SAN DIEGO — Danny and his attractive blonde wife, Louise, were ending their two-year marriage. The trim 34-year-old nurse had enough of his locked up feelings She couldn’t get him to show any feelings indicating he felt anything. It was like splashing her emotional bucket of water against a brick wall. The handsome 35-year-old computer engineer responded to her pleas to share his feelings with her, as if he were a part of his beloved machines. He created a spreadsheet in rows and columns of analytical minutia, where other people would exclaim, “I feel.”
Even their sex life, the glue that bound them together in the beginning, had deteriorated to occasional animal releases for each of them. One day after work, she made an appointment with a lawyer and filed for divorce.
Part of the divorce procedure in the San Diego County court system is a joint visit to the Conciliation Counselor’s office to see if there is any possibility of reconciliation. Danny and Louise, sat down and discussed their differences with the counselor. Sensing there was not much bitterness between them, he recommended, they make one last attempt, and attend a “couples sensitivity group” weekend. Here, married couples with problems gather in a neutral setting, without the distractions of children, phone calls, etc., to focus on their troubles and make attempts at resolving their differences.
Early Saturday morning, five less-than-enthusiastic, unhappy married couples gathered in a comfortably furnished large room in the plush former Wishing Well Hotel. Carl, the facilitator in his late 30s, with a credential in marriage and family counseling, greeted them. He asked each of the participants to sit in one of the comfortable plush chairs arranged in a semicircle around the room. “We’re going to be here all day and tomorrow with only a short break for lunch each day,” he said. “There are only two rules in this room, The first is that we talk only about our feelings. The second is that there will be no physical violence by anyone, whether it be your spouse or any other person in the room. Now, who wants to talk first and get things started?”
The first day there was emotional turmoil. Accusations, crying, anger, denial, fear, dismay, revelation, and a host of other feelings. Shouts of “bullshit!”; “manipulator!”; “bully!’; and “whiner!” flew across the room at sonic speed as people expressed their reactions to the one on the “hot seat.”
“Louise, you haven’t said much,” said one member of the group, “what’s your story?”
The soft-spoken blonde looked around the room and felt more confident to risk declaring how she felt, as others had done before her.
“I can’t reach Danny. I feel so alone. We have nothing to talk about. When he comes home from work, we eat silently and then he reads manuals and technical magazines all evening. He has no friends, never brings anyone home for dinner, and we’re never invited to anyone else’s home either. He’s indifferent to my friends and they feel uncomfortable with him. I try to talk to him about us and he just gives me a blank stare. I’m afraid I made a mistake in marrying him.”
As she spoke, tears flowed slowly down her cheeks. Bobbi, sitting across the room, having spent the previous half hour soaking a handkerchief with her tears, gently asked, “Did you ever love him?” “I thought I did, but now I think I might have misinterpreted my sexual desire for feelings of love and intimacy.” Louise’s body visibly sagged as she spoke.
The focus of everyone now shifted to Danny. “ You haven’t said a word the whole time we’ve been here. What’s going on, I asked?” Danny sat mute and stared across the room with an indifferent expression on his face. “God Damn it man, come alive. Stop being a sack of shit,” demanded the rugged golf course maintenance supervisor. “We’re all spilling our guts and risking getting hit in the nuts, while you hide behind your silence.”
“No wonder your wife wants a divorce,” an outraged biology professor added. “If you were my husband I wouldn’t have waited two years to get rid of you.”
Carl coolly waited until the heat was out of the air and then said evenly, “Danny, you’re at a crossroads. It seems to me you have two choices. You can take this last opportunity to explore your inner feelings and find out why you have this tight armor bound around your emotions, or you can choose to go silently through divorce and a lonely future by yourself.”
He paused for a few seconds to let the impact of that thought resonate in the silent air and then said, “It’s time for lunch. Think about it and let’s continue with Danny after we resume.”
During lunch, my wife Suzi asked Carl, “Aren’t we being too tough on him? I’m afraid he’s going to get up and leave or do something drastic.” I, who had been the most forceful in the verbal pounding of Danny, expressed the same concerns. “No,” Carl replied. “Keep up the pressure, I think this is the only way we can peel away his defenses.”
After lunch, the group resumed pressing Danny. “Don’t you sense anything?” Morgan the successful overachieving executive, queried. “Are you so inured to feelings you are oblivious to life going on around you?” Danny squirmed uncomfortably and mumbled softly, “Emotions can be expressed in duality. There is tension balancing precariously at each end of a fulcrum. One is positive electrical impulse and the other is negative. The resulting torsion generates reactions in the dendrites of the extremities.”
“What the hell did you just say?” shouted the astonished Polly, earth mother of the group. “Did those words come from a human being or a machine?” another asked. ”Pure crap,” railed the groundskeeper. The expressions on the faces of the rest of the group mirrored similar feelings.
“Now you see what I’ve been going through for two years,” Louise cried in frustration and despair.
The pressure was affecting him. The verbal pounding caused him to look down and whisper something. “What did you just say Danny? What’s going on? Speak up.” Still looking at the floor, he hesitatingly mentioned something about “the war.” “What happened in the war? What happened?”
Speaking to no one in particular, he retreated into a place only he knew, and began his story. It was the Korean War. He was a radio operator on an airplane. The plane received a direct hit and was shot down and heavily damaged upon impact. Two of the crew were killed, but the rest scrambled out of the plane. He was trapped beneath some twisted metal and couldn’t free himself. He panicked and shouted for assistance, but no one came to his rescue for several hours. All the time Danny told this story his face and voice showed he was reliving the horrible experience of many years ago. When he could speak no more, his voice trailed off into a whisper.
When he was finished, Carl gently said, “Danny, can’t you see this is the instant you pulled a non-feeling curtain around you. You were so traumatized by the experience of being abandoned by your comrades in such an awful situation, you decided no one was going to hurt you again. Look how it has worked against you. You’ve avoided the joy of having friends and you’re about to lose your wife, the only one who truly loves you. You’ve got to return to the world of feelings and take risks with your emotions like the rest of us. Sometimes you will be hurt, life is not always pleasant, but the potential for joyful rewards far out way the downside.”
Carl finished and no one had anything more to say. There was closure. Danny said nothing but nodded his head. The atmosphere in the room changed. Everyone had been sitting on the edge of their chairs as this powerful drama unfolded. Now it was over and no one knew what would come next. Carl steered the dialogue onto the sophisticated couple from Claremont and the group refocused. However something had taken place. Danny slowly began to interact with the group, making comments when he had something to contribute. Louise noticed what was happening, and became happily animated as the afternoon session continued.
The group had dinner and stayed overnight, In the next morning’s session, Bobbi remarked to Louise, “You look radiant, entirely different from yesterday.” Beaming, she could hardly contain her excitement. “We made love last night like the very beginning. It was better than the beginning. Believe it or not we were both virgins when we were married.” She giggled. The group’s second day continued like the first. Danny was now a full participant in the group and his handsome face showed a range of emotions absent when the group began. It had been a long journey for him.
A month later, Carl got a phone call from the conciliation counselor. Louise had dropped her divorce action and Danny in a private interview told him, “I feel as if I have a brand-new life.”
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Ira Spector is a freelance writer based in San Diego.