Marriage, Family, and Becoming Pops

Before We Begin: A Little About the Person Behind the Therapist PART ONE

Psychology has given me useful maps. Life—marriage, family, anxiety, loss, faith, and a few unexpected turns—has taught me what it means to actually walk the territory.

Before I begin writing here about psychology, relationships, anxiety, faith, change, and the complicated business of being human, it seems only fair to tell you something about the person doing the writing.

I have been a therapist for more than thirty years, which is long enough to have watched theories come and go, new therapies acquire acronyms, old ideas be rediscovered under new names, and our understanding of the human mind become more sophisticated. It is also long enough to become humble about how much any of us really knows about another human being.

I began my professional life steeped in psychology and family systems, earning degrees in behavioral science, biblical literature, and psychology with an emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy. Over the years I have worked with individuals, couples, families, adolescents, and groups, and trained and supervised other therapists. My work has taken me into anxiety, depression, trauma, OCD, relationships, sexuality, forensic psychology, and some of the more difficult corners of human behavior, while my clinical toolbox has accumulated its share of acronyms—CBT, ACT, ERP, EFT—along with family systems, trauma-informed treatment, and other approaches.

Those things tell you something about my qualifications, but they do not tell you very much about me. I have increasingly come to believe that beyond technique or theory, who the therapist is matters. Therapy is relational, and the person sitting across from you inevitably brings more than what he learned in graduate school.

As a Marriage and Family Therapist, I would say my most important qualification—and it is not even on my résumé—is my marriage of over forty years. Clichés like “happiness is being married to your best friend” or “a good marriage is falling in love many times, always with the same person” can sound a little syrupy until you have spent four decades with somebody, and then you begin to suspect there may be something to them.

I have also heard that the secret to a long marriage is never going to bed angry, which after forty years strikes me as questionable clinical advice. Sometimes you are both tired and should just go to bed. And then there is the old observation that marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right and the other is the husband, but I have accumulated enough longitudinal data to know better than to comment further.

What I can say is that I have been delightfully married for over forty years, and I use the word delightfully deliberately. Longevity alone tells us very little about whether a marriage is good; people can remain together for an exceedingly long time without particularly enjoying one another.

Marriage is not simply something I studied in graduate school or something I have observed from the therapist’s chair. I have lived inside one for most of my adult life. My wife and I have grown up together, changed together, raised a family, disagreed, repaired, laughed, endured losses, welcomed grandchildren, and continued discovering one another along the way. I have learned that love changes as people change; that two people can remain deeply connected without becoming the same person; that repair matters more than perfection; and that commitment and happiness are not opposites.

Forty years has also taught me that a successful marriage is not one in which two people finally figure each other out, because about the time you think you have accomplished that, one of you changes. A good marriage is not something two people finally achieve and put on the shelf. It is something they continue making. There are seasons when that making comes easily and seasons when it requires more grace, patience, humor, forgiveness, and sheer determination. Given enough years, you discover that staying connected does not require staying the same, and in a lifelong marriage you eventually realize that you have been married to several versions of the same person—and, alarmingly, so has your spouse.

Part of loving someone for a lifetime is learning to love who they were, who they are, and who they are becoming. Courtship is about getting to know one another, and marriage does not mean the courtship has ended; perhaps it simply changes its language. After forty years, it may sound something like this:

“There you are. I hadn't met this part of you yet.”

My professional training has taught me a great deal about marriage, and so have the thousands of hours I have spent listening to couples tell me about theirs. But my own marriage has taught me something the textbooks cannot: marriage is not primarily a theory, a communication technique, or a collection of skills. It is a relationship lived over time.

That is why I do not regard those forty-plus years merely as a biographical detail. They are part of what I bring into the room when I sit with a couple—not because I know what their marriage should become, but because after most of a lifetime inside my own, I have enormous respect for what two people are attempting when they decide to make a life together.

Family Is Everything

Family is everything to me. I am a husband, father, and grandfather, and my grandchildren affectionately call me Pops, which has turned out to be one of life’s better titles.

Being Pops has reminded me of something therapists occasionally forget: human development looks different when you are watching it happen in someone you love than when you are reading about it in a textbook. Children notice things adults have learned not to see, ask questions we have learned not to ask, and can be astonished by a bug, a puddle, a strange tree, or some small treasure on the forest floor that an adult would walk past without noticing.

Spend enough time with young grandchildren and you begin to suspect that growing older is a peculiar bargain: we accumulate considerable wisdom while somehow misplacing some of our capacity for wonder. I wanted to be present in my grandchildren’s lives because I thought there were things I might give them, but what I had not expected was how much they would give back. Somewhere along the way, they began returning to me the wonder I had misplaced. I was trying to help them grow up, and they were helping me remember how not to.

Family has been one of the great classrooms of my life. Long before I knew words like differentiation, triangulation, or emotional process, I was living in a family, as all of us do. Later, studying Murray Bowen gave me language for something I had already begun to observe: none of us develops in isolation. We are born into emotional systems already in progress, carrying histories that began before us, patterns nobody deliberately designed, and expectations about closeness, conflict, responsibility, success, failure, and belonging that we often absorb without knowing we are learning them.

Ronald W. Richardson, who has written wonderfully accessible books applying Bowen’s thinking to ordinary family life, makes this especially practical. Families are not simply collections of individuals who happen to share an address or genetic history; what happens to one person affects the others. Anxiety travels, and so does calm. We worry about one another, disappoint one another, rescue one another, irritate one another, and sometimes try very hard to get another person to change so that we can feel better.

That last one can keep a therapist in business for quite a while.

Dr. Murray Bowen called one of the central tasks of emotional maturity differentiation. The word sounds clinical, but the idea is wonderfully human: Can I become more fully myself while remaining meaningfully connected to you? Can I know what I think without requiring you to agree with me? Can I love you without taking responsibility for every feeling you have? Can we disagree without treating disagreement as rejection? Can I remain present when somebody I love is anxious, angry, disappointed, or hurting without either abandoning them or being swallowed by what they feel?

Those questions matter in marriage, but they matter just as much between parents and children, adult siblings, grandparents and grandchildren, and eventually between generations. Family life continually asks us to negotiate that strange territory between belonging and becoming—being part of an “us”while still becoming an “I.”

I do not assume everyone’s experience of family has been like mine. For many people, family is also where some of life’s deepest wounds began. Families can nurture us, bewilder us, disappoint us, injure us, and sometimes require boundaries or distance. Some people spend years recovering from things that happened in the very relationships that were supposed to protect them, while others have constructed family through friendship, community, marriage, adoption, or relationships bearing little resemblance to the family into which they were born.

Still, after a lifetime as both a family therapist and a member of a family, I remain convinced of something fundamental: human beings are formed in relationship. We learn who we are partly through the eyes of other people. We learn whether the world feels safe, whether we are worthy of love, whether relationships can withstand conflict, whether forgiveness follows our mistakes, and whether somebody will still be there tomorrow. And much of our healing, growing, forgiving, changing, and becoming happens in relationship as well.

That is one reason the title Pops means so much to me. It locates me in a story larger than myself. I am watching another generation become itself, just as generations before me watched mine, and I get to teach some things and, if I am paying attention, relearn some things I had forgotten.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of family: it keeps reminding us that becoming a person is never entirely an individual project. We shape one another. We inherit things from those who came before us, change some of them, pass others along, and occasionally discover that the youngest people in the family are teaching the oldest how to see again.

There is another part of my life that has taught me something similar about the difference between knowing an idea and having to live it. Anxiety—and, more recently, chronic pain—has a way of making theory personal.

In the next blog, I want to turn there: to anxiety, pain, the tunnel they can create, and what I have learned about continuing to move toward what matters even when the way ahead is not especially comfortable or clear.

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