@mouser:I tend to be careful about giving advice, on the basis that I could well be wrong in what I say.
Having studied human and animal psychology to some extent, I would suggest that one probably needs to be
especially careful about dishing out or "recommending" personal marital/relationship advice, whether it is from first-hand experience, or from secondhand experience via other peoples' quoted experiences, or from the thoughts of "professional" or "expert" authors on the subject.
Where you say:
...This is a book by someone who has studied relationships academically, and he has written many books on the subject. ...
-mouser
- I would respectfully suggest that this could implicitly seem to be:
- a non sequitur ("it does not follow"; or irrelevant conclusion). Just because someone has "studied relationships academically", or "written many books" on a subject does not, in and of itself necessarily mean that they are a good choice of advice. They might be the opposite of what you suggest. At most, all it may indicate is that they have written many books on the subject, but whether they have learned anything from their "academic study of relationships" is unknown.
For example, a friend of mine once directed me to an interesting book "Are you the one for me?" written some years back by one Barbara De Angeles PhD. Her photogenic face was on the cover, and she was easy on the eye. Her book was reputedly a "#1 BESTSELLER". I thought her analytical approach was novel but lacking in love/humanity.
However, if you follow her biography, you will probably find that she seems to have been somewhat of an unlucky serial relationship breaker, with a trail of shattered personal relationships in her wake. But perhaps she is still earning money from a gullible audience desperately seeking answers to real human problems but who may have looked no deeper than the cover of her book(s) - I gather she has written several.
- an argumentum ad verecundiam (appeal to authority; conventional propriety). Just because someone has (say) a Ph.D and writes on the subject, it does not follow, in and of itself, that they are necessarily a good choice of marital/relationship advice. If they have been able to show a genuine trail of success - e.g., (say) genuine testimonials from many happy recipients of their psychiatric relationship counselling - then that would be a positive indicator, certainly. Similarly, one of the books below says on the cover that it is "A practical guide from one of the country's foremost relationship experts." Yeah, right. This is a meaningless, improven and unprovable statement - regarded in (UK) contract law as a marketing "puff" - a permissible unproven promotional statement which can be used to nimbly skate around any consumer complaints of false representation inducing them to buy the book. Of course the publisher is going to punt his wares, and should be permitted to do so with glowing praise if he wishes ("accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative", etc.). Caveat emptor.
- an argumentum ad ignorantiam (forwarding a proposition without any certain proof). Just because one might have a high opinion of a book does not, in and of itself necessarily mean that it is a good choice of marital/relationship advice/guidance.
There are a lot of con men and intelligent idiots about (e.g., many seem to be in psychology and other "social sciences" and "climate science"), many of them even qualified and published in some field or other, believing themselves to be, or appealing to others as self-styled experts. They can do a great deal of damage to a society's store of Truth/Knowledge - e.g., Trofim Lysenko (Lysenkoism) and other fakers such as the German physician Franz Joseph Gall, who devised the Phrenology hoax, or the amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward (Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum) who were the architects of the Piltdown Man hoax, come to mind. Learned men all. The proof of their worth is not in (say) a paper qualification or their position in a hierarchy, but only in the pudding - i.e., what they do with their lives and what they produce that is or has been beneficial to humanity/science., or which has contributed to the store of human knowledge.
Having said that, I have just once given some indirect "relationship advice" to someone - a woman who was the IT Manager and my boss (sponsor) on a consulting assignment that I was independently contracted for in 2004. I'll call her "Anne" (not her real name).
Anne had recently married, but frequently had to work late - often on the critical projects I was engaged upon, and she described how she found that her husband - who worked from home as a self-employed architect) disliked this and when she got home they would keep getting into an argument about it that always spiralled down into an inconclusive/unresolved stasis. It seemed to be repetitive, where the same things/points were said/put by each person.
I told Anne that, quite by coincidence, I had a book with me that I kept to read in the lunchbreaks - it was a psychology textbook written by a man and wife team (2 academics and psychologists) who had expanded in the book the theoretical boundaries of what is called
TA ("Transactional Analysis") - a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy. I was reading it simply out of interest and to get up to speed with the current methodology, having studied and been very interested in the earlier development of TA (sort of
"I'm OK, You're OK").
I explained to Anne that it is/was so relevant and useful that I even taught TA theory to my wife and children, so that they could better understand how we as a family might interrelate, and also to better understand relationships with others, and why people (oneself included) might tend to behave/do/say under certain circumstances, depending on their ego-states (basically, Parent, Adult, Child). We each can speak from these ego states, and in our interrelationships we will tend to flicker between them. We are usually unaware that this is happening, but becoming aware can help us to balance our responses in the Adult state
- if we want. If our ego is stuck in another state though, it will literally protect itself and resist such self-adjustment. The
therapist's task is to help his/her client on the journey to realise/come back to the Adult state, and
to take responsibility for consistently maintaining that behaviour pattern. Not necessarily an easy task!
She was an intelligent woman, so I thought she could understand and I told her that what she had described as her repetitive dialogue with her husband was described in some detail in the textbook - it was a classic case of what was/is called "running/acting a script". Simply put, the thing would basically tend to repeat indefinitely until either:
- (a) One or the other partner attacked the relationship with the other partner, blaming them as being the cause of the perceived problem ("You're NOT OK") - thus damaging the relationship.
- (b) Both partners realised that they were acting out a classic example of the theoretical life script in the textbook, and that they were not obliged to act out the script and had the option to adapt to and maintain Adult ego state behaviours, which would enable them to perceive and take responsibility for successfully resolving whatever the real problems might be (if any) in their relationships.
She asked if she could borrow the textbook. I gladly handed it over. Two weeks later she gave it back to me and thanked me profusely. The book had enabled them to understand what they were doing to themselves, and why, and they had intelligently modified their behaviours to Adult ego state, and held them there. This had enabled them to collaboratively work to resolving their
real/root causal relationship problems, which they had not previously even been able to perceive as problems.
So that seemed to be a good result, though it probably did some psychotherapist out of their potential fees. But that is really what most therapists do - they help the client to take responsibility for seeing what is wrong, for fixing themselves up, and give them a method to do it. Most people need a therapist for that, but if one is not too ego-bound, one can do it oneself - always given the relevant knowledge.
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