask what's wrong? She's not. Or he's not trying to make me feel bad, they're looking to me for safety and reassurance. And now they're working as a team. Right. Where the person's like, hey, I didn't realize that happened to you. And that's I mean, you're right. If that can start to happen, then the predictability and the caretaking really just takes over and couples can, you know, I think that out of these injuries, couples learn very much in more sophisticated ways how to read each other, how to, you know, not fall into the traps of feeling blamed and criticized. And don't you think that is so important in love generally in couples, to recognize the response to oneself? So we have an action and your partner reacts. What is, what is happening here? Why have you reacted like this? This was my intention. I did it for the right thing. And yet you're reacting in a different way. What is not the way I expected and these conversations. This is why I love drama improvisation, actually in school. So I used to teach improvisation in social issues and relationships and so on in schools, and it stopped now. But that ability to learn the language, to open up to be taught that language between couples, say this or try these words or, you know, what would your partner respond to and what is really going on for them instead of being defensive because what is. We don't have a great deal of time left, but a couple of things I want to just talk about is the defence mechanism that was always talked about, but I think defence becomes an offense very often for people. Yes, they say, oh, she responded like that, you know, she shouted because she was being defensive. No, she was shouting because she was being offensive. She wanted to offend you, you know. Yes, she did it because she was feeling whatever she was feeling hurt, betrayed, distance. You know, the early attachment problems reared their heads, but fundamentally we have to learn self control. Or he behaved like that because he's in defensive mode. No, he behaved like that because he is trying to offend you to stop you from behaving the way you are to them. And I do think that we need to review this slightly as therapists to give them the guidelines where they can take more control of their behavior and dialogue with their partners so the relationship can become far more healing and wanting to heal. The intention to heal. The intention to be closer. The intention to love. The intention to love the child is a symbol of your love. The intention to be together as opposed to punish the other person, which often happens. And I think if we can talk about that, once you start saying, are you punishing me? It actually disarms somebody. Actually. I never thought that you'd see it like that. But yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. But I don't mean to, you know, and I think at the moment we are on the side, too much of the people that are doing. Doing the injury without giving them the opportunity to take responsibility for that. Have I gone too far? Well, no, I don't think so. I think that in your introduction today, and you talked about a kind of utopia and a fall from utopia, and I take this a bit from this professor in Canada, Donald Carvith, who talks a lot about Melanie Klein and my understanding about this swing within us, where we go from the traditional depressed position, which is, you know, sadness and gratitude and, you know, to, you know, to going into a place where we're paranoid. We have to let ourselves off the hook. And you said in the introduction, there are no quick tips for this. There are times where we are hijacked. But then we have to come back and use the complexity of our improvisational skills with our emotions. I did Improv two, where we can just really reflect on it. And that, for me, is where intimacy happens. Don't get annoyed or don't beat yourself up. If you can't always do this, nobody can, because you're a human being. So, Mitchell, we're coming to the end of this program, and it's, oh, so I know. So am I. It's gone so quickly, and there's so much more to talk about. But can I just ask you, if you were to give anybody advice on relationships, confession, betrayal, realization, repair, something hopeful to hang on to, what would you say the most human thing is? To be stuck. The most human idea, Freud's whole project about masturbating our emotions was not because that's a failure. That was because he discovered that that's what human beings do. Jung's discovery of complexes is not because, oh, we've all failed. That's because of how we learn and how we progress. So remember when that electric feeling of being stuck and thinking in black and white takes hold of you, it's normal. Go for a run, sleep, and then come back. Think about it. See a therapist. Call Maria, call Mitchell. We'll do this again. Mitchell, I cannot thank you enough for joining this discussion. It has been sensational, and I hope we have enough people listening to this. It's an absolutely sensational program and a joy to be talking to you. So thank you for having me on. Absolute pleasure. This is Dr. Maria Klempinska, and your mind does matter.