Hello all, I have been reading the posts and the materials and I am just struck by how you guys punctuate relationships and your interweaving of these ideas with evolutionary psychology. I have just finished up my Master's in Marriage and Family Therapy and I would like to present to you the Systems Theory and Interactional View of human behavior on why this works.

Assumptions:

  1. Evolutionary Psychology does not paint the whole picture.

  2. You can change your deadbedroom and or sexless marriage overnight.

  3. Shift from linear causality A+B=C (My wife doesn't want to have sex with me + I withdraw=no sex) or any combination of B+A to A+B=C+A=B+C=X where X is the relationship between the individuals.

The reason I throw out evolutionary psychology is because, while it is helpful, it does not tell the whole story. Marriage and Family Therapy shifts the perspective from innate things wrong with an individual and looks at the relationship between the two individuals.

Once people become involved with each, from first contact, they become a System. Each of their behaviors is a bought cause and effect of each others behaviors. This results in a circular context for their interactions.

There exists a number of possible interactions, but for the sake of MRP, the one we will be dealing with is called Pursuer-Withdrawer. Now, if we go back to Evo-Psyche one would, rightfully so, punctuate the events by saying that one or more persons "caused" the interaction. I submit to you that both individuals are both the cause and the effect.

Instead of "I pursue because they withdraw" period or "I withdraw because they pursue"period we have "I pursue because they withdraw because I pursue because they withdraw...ad infinitum"

I give up looking for "why" this happened, and instead look at How does this undesirable situation persist and what can be done to change it? Have you ever noticed how the situation is described as staying the same, but steadily getting worse?

It is because the participants in this interaction cannot see outside of the context that they are in. So a third party must be drawn in, whether it is a friend, a therapist, or a divorce attorney, TMRP...

Going again with our circular causality assumptions, Libido does not exist as a thing in and of itself. It can be punctuated that way, just as it can be punctuated that "I pursue because you withdraw", but if we look at it with circular causality it becomes "My Libido is higher or lower in relation to your Libido".

The crux of the problems can be boiled down one curious paradox, which MRP so wonderfully describes.

You cannot negotiate desire

In MFT terms, you cannot make someone Be Spontaneous.

The Be spontaneous paradox is the crucial element to most of the issues I see and myself have been a part of. It goes something like this...

"It is not that I just want my spouse to have sex with me, I want them to want to."

You have now placed your spouse in a catch-22 or double bind. If she does have sex with you its because you said so and not because she wanted to. If she doesn't have sex with you then she is still not doing what you asked and on top of that they are punished for either action either by withdrawal of feelings or the talk*.

What is the solution? If any one of the individuals in the relationship game would give up their role then the game would change. However, we need a real change, a change of change or a second order change. The individuals cannot simply switch roles.

If one person suddenly changed roles in their relationship "dropping a redpill nuke" the other person would just see it as a ploy which is why you guys say to take it so slow.

Which is a paradoxical intervention...

*The only way to beat the paradoxical injunction of "Be Spontaneous" is with an equal paradoxical intervention of "Go Slow"....

I want you to get that last statement on your own, I hate to take away peoples Aha moments. If anyone would like to discuss these topics please ask away. I love what you guys are doing here, I just wanted to tell you why it would work.

Sources:

The tactics of change: doing therapy briefly By: Fisch, Richard, and John H. Weakland. Jossey-Bass 1982

Pragmatics of human communication; a study of interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes By: Watzlawick, Paul, and Janet Beavin Bavelas. Norton 1967

Change; principles of problem formation and problem resolution By: Watzlawick, Paul, and John H. Weakland. Norton 1974

If you notices the dates these sources are way before post-modernism and feminism took over.