Jewish Man in Marriage Therapy

The NY Times is good for Jewish versions of the news, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and insights into Jewish life. Here is a Sunday magazine article

How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me

It took a superstar couples therapist to help me see beyond my anger.

By Daniel Oppenheimer

One thing I’ve learned from being married to my wife, Jess, who is a couples therapist, is how vast the distance is between the masks people show to the world and the messy realities that live behind them. Every couple knows its own drama, but we still fall prey to the illusion that all other couples have seamlessly satisfying relationships. The truth about marriage — including my own — is that even the most functional couples are merely doing the best they can with the lives that have been bestowed on them.

This past spring, Jess and I had the first of eight sessions of couples therapy with Terry Real, a best-selling author and by far the most famous of the therapists we’ve seen during our marriage. ...

This is what we signed up for. Real, whose admirers include Gwyneth Paltrow and Bruce Springsteen, is one of a small number of thinkers who are actively shaping how the couples-therapy field is received by the public and practiced by other therapists. He is also the bluntest and most charismatic of the therapists I’ve seen, the New Jersey Jewish version of Robin Williams’s irascible Boston character in “Good Will Hunting” — profane, charismatic, open about his own life, forged in his own story of pain.

The author is presumably Jewish, along with his couples therapist wife, and the various other psycho therapists they see.

I could not stand to read this. It is too pathetic. I do not want to repeat Jewish stereotypes, but it is hard to believe anyone lives like this.

It’s the last of our eight sessions, and I’m talking to my “inner child.” I remember, under Real’s guidance, closing my eyes and bringing him up out of my memory so that we could talk. He was 6 or 7, a bit chubby, wearing clunky eyeglasses and shorts pulled up too high above his waist. He’s a composite, I realize now, of details of me at my most awkward self across the ages.

I find this session the hardest of all of them to watch. What we talk about is intensely vulnerable, but that’s not the most difficult part. Nor is it imagining the silent audience evaluating me. It’s that I’m too sealed off from it, then and now. I couldn’t — can’t — feel it in the way I so urgently want to.

When therapy is dramatized on TV or in the movies, there’s a classic scene where the deep childhood trauma is finally exposed. “It’s not your fault,” Robin Williams says to Matt Damon in “Good Will Hunting,” referring to the gruesome abuse Damon’s character suffered in foster care. ...

Daniel Oppenheimer is the author of “Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.” He is currently working on a book about relationships and couples therapy with his wife, who is a couples therapist. They live in Austin, Texas.

They cannot manage their own lives, but they are writing a book on how other couples can blame the husband and the husband can blame his inner child.

Much of psycho therapy is controlled or influenced by Jews, but I read this:

After October 7, 2023, the Jewish Therapist Collective received a sharp increase in calls from Jewish therapists saying, as shared by the collective's director Halina Brooke, that they were "sidelined or fired from their mental health workplaces due to being Jewish." Jewish therapy trainees, according to Brooke, were "told that their presence is triggering to non-Jewish therapists."

Likewise, Chicago-based psychologist Allison Resnick wrote in Kesher, the journal of the Association of Jewish Psychologists, that she routinely reads about "therapists being told to conceal their Jewishness for fear of offending colleagues and clients."

Here is a comment, from a NY Times reader:

@Tim Thank you for sharing. I also think you have illustrated the widening gap between Millennial women and men, at least in my own social circle. My female friends and I read self-help books, go to therapy and even talk about how we can break the patterns of our parents through personal enlightenment and self-improvement…whereas the men in our lives are staunchly against the idea, at most willing to placate us women by providing lip service in a passive, surface-y couples therapy session or two.

It’s creating a widening gap between the genders and, in my view, resulting in ever increasing misunderstandings and resentment. I’m hoping that articles like this (thank you Oppenheimer!) and guys like Real can de-stigmatize this emotional work for the men that we love and desire a healthy connection with.

We are getting a generation of infantilized and therapized women who will never have a healthy connection with anyone.