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In the discussion of the symmetrical relationship and the status struggle we mentioned that certain statements or actions may unconsciously be directed at the spouse in a derogatory, attacking manner by a person who is attempting to establish that he is the peer or the superior of the other, in order to build his self-esteem, his self-respect, his dignity. This behavior is often of the youhurt-me-so-I’ll-hurt-you variety; in many instances it becomes a form of mental plundering, pillaging, and weakening.
The cause of this sort of conduct is likely to be vague, hidden, or camouflaged. It may be something which the other partner is believed-whether correctly or not-to have done or to have omitted doing. Perhaps one of the spouses suffers from his own sense of inferiority and in compensation attempts to elevate himself by stepping on his partner. Often an individual may attack his spouse on any insignificant issue when his real criticism is related to something entirely different. For instance, a husband may nag his wife for being a mediocre cook (even though he really doesn’t mind her cooking) because he is jealous of her social success. He is shy and awkward socially, but may unconsciously sense that if he attacks her on this issue, he automatically will expose his own feeling of inadequacy and his envy. In order to avoid painful self-disclosure, he chooses to pick on one of his wife’s sensitive areas-her cooking. He is probably not even aware that he is doing it, and certainly does not understand why.
Attacks of this kind are not restricted to husbands and wives.
They may involve employer and employee, brother and sister, two congressmen who happen to sit next to each other. But they are most obvious and (probably most damaging) in the case of marital partners simply because marriage lasts so long and is so intimate. Spouses cannot keep up a front with each other, no matter how much they wish to do so, or how hard they try to deceive themselves.
The symptoms of this type of human aggressiveness-though not necessarily the causes-have been reasonably well identified by psychiatrists and psychologists. In most cases in which marriages break up, several varieties of this destructive kind of behavior have been at work It is probable that these patterns of behavior are present in almost all marriages, but they need not be damaging. In the same way, the germs of tuberculosis and pneumonia are present in the bodies of most human beings, but these pathogenic germs are kept under control and do not become pernicious unless the body becomes weakened by fatigue, other illnesses, or the malfunction of an organ. Correspondingly, in a healthy marriage the natural defense system of the individual can handle the derogatory attacks, sometimes by tolerance, sometimes by quid pro quo techniques, sometimes by rendering the attacks harmless through personal change or a good old-fashioned fight.
Many a spouse, after spending expensive months with a psychiatrist or marriage counselor, has at least become aware of the extreme, constant attacks that he unconsciously makes on the other. It is one of the great rewards of psychiatry to witness the client’s explosive surprise upon recognizing that he has unconsciously been beating his partner into an emotional pulp. Usually the response is, “But I love my wife (or husband); how could I have done such a terrible thing for so many years?”
If this illumination comes before the partner has erected permanent defenses against the tormentor, there usually follows a satisfying revitalization of the marriage. Because the marriage process is an interlocking system, anyone action which has been fed into it has effects in a dozen different ways. When a person recognizes and understands the attack he has been making on the other, he is likely, almost in a moment of revelation, to understand a variety of past experiences which were discordant and confusing.
In the hope that some readers will experience illuminations of this sort, we present in the following sections on “How to Drive Your Spouse Crazy” examples and analyses of the most common methods by which one partner attacks and cripples the other, without even knowing what he is doing,
Yet the reader should recognize that it is incorrect to say that one spouse has “ruined” or “castrated” or “undermined” the other. A law of physics states that every action has an equal and opposing reaction; correspondingly, while there is no victim without a victimizer, it is equally true that the victimizer requires a willing subject. For instance, there can be no aggressive or dominating husband unless there is an accepting or passive wife. However, in each of the following examples we are concerned only with techniques employed by one of the spouses; it is up to the reader to remember that this approach is used for the sake of simplicity, so that the reader perhaps will be able to recognize the complexities of actual life.
