Unleashing the Artist Within by Eric Maisel

Author:Eric Maisel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Courier Publishing
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Broken Window

When I first began working as a family therapist I decided to focus my practice on couples’ work where one or both of the partners were creatives. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there was no shortage of such couples. When the couple was made up of a self-identified creative and a self-identified noncreative, typical complaints were that the creative, who rarely brought in any income, was a parasite; that the noncreative simply “didn’t understand” the creative (and was also boring); that the noncreative was passive-aggressive, proclaiming support but acting anything but supportive.

In couples where both partners were self-identified creatives, typical dynamics included the following: a competitiveness that was muted on the surface but fierce underneath; anger and despair that leading creative lives produced; difficulties multiplied rather than reduced, by the fact that both partners were struggling to make it in their disciplines; envious feelings that made it hard to genuinely enjoy the other partner’s successes.

The triggering crisis often was something relatively small. It might be that the supportive but actually passive-aggressive noncreative mate was supposed to pick up the partner at the airport but “got delayed” and kept them waiting for hours. It might be that one partner invited relatives to visit at the same time that the partner had an important art deadline looming. It might be that a partner was spending “too much money” on art supplies, studio space, or one’s independent film. Issues of this sort would become the touchstone and lightning rod for the couple’s electric antagonisms.

The following was a typical example. I was seeing a painter and a musician who were mad at each other because each felt that the other wasn’t willing to take “just a little time off” to fix a broken window in their house. That was their current hot-button bone of contention: that the other was acting selfishly, cavalierly, and unfairly with regard to the “window thing.” Where to start with this tangled issue? I began in a straightforward way: by looking at the exact nature of the window-fixing task.

I could tell that each of them was refusing to really add up how much time was involved in tackling this “little project,” and so I had them lay out what was involved in fixing the window. It turned out that it was going to take one of them a dozen hours or more to get the job done. They had been denying this reality so as to be able to more easily charge the other with a relationship sin. We often “block” on tackling a project because we know that there are things that we have to learn, work that we have to do, and costs that we have to assume, and rather than admit and confess to all that, we refuse to honestly look at the task. My client couple was doing exactly that.

I forced John, the musician, and Stephanie, the painter, to sit still and add up the hours. Time spent traveling to and from the home supply store.

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