– And I would say in every family, including all of yours, mine, and everybody else, communication between people that live together is lousy. Why? What is the other reacting to? And by far and large the other is reacting to feelings, and it is the feeling that drives the other up the wall. Many years ago I used to, I believe that the, I did a tape on this, tape on this about a year ago, significant relationships. And I would say there are three times in the average life when a significant relationship exists. Number one is between a caretaker and the infant, usually the mother and the infant when that is a completely open relationship. Try to keep that one open. And you can try, and try, and try, and by the time he’s three or four, if this is a quote normal family, the relationship turns negative and it probably will stay negative. And that is a more normal relationship than if it stays positive. If it stays positive, that child is vulnerable for a breakdown in the future. If the mother, say the mother and the child keep this open communication on as the child growing up into adolescence, then that child, look out for the future. But if they do too much cutoff, look out for the future, look out for an acting out problem. So I would say the average of all people, have one of their best relationships between the child and the mother, or the principle caretaker. It don’t make a difference whether it’s father, mother, I don’t get the sex out of this, but most of the time it is the mother. And then in a normal growth process, that relationship goes negative. The next time in life when normally you get into a significant relationship is in a courtship. And that is when two people are able to communicate life and life’s purpose to each other. And most people can do that, the relationship with the other is a fantasied relationship. It is not too much reality to it. And as soon as two people get married, then bingo, it goes negative. And most of you know about that. And now a relationship which used to be perfect has gone sour and you’re gonna to try to fix it. And if you say well, we should ought to communicate more and the number of people that I see who say we should ought to communicate more, yes, it’s very high, people know this. People know it all the time and they try to communicate. And the more they try to communicate, the worse they make it. That was back in the old days when I used a new therapy and I’d say you people ought to communicate more, and they’d go home and break their necks to communicate more and then blow it up. So I would say during the courtship when a relationship is more fantasy than reality, it approaches an ideal which was close to the parent-child relationship. And there’s one other time in a lifetime when people can have an ideal relationship, and that is the relationship between a patient and a real, honest-to-goodness psychoanalyst. And I would say the difference between a psychoanalyst and a counselor is the counselor talks and the analyst doesn’t. And there are not many analysts who can do that. And an analyst then becomes a screen in which he can calmly listen to anything, the patient is encouraged to say anything that comes to his mind. And the analyst does not get anxious and run away from it. And in that, the problem with that is this is a paid relationship and you can’t afford it forever. I would say most people who’ve had an analytic relationship have had that experience in analysis. Only that is a foreign body which has to come to an end someday. And as soon as that goes to a reality level, then comes the problem. That is when you have the relationship and go beyond the fantasy stage and is a reality. And I would say those are the three times in which a relationship can exist. That relationship that exists between a, with an analyst is reserved for a very few people. Because most people doing psychotherapy put self into it. And when they put self into it, they mess it up, you stir the anxiety in the other. In other words, in this kind of a relationship, if it could be calm, if people could communicate self to another and you can stay calm, that can be magic. But when you’re exposed to the reality of the other’s living situation, you will react. And when you react, that causes the problems. So that would be what I would consider the ideal in another relationship. And for the average therapist, you do not have enough life. You get in a situation, there’s so much to be done, so you communicate self to it. And when you communicate self to it, you destroy your value as a sounding board for the other. I would say counselors have a place in things and I would say a counselor is better off if the counselor would move out of expressing feelings. Now if you’re sitting with a family, you can encourage the family to express feelings to each other. That is a different way of therapy, that is group therapy. Which is okay, that is what AA is, it’s group therapy. And group therapy wears itself out very soon. In other words, people can get symptomatic relief for the symptom of now, but they don’t get a new way of life changed. Which to me would be the difference between group therapy and relationship therapy. That is the main thing which AA does, which I think is the powerful thing that AA does. In other words, they put you into, it is not assembled as a group, you don’t sit around in a circle and all that sort of thing. But the people in that are encouraged to express their own feelings. And that is extremely helpful to people to deal with the symptom of the here and now. And I would say most of the people who get into AA, continue AA for years, which is okay. It’s done more good for people and it has fixed more drinking problems than almost anything. But if you try to change AA to a relationship therapy, it is hard to do. Among the people I’ve been seeing in AA, what they do, I’ve seen people in AA, for instance, who would continue. I don’t know the people that I’ve been seeing that is going every day. And in a big city like Milwaukee, I know it’s in Washington, there’s a half a dozen AA meetings every night. And people in it know where the meetings are. And they go one group, to another group, to another group. And if they cease going, then they’ll find themselves drinking again. So by now they know they’ve got to go to AA as a way of staying sober and they want to do it. And then at the end I’ve seen people that have tapered off then, seen AA people go every night for years. And the relationship system keeps them alive and then people cut down, and down, and down. And people were cutting down, I don’t know people that had cut it down to less than once a week, but they continue it for years. Now I would try to do something in which I would make the family the therapist, somehow, someway in which I would try to hep this family do a way that through normal living they could have a normal life without having to evoke this kind of relationship. Stuff I don’t know what, I don’t mean to wander too much into that. And I don’t not wish to be critical of AA, AA has done more for the drinking problems of the world than anything else that’s ever existed. And I say good, good for AA. But there is a point beyond which people can go. I went to the AA system in Washington and for many years Wilbur Mills was the head of it. And when Wilbur Mills had an important position in Congress and he’s head of AA too, everybody used to talk about Wilbur. So that he was a powerful thing in AA, and gosh knows how many people he supported by just being Wilbur and going to AA meetings. But that does not mean that he got out of his necessity to keep up the meetings. Don’t let me get going to much on this good stuff. Somebody got another question? There was another back there. How about red back there?
– This has to do with AA. Could you speak to your work with families conflicted with AA and what you’ve done with families to get them off that addiction? It becomes a problem when their family member goes to AA seven or 10 times a week.
– That one is directed what would I do with family with somebody whose off of drinking and in AA. I would not touch AA. I wouldn’t touch it. If you want to get yourself killed. Just get into that one. And there’s no such thing as a therapist replacing AA. What I would do with that family would do my best to build up the family. And if it works, the patient will drop AA. I did one recently, and this was a young woman that I began seeing about a year ago. She was single, she had a good job, and was thinking of getting married to a man she’s been living with. She’d never been married before. The man she’s seeing is quite a bit older, has been divorced. He wants to marry her, only she’s not Jewish, she’s one of these can’t make up her mind about anything. And she was, there’s a small problem, her mother is anti this man. And she took the man home and her mother said if you marry him, don’t come back. You know, one of them little deals. And so she wanders back and forth. And the man keeps saying well let’s get married anyway and I’m gonna work on a relationship with your mother. And she didn’t quite trust that. And in the meanwhile she has been on the drugs, she was on drinking first and then she was on drugs. And she has picked up a couple of therapists within AA and the drug problem. And these have been sort of advisors, her advisors. So during vacation this year, she runs into some symptoms. And she gets to going back to one of her old supervisors and she ended up in a relationship bind. And she comes in the first time, now one of the things she wants to bring up, she brings it up last, she said I’ve just got to talk about it. But this therapist has been worth a great deal to me, this advisor, whoever it is, this woman, and she says I want to know about is it okay for me to see this woman and you too? Well now she had ceased to use this woman for the drug problem, she’s using her for a relationship purpose. And I told her that I thought she would be better off to give up either the other or to give up me. One or the other, I didn’t care. She says well, I just got to see the other one. And I said well, then you can drop me off. Ain’t no problem. She says well, I think I’ll do it. I said well good for you, you made a decision finally. She couldn’t make up her mind about marrying this man that wants to marry her, but she did make it up about whether she wanted to see this woman or me. She will come back. I’ll swear it. But that’s one I did within the past month on one of the best patients I’ve had in a long time. And at that point in her life, she got into an anxiety thing about this marriage thing about that man that wants to marry her. And I was away on vacation and she went back several times to see this ol’ counselor that she picked up in the drug program. Good Lord, this woman has been on drinking and drugs too for a long time. And that’s the one she presented me the first time she came back.
