By Ibrhaim Kreps

There is little doubt about it. Marriage,and couple relationships in general, are in crisis. The chance of a first marriage ending in divorce over a 40-year period is 67%. Greater than twothirds. As to second marriages, the chances go up another 10% to three-quarters. And “cohabiting”couples, an increasingly popular option in the West, are even less successful.What’s going wrong? In this second of a two-part article, Dr.Ibrahim Kreps analyzes the psychological nature of the problem and explores the Qur’anic ways of resolving relationship issues.

I have seen numerous clients over the years that are able, all alone, to destroy relationships one after the other. And the mechanism is invariably induction. They can induce others to violence or induce others to hate them, or to betray them or belittle them—even if this was not part of the usual behavior of the perpetrator. Sometimes the induction is behavioral and you can see it. Other times it is an inward process and you can only see the results in its effects. This is the most sinister type.

I suspect that some of the worst behaviors of people in war situations are “induced”—by a climate of hatred and paranoia. There is actually “collective induction,” and the harm is then multiplied by the number of people involved. Perception, the second of the three modalities, although the easiest to detect, is probably the least potent. Through perception, we interpret current situations in terms of historical experience. We are not in touch with the actual reality but are in fact projecting our past reality into current events. In the case of Yvonne for example, her violent father is perceived in each of her male partners. It is not always an easy task to disentangle the projected reality from the actual one. What if the chosen partner is, in fact, an aggressive, violent personality?

In this context, sometimes it is helpful to bring in the partner to see them, in flesh and blood, if possible. The result is, at times, surprising.

THE CASE OF EDNA

Edna was a lady of Portuguese origin, going out seriously for the first time—in her early thirties. Her father had been a laborer with violent outbursts who died early in her life but left an indelible impression on his daughter’s psyche. Edna had begun dating John but would get very anxious at times when he showed the least amount of impatience or irritability. She herself wasn’t sure whether he was in fact a violent man or not. I suggested that she bring him in.

Evaluating people in one session is not always an easy maneuver as people can give a false impression in the first interview. I have seen experienced and competent psychiatrists making serious diagnostic errors in the emergency room—being misled by a patient’s “good behavior”. At other times the aggression is there for all to see—just pouring out in front of you.

So we brought in John and there was little doubt as to what was happening. He was a soft-spoken, mild and shy man who reminded one more of a teddy bear than of the fierce grizzly that Edna was perceiving. I confronted him a few times about his lack of initiative and generally passive stance in life but despite the provocation got only the mildest of reactions. I probed his previous relationships and violence had never been an issue. And I checked carefully his family history and again came up empty-handed. In fact, I ended up referring him to a colleague for assertiveness-training as he had considerable employment problems due to his lack of assertiveness. I can now say, more than fifteen years later, that they are still together and violence has never been an issue in their marriage. Almost all of the perceived violence was a projection from Edna’s past.

What about the “S” modality-selection? This is actually the heart of the matter, as it is the easiest to manipulate. People invariably choose partners that correspond to their self-object models explained in the previous section on Object Relations Theory. In other words they choose the appropriate complement. And this is the basis of the “Relationship Pattern”—a now commonly accepted term in pop-psychology. The victim chooses a bully. The bully chooses a victim. The unloved one chooses a narcissist and the narcissist chooses an admirer.

We are speaking here of pathology, of course. If we want to counsel people properly, we would have to identify the pathological pattern and work to avoid and undo it. This is often more difficult than it sounds. You cannot get someone interested in a partner if there is no attraction whatsoever. If the potential partner is other than the complement, the chooser may well find them uninteresting or boring.

An elderly therapist I once knew liked to tell me about one of his male clients who fell neatly into the category known by the English as the “Bitch’s Victim”. He invariably chose the nastiest females available. During the course of his therapy, he met a classmate and started dating her. He could find no obvious fault in her. She was intelligent, attractive, socially charming and a kind and sensitive person. But he would come to his therapy sessions complaining, “There’s something missing, I don’t know what it is” and the therapist would answer him, “I know what’s missing. It’s anxiety. She doesn’t create stress for you and you’re missing it.” The client eventually got the point. He had to adapt to being comfortable. He was used to discomfort and distress and looked for it in relationships.