Second Interview with Mary

Now that the children are beginning to feel all this-and are likely to be still more deeply affected-it is even more important that they should be helped to find their way through the distressing tangle. How can the stalemate be resolved? This may become clearer as we go on to look at the remaining interviews with John and Mary, beginning with the second interview with Mary.

After the usual kind of greeting the counselor asked Mary how she felt about the situation, to which Mary replied:

M. I don’t know what you did to John the other day, but he has been a new man, much more relaxed and communicative, and I feel better too. But I still feel that there’s an underlying tension, and it wouldn’t take much to make it burst. I feel a bit as if I’m walking on a tightrope, and I’m trying to be very tactful. c. Things are better, but you still have to watch your step?

M. How can we get past that kind of barrier, so that we don’t have to hold ourselves in?

c. People who do this work find that it often helps to look at the backgrounds of those in trouble, to find out what they feel about the husband’s and the wife’s roles in marriage, and possibly why they feel as they do. Would you like to tell me something about yourself, and your earlier life?

M. I’m not quite sure what you would want, and it’s not very interesting, but I’ll try. I suppose the biggest thing that happened to me was that mother died suddenly when I was 16. I felt that the bottom had dropped out of my life, because she was the one person I had ever been able to lean on. You see Dad is a very good person, but he was never very strong, and my brother, he’s two years younger than I am, has always been an irresponsible impulsive boy who had a passion for getting himself into trouble.

c. So you must have felt the loss of mother very keenly

M. Yes, and it wasn’t improved by the fact that I had been all set to go to the University, but I felt I had to give that up and look after Dad and Harry, my brother. Mother had trained me pretty well in cooking, so I didn’t find it too difficult, and Dad was most appreciative-he said several times that I had saved his life! He was very cooperative, and always came home punctually, but Harry was always difficult, he used to come home at all hours, and he was very careless and untidy. But I gradually got him trained so that at least I could run the home properly. If he came home late without telling me he had to get his own meal! He got into some pretty bad scrapes, and once I even had to go and bail him out when Dad was away.

c. You felt you had to train him pretty well so that you could run the home properly, but it was easier with Dad?

M. Well, if I was going to give up everything I’d wanted to do to look after them, I felt it was up to them to cooperate. But I got things well organized so that I could run the home well and also have some opportunity for some social life of my own. You see Dad’s friends were all out of my age group, and Harry’s friends didn’t attract me one bit.

c. You felt a lot better when you got things organized?

M. Yes, I even managed to take a few university courses, but of course any full course would have been too much with my domestic responsibilities. But I felt I’d saved something out of the wreck, and I made some good friends. But with all I had to do I felt worried sometimes that I’d never get married. All my girl friends from school had gone off, and here was I, with a family of two helpless males and no husband.

c. You had all the responsibilities of motherhood without the pleasure and support of a husband?

M. That was just what I felt, but eventually of course I met John. He was the younger brother of one of my school friends. At first I didn’t take to him at all, he was very much a “mother’s boy.” You see his father had walked out when he was about ten, and he and his sister were brought up by his mother and his grandmother. They just idolized him, and seem to have lavished everything on him. His mother still idolizes him and demands a lot of attention from him. Looking back now I realize that John never had to stand on his own feet, he got everything he wanted, and he often behaves now as if he believes he has a right to other people’s love and cooperation.

c. You feel he never had to win the love and cooperation of people while he was growing up. Did he take much initiative in winning your love when he was courting you?

M. As I see it now I don’t think he did. I’m afraid I rather took pity on him at the time he first showed real interest in me, and I really wasn’t very hard to get. I felt that we clicked almost at once after he began to show interest, and I still felt that way till he started to get moody after Jimmy came. Then I felt he was demanding more attention than I could give him. He couldn’t seem to understand how much the baby took my time and attention, and I couldn’t neglect the baby.
c. Could it be that you were really mothering him at the beginning, and that he felt neglected when Jimmy came and needed your mothering?

M. I’ve sometimes wondered about that, and as we’ve been talking it seems to make sense. You know he’s four years younger than I am.

c. And he’d been used to being mothered; while you’d been doing a lot of mothering to your father and brother?
M. It’s extraordinary, now you mention it, how our two past histories interlocked with one another how my satisfaction at mothering clicked with his need to be mothered-and how lost he must have felt when there were two helpless children to take all my mothering!

This second interview with Mary concluded with considerable growth in her understanding of John’s difficulties, and the beginnings of better insight into her own attitudes. But so far she hasn’t been able to see her own passion for organizing John, and the counselor has not made any attempt to confront her with it. It is found to be much more effective when people can come to achieve insight into their own destructive attitudes and to get some idea of why they have had them, than it is to attempt to confront them with such matters, at least at the beginning.

When the main emotional unburdening has been completed and the rapport with the counselor is good it may be tempting for the counselor to say, for example, to Mary, “John feels that you are organizing him too much, and that’s one thing that makes him sore.” This is not likely to be very effective because Mary will probably be unable to see herself as others see her, and she will probably have rejected this idea already when John has tried to put it to her. A likely response to the counselor’s effort at confronting her with it will be, “John’s exaggerating this altogether; he has that stupid idea on the brain!” What can the counselor do then? Is he to argue it out with Mary and have the whole interview sidetracked into a conflict? Or is he to confront John later with the information that Mary doesn’t agree with his ideas-which of course John knows already from his discussions with her? “Tale bearing” of this kind is not the function of the counselor, and it is apt to lead him into troubled waters.

If John and Mary each discuss the other’s faults, and ignore their own (as seen by the other one) it is generally best, after the main emotional tensions have subsided to some extent, to arrange an interview with the two of them together-with mutual consent, of course. Then if, for example, John brings up Mary’s excessive organizing, and Mary tries to discount it, John can answer her on the spot with particular examples. In this way the main points of conflict can be brought into the open and ultimately accepted by both of them, even if at this stage there is no apparent reconciliation.

After such a joint interview further sessions can be carried out with each alone, and an opportunity given for each to talk about the reasons and motives for these attitudes, so that better insight might be achieved. Further joint interviews can be arranged when there are any points of mutual concern to be clarified, and also later when any positive plans for the future are being considered.

If the first joint interview is held before the emotional tensions are partly relieved it might only serve to increase the tensions and inflict further wounds. Such interviews need be handled carefully, and if there seems to be undue heightening of tension it may be best to call a halt in the joint interview and to go on with individual interviews for a further period.

In the present case the growth of insight has so far been as good as one could expect, and the logical step is to have a second session with John, with the idea of learning how he sees his own background and that of Mary. This “two-dimensional” perception of backgrounds and of role perceptions in marriage is much more helpful than any “one-dimensional” perception, and it will make for much better clarification in further discussion with John and Mary.

Tags: Counseling