“Knowing” and “Unknowing” Your Partner: How Couples Therapy Promotes Narrative Deconstruction

Positive change occurs in couples therapy when partners’ deeply ingrained assumptions about, and biased views of, each other are challenged and refined, re-igniting curiosity and new pathways to intimacy.

KEY POINTS

• In long-term committed relationships, partners tend to form beliefs about each other’s character, tendencies, and motivations that calcify into rigid narratives; these narratives are shaped by many factors including previous experience, cultural influences, and individual biases.
• Supported by evolution and our inherent drive to make meaning, draw quick conclusions, and avert danger, the narratives that emerge in relationships are highly resistant to change.
• Narratives are ultimately destructive: they contribute to misunderstandings and resentments; one partner believes he or she “knows” the other, leaving this partner feeling misunderstood, caricatured, and resentful of his or her partner’s biased perspective.
• An important goal of couples therapy is to deconstruct and modify these limiting narratives so that each partner becomes “unknown” to the other; this sets the stage for deepening intimacy as the mystery of one’s partner mobilizes curiosity and revitalizes interest in discovering his or her unique identity.

Couples Therapy: The Irony of the Path to Intimacy

Couples therapy invites partners to embark on a transformative journey that transcends simply addressing conflict resolution and communication issues, the two most common reasons why couples seek therapy, according to researchers. The essence of quality couples therapy lies in fostering among the partners a deeper understanding of each other’s identity and inner life, cultivating empathy and attunement, and nurturing the skills essential for navigating the complexities of an intimate relationship.

Ironically, to understand one’s partner, good couples therapy challenges and ultimately deconstructs what partners think they know about each other.

Narrative therapy, a distinct perspective that draws from postmodern social construction theory, emphasizes the power of storytelling, the nature of self-insight, and the importance of challenging one’s preconceptions, thereby offering a promising avenue for couples seeking greater emotional connection and intimacy.

This article will briefly explore how utilizing components of narrative therapy in couples therapy may enhance intimacy by enabling partners to forego the impulse to draw conclusions about each other and, instead, embrace each other’s fundamental mystery and unknowability. This discussion will hopefully provide a new perspective on vulnerability in relationships, i.e., vulnerability not in terms of letting one’s guard down or trusting in the other but, rather, in tolerating your partner’s unknowability and utilizing it as a source of self-discovery and mutual exploration.

Couples Enter Therapy Trapped in a Chasm of Misunderstanding

By the time couples begin therapy, research indicates that significant problems have originated and negatively impacted their relationship for more than six years. As unresolved conflict, distress, and resentment have been mounting for so long, typically there has been an erosion of emotional intimacy and effective communication. Both partners usually feel unheard/unseen, uncared for, and disconnected from the once cherished bond that united them.

In my own clinical practice, most couples begin therapy with a sense of resignation. There has been a chasm of misunderstanding widening between the partners for quite some time, and an atmosphere of hopelessness lingers in which each partner feels skeptical that the other will actually see him or her, and the areas of conflict between them, in a new way. I frequently hear partners say in the first session something like “I already know what she will say” or “It’s no use if I explain my perspective – he will believe only what he believes and nothing else.”

As I learn more, it is often the case that partners feel misunderstood and taken for granted because the degree of curiosity in each other has significantly waned. Couples refer to the “honeymoon phase” when a keen interest in every detail of each other’s life, including one’s partner’s thoughts, feelings, opinions, and perspectives, was palpable. Now, the atmosphere between partners has degraded into a sluggish retreat into the television or cell phone as partners no longer even ask how their day was – let alone show an interest in how their partner navigated the day, what he or she thought and felt about the day, and what it may mean for tomorrow.

How Partners Construct and Constrict Narratives about Each Other

Newly forming romantic partners experience a compelling desire to unravel each other’s inner worlds. Their initial conversations and time spent together spark an insatiable curiosity to delve deeper, to access the complexities underlying each other’s thoughts, emotions, and personal history. In this early phase, partners find themselves highly attentive to intimate revelations, anecdotes, and musings that gradually unveil the nuances of their significant other’s persona.

This inaugural phase lays the groundwork for a burgeoning narrative that each partner constructs of the other, one that hopefully will continually evolve as intimacy deepens and shared experience accumulates.

Inevitably, relationships encounter obstacles and conflicts that test the resilience of the couple and how malleable their narratives are in assimilating new data about each other. For some couples, as their relationship progresses, the burgeoning narratives that were forming and evolving may, at some point, become stalled and progressively constricted. Warning signs indicating this stalling and constriction may be identified with the following questions:

• Can disparate qualities of one’s partner be accepted and integrated (e.g., both the “good” and the “bad,” the “caring” and the “selfish,” etc.)?
• Can disappointment in the natural humanity of one’s partner (fallibilities, limitations, etc.) be navigated and managed?
• Is there a comfort level with the realization that one’s partner’s motivations, values, and approaches to decision-making may be different from one’s own?

If the answers to the above questions are “No,” it is likely the case that the existing narratives about each other may not be easily modified, i.e., will not be easily refined to incorporate a deeper comprehension and understanding of one’s partner across time and experience.
In essence, nothing new will be perceived about one’s partner and no new way of seeing or understanding one’s partner will be entertained. This is often indicated with the “always” and “never” criticisms of one’s partner that are so common.

At this stage, many couples I have worked describe feeling as if their partner has “caricatured” them, i.e., exaggerated certain features and tendencies (often those experienced as difficult or negative) and downplayed or denied others (usually those that one wishes his or her partner recognized more often).

Intimacy Overtaken by Evolution

With couples in my practice who find themselves entangled in the predicament described above, I often characterize the dilemma as one in which intimacy has been overtaken by evolution.

That is, our minds, evolutionary scientists agree, are “meaning-making” machines. We are literally programmed to use certain forms of logic and reasoning to quickly organize and evaluate incoming data and draw conclusions. This serves an important survivor function: if we see some signs, however murky or inconclusive they may be, indicating that that shadow may be a snake, we reason that it is a snake and flee, insuring our survival!

Confronted with potential danger, we are far less concerned about false positives (a “false alarm”), the Type I error in statistical reasoning, than about false negatives (missing something that is actually there), the Type II error. Despite this evolutionary tendency, contributions from a diverse range of disciplines including philosophy, scientific theory, and empirical investigation have documented the widespread role of bias, faulty logic, and misjudgment inherent in how subjective bias (what one perceives or believes to be true) obstructs objective observation.

In relationships, the drive for meaning making almost always inhibits intimacy. As partners assume the truth about what they perceive of their partners (leading to any number of false positives), the fate of the couple hangs in the balance.

The Narrative Lens in Couples Therapy: Deconstructing the “Known”

Biased, constricted, and often erroneous narratives that partners construct over time about each other inadvertently perpetuate negative patterns, reinforce unhealthy dynamics, and fail to accurately reflect the depth and complexity of their relationship.

Once your partner believes he or she “knows” you, it is difficult to be truly related to and understood by your partner because you are always being viewed narrowly and in accordance with that particular perspective (akin to “confirmation bias”).

In such cases, intimacy is essentially frozen because no new experience can emerge between the partners. Analogous to the belief that the earth is flat, one partner’s understanding of the other limits the pursuit of, and ultimately forecloses upon, the emergence of new knowledge about one’s partner, i.e., the discovery of a truth about the shape of the earth that was not previously recognized.

In effective couples therapy, a significant component of positive change involves the therapist’s capacity to help the partners deconstruct the “known” about each other. This process typically begins with the therapist’s helping the partners see how they may consciously and/or unconsciously have formed their narratives in the first place to align with their desired reality. Often this involves partners recognizing how they may project (via “transference“) onto each other. For example, if Jeremy’s father abandoned him during childhood and this remains an unresolved emotional wound, it would not be surprising if Jeremy’s narrative about his wife Sarah was populated with abandonment themes. And even if Sarah herself occasionally withdrew emotionally from Jeremy in their relationship, his narrative about her would probably over-emphasize certain elements of her emotions and behaviors to align with how he perceived and experienced his father.

The “decentering” of these constricted and biased narratives challenges the veracity and dominance of a single, limiting perceptual view of one’s partner and invites the exploration of alternative narratives that have been suppressed or de-emphasized. This decentering process is akin to an untangling of the knots that bind partners to rigid perspectives. As what is “known” is challenged, areas of the “unknown” naturally unfold, thus allowing for the emergence of new discoveries about one’s partner and new ways of perceiving him or her.

Preparing the Couple for Access to Ongoing Intimacy: Future Cycles of Being Known and Unknown to Each Other

Through the decentering process of couples therapy, limiting narratives that have commandeered the couple’s relational bond are challenged and, ultimately, modified. Narratives that were previously subjugated are brought to light. Partners learn to tolerate, welcome, and engage with the “unknown” that exists between them as these narratives dissipate. This sets the stage for a more nuanced understanding of each other’s perspectives and paves the way for more authentic, empathetic communication and connection.
An important consequence of this work involves each partner’s increasing ability to identify the recurring themes, assumptions, and biases that influence how their narratives are constructed and what aspects of relational experience tend to be mis-judged or misinterpreted. This enables partners to access more balanced, realistic, and fluid narratives, thereby allowing the couple to approach each other with openness and curiosity rather than judgment and condemnation.

Finally, the experience of couples therapy leaves the partners with a new pragmatic model of intimacy that moves beyond vague notions of “empathic attunement” and being “vulnerable” with each other. This model of intimacy suggests that cycles of being “known” and “unknown” to each other are the pathway to ongoing vitality and interpersonal connection. The skill to be developed in this context involves learning how to hold one’s perceptional framework of one’s partner in check and to approach previously known facts in new ways. Attributions, limiting beliefs, and automatic thoughts can now be subjected to a process of introspection and honest inner dialogue, so that partners bring to their relationship an openness to alternative perspectives that have been previously overshadowed or silenced.