Take off the Mask in your Marriage

James Christensen & Catherine Roebuck

James: There's a thing I tell clients who are trying to regain their partner's trust after cheating. One way to regain your partner's trust is to reveal things that are in your mind — things that are going to be hard to reveal, or that your partner might not like to hear. Because those are the messy things you'd be tempted to hide. To gain your partner's trust, you want to get better at revealing more of your mind. Revealing the messy things makes you more trustworthy, even though it might upset your partner in the short term. Does that seem true to you?

Catherine: Yeah, but I think it's missing one piece. You still have to be considerate while you're doing it, because you can just dump your mess on someone over and over. Like, "I was just thinking about how this other person at work is so much more attractive than you, and I'd way rather be with them." That's not going to help. You have to take responsibility for what you're revealing and for what's actually in your mind. The liability I see is that someone could go from hiding everything to revealing everything, but still not dealing with anything.

James: So: I'm going to reveal what's in my mind, and I'm going to take responsibility for changing the things I do that are harmful.

Catherine: Right, and every time you reveal something, you do have to look at why you're sharing this. If you find some kind of problem in your mind and dump it on your partner, but you're not in a place where you're serious about addressing it, this is just going to make your partner's anxiety go up. They're going to think, "This is even worse than I thought."

James: Yeah, it's delicate.

Catherine: It is.

James: As I think about masking, I often consider revealing things to my wife that I never would have revealed before. But I try to pause and think about what the impact will be. Is this worth revealing? The difference is that I didn't even used to consider it, and now I do. I think about whether it's useful to reveal right now, or tomorrow. Sometimes I won't reveal something in the moment, but I'll think about my intentions, the impact, the way of revealing it, the time and the place. In the end, I want to reveal most of what's in my mind. But as you're saying, revealing can be used to harm as well as to help.

Catherine: Totally. And it's not a substitute for dealing with what's in your mind. But I also run into people who have this idea that they're going to go in secret — without confiding in their partner at all — secretly clean up this whole mess in their mind, and then never have to talk to their partner about it. I've had clients who had an affair years ago, coming in saying they're going to work through it but still never tell their partner. I have reservations about that because it's not really fair. You're not giving your partner a choice.

James: I don't think you can clean up an affair without telling your partner. You're still deceiving them. You're allowing your partner to think you've been faithful when you haven't. The deception is still ongoing. You're not really cleaning anything up.

Catherine: That's my view as well. There are people who think differently, who think it's sometimes better not to reveal it. But I think if you're going to continue a relationship — a sexual relationship — and you're going to continue asking your partner to open up to you, holding that kind of thing back isn't going to work.

James: That's interesting that people still recommend that. There's such an emphasis on not hurting someone's feelings, which I think is the wrong emphasis. The emphasis needs to be on caring about the other person and presenting myself in a congruent and authentic way. There are things I've done that have seriously been hurtful to my wife, and if I don't reveal them — the thing is, the harm has been done regardless of whether I reveal it or not. This idea that the harm is in the revelation doesn't line up.

Catherine: I agree, because the harm exists. Most likely, the partner in that situation is walking around with a sense that something happened. They don't really know what the problem is, but there is a problem. There's some reason they don't trust their partner, and it's been this way for years. The idea that they might get angrier when you reveal it — that's not the harm. The harm has already happened. I still think it can be restorative to bring something to the surface and give your partner a choice. If you've really worked through it and you're with a reasonable person, there's a decent chance they'll be able to see what you've done and make their own decision about whether that resolves it for them.

James: I was talking to someone the other day about how they were trying to use an apology to control the other person's feelings. This client said, "I'm sorry for what I did," and then got upset because their partner didn't feel better instantly. But the apology is you taking responsibility for what you did. It doesn't mean the other person is going to feel better instantly. Now you're trying to control their feelings and getting upset at them for not changing how they see you just because you said something. They're actually going to base what they think about you on what you do, not on what you say.

Catherine: Do you see that apology as a mask?

James: It's interesting — when this client told the story, I initially assessed that the apology was not genuine. What happened is Partner A told the story about Partner B apologizing, and I thought it sounded like a general apology. But then Partner B came in and told their side, and I realized it actually probably was genuine. But then they got upset about Partner A not forgiving them immediately, so it seemed like a separate problem — more of a fragility thing.

Catherine: That idea that they're really sorry but they're mad that you don't immediately forgive — that doesn't line up for me. Part of being really sorry about hurting someone is being willing to make real contact with the impact of what you did. Your partner's reaction is the impact of what you did, at least a big part of it. So here one partner is saying they've dealt with it and they're really sorry — putting forward the idea that they've made real contact with their impact. But then their partner shows them that impact and they're like, "How dare you show me that."

James: Yeah. And there's also a disagreement about who's responsible for what. He was saying, "I'm sorry for what happened, but I don't think your emotional response is appropriate." That's fine, but he needs to hold onto that line instead of saying, "I said I was sorry, now you need to stop feeling bad" — which is a whole different thing. I think it's an over-belief in the power of words. The idea that "I said a certain thing, so you need to feel a certain way." Feelings are more often a response to behavior, not to what someone says.

Catherine: The behavior I see here is the apologizing partner actually breaking contact at the very moment they're getting a view of their impact. That makes me not trust how real this apology is. How much have they actually dealt with this? Even if your partner is having an overreaction — you really hurt your partner. Can you handle sitting with them for a few minutes through their overreaction? That seems like a fair thing.

James: Yeah, absolutely. The difficulty — and I face this — one of the most powerful words I learned in my own marriage therapy was the idea of fragility. I'd never been described as fragile before. We men love to think of ourselves as super strong, rock solid, no feelings. "Say whatever you want about me, I can take it." What I learned in marriage therapy is that I am actually quite fragile, especially around my wife. The slightest hint of her disapproval just really gets to me, and that causes a lot of problems because I react intensely. My intense reaction affects her, and we go through this whole dance.

Part of our path of growth was for me to learn to comfort myself when I feel threatened by her criticism. Whether it's valid or not — it's not so much related to how right she is, it's related to the idea that she sees me in a critical light, and that's hard for me to handle. That's something for me to work on. What I tell clients is: can you give your partner permission to see you how they see you, instead of trying to change it all the time? I'm going to handle my own feelings about that — which are intense — but I'm not going to put the responsibility for my emotional response to your criticism back onto you. That's my responsibility.

Catherine: If I go back for a minute to this partner who apologized and then the spouse was overreacting — an overreaction is just a reaction to something historical. It's not necessarily something from this couple; it could be a reaction to something from childhood. Part of taking in the impact of what you've done to your partner is understanding that you did it to a person who was already raw in this area. Say it's some type of deception, and this spouse has some historical reason from childhood that makes deception feel particularly frightening. If I'm going to deal with the impact I've had on my partner, I have to hold in my own awareness that I didn't just deceive someone — I deceived someone who already had a predisposition to really struggling when someone deceives them. This is very tender, and I probably knew that already. If you care and you're serious about cleaning up your impact on people, you have to be willing to make contact with who you did it to.

James: I agree. My impact on my wife is related to my behavior, our history, who she is, and her history before I ever met her. It makes sense for me to take all of that into account and not to blame her for being who she is. I married her the way she is, with her particular sensitivities and tenderness and fragility around certain things. Those things were true before I ever met her, in large part. I chose this person, and when I chose her, I chose her with all of her fragility and frailty and sensitivity.

Catherine: Exactly. If you're going to love someone, you're loving a whole person. There are things about them that predate you, and just because you didn't cause that in them doesn't release you from caring about the fact that it's in them — and that it could really sting if you step on those spots.

James: One thing I've done as I've worked on taking my mask off in my marriage is I've practiced sharing more of what's going on inside me — including my feelings and my thoughts. That's interesting because I often advise couples not to talk about their feelings, but in my case, it has been useful to talk more about mine.

The context is that I went from zero to one, not from nine to ten. I didn't used to talk about my feelings at all. I didn't even really believe I had feelings — I was pretty disconnected from them. Over the last year or so, I've said things like, "I'm feeling really angry right now," which I had never told her before. I would be angry, and I would give no overt indication of it. I wouldn't have an angry face, and I wouldn't do angry actions — not immediately, not what people associate with anger. I would get condescending and manipulative, which is where my anger goes.

What I try to do now is say, "I'm feeling really angry right now." It's helpful to just bring that out. She actually really appreciated it — I remember the first time, she said, "Thank you for telling me that." We were in the car, and I said, "I'm angry right now," and she had this breeze of relief. Not what I expected, but she knew already. I was pretending to be fine all the time when I obviously wasn't. It was helpful for me to take my mask off a little bit in that regard.

Catherine: I love that word, congruence. The opposite of wearing a mask is being congruent — where what you do and what you say and the feeling of being around you and the tone of your voice all line up. That's what's so difficult about being in a relationship with someone who's masking a lot: they don't line up. They're telling you they're fine, but you can tell they're not fine. They're telling you they're not mad, but you can tell they are. You can tell they're hiding something, and they get mad every time you try to talk to them about it. All of this is very stressful.

The congruence is just: can you be real with me? But not in an indulgent way where you're saying, "Now you deal with everything about me that I'm not dealing with." When you told your wife in the car that you were angry, you weren't yelling, you weren't berating her. You weren't venting your anger at her. You were just sharing what was actually going on for you. And when you say you often tell couples not to talk so much about their feelings — I think it's more about the venting. It's about dumping or becoming aggressive with your feelings, using them like weapons, or the idea that because you feel something, your partner has to change.

James: Exactly.

Catherine: I don't think you can love someone without caring about your feelings or sharing them. But a lot of what we actually do in relationships is different from that — it's more like, "I can't handle my feelings, so here they are. You deal with them."

James: Exactly — "It's your responsibility and your fault. My distress is caused by you, and you're going to be the solution to it. I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm not going to calm myself down, I'm not going to comfort myself. That's all on you, and it's all your fault." That's kind of the traditional approach in marriage. And that approach made sense when we were young and dealing with a parent who had the responsibility to take care of us. I don't think it makes sense in adult relationships.

Catherine: Right. Our first attachment experience involves a genuine imbalance where there's an adult and a child, and the adult has more capacity and responsibility to regulate both people's emotions. Then you get into an adult relationship where you're actually on equal footing, but your brain is still wired for a close attachment where you're expecting the other person — this powerful, magical other — to be the one who helps you with all of this, because you still feel kind of small and haven't figured out how to handle it yourself.

The other way it can go is that sometimes you have a parent who isn't able or willing to do a lot of regulation, and you end up — even as a child — regulating them. Some people fall into a pattern of over-functioning and caretaking in their adult relationships, taking too much responsibility for themselves and their partner.

James: There's a tradition in couples therapy — it comes from nonviolent communication, and it's also common in things like Gottman therapy — where the approach is: "I'm going to talk to you about my feelings and my needs. This is what I feel, and this is what I need."

I strongly disagree with that model. What I tell people is: don't talk to your partner about your feelings or your needs. Say, "I want to talk to you about your behavior. This is what I see you doing, and this is what I want you to do." I think that makes a lot more sense because my wife is not responsible for what I feel, but she is responsible for what she does. She's responsible for her behavior.

Even though I do tell her what I feel occasionally, if I really want to deal with a problem in my marriage — and I've already dealt with my side — I think the best approach is to say, "This is what I see you doing, and this is what I want you to do," as opposed to "I have a certain need" or "I have a certain feeling," which just doesn't seem precise enough. What is she supposed to do about it, and why is it her responsibility to make me feel differently in the first place?

Catherine: The thing I wonder about is: where's the vulnerability if you're just talking about their behavior and what you want? I do think talking about your own internal experience — including your feelings and emotions — can be vulnerable. A lot of times it's done in a way that's not actually vulnerable, but it can be. I see that as part of what you want to do when taking off a mask in a relationship: actually showing your partner a vulnerable side.

James: Yeah. It can be vulnerable. The reason I steer people away from it is that they're doing it manipulatively. When I see couples using their feelings to manipulate each other, that's when I'll say, "Let's stop talking about your feelings, because you're using them to manipulate each other." In the future, you can learn to share your feelings in a collaborative way, but right now that's not happening.

So if you want your partner to do something differently, figure out what that is and ask for it directly. Part of the reason we don't do that is because when I do that work and say, "The thing I want my wife to do is this," I'm admitting that it's not my choice — it's her choice. The temptation is to say, "I feel this and I need this," which implies that she has to do what I need and take care of my feelings. I think that's the manipulative implication. I want to go straight to, "I want you to do this," because there's an admission in there that this is what I want, but it's not my choice.

Catherine: And that's actually a more vulnerable position as well, because it's being honest about the limits of your power. I do think there's a lot of benefit in making requests versus complaints. If you say, "I'm feeling abandoned," that's a complaint. But if you say, "I'd really like to spend an hour with you tonight," that's a request — and it's much more inviting. Saying "I'm feeling abandoned" draws your partner right into a dynamic where they're very likely to become defensive. If they're super skillful, they might not, but they're probably not super skillful. You might need to be more precise about what you're actually asking for and be willing to step into the vulnerability of asking.

James: Exactly. Now, there's a flip side. My wife and I — I feel an abandonment panic quite a bit, several times a week. But we've talked about this extensively and have a pretty solid understanding that my abandonment panic is not her responsibility. I'll come to her and say, "I feel an abandonment panic right now," and she knows it's not her job to help me deal with it. If she wants to, she can look at how well she's showing up as a partner, but it's not a request for her to do something about it. There's an acknowledgment between us that this is mine to deal with.

It doesn't lead anywhere good if I bring that panic to her as though it's about her, because it's not really about her. She's not doing anything responsible for the intensity of my feelings. My feelings are really intense, and they're tangentially related to what she does, but not directly. I've been deployed for months in the military and been fine, and then she goes out with her friends one night and I'm dying inside. It doesn't make any sense. I can't hold her responsible for feelings that predate her by quite a bit.

Catherine: Right. And she's actually doing you a favor by bringing them up over and over, giving you lots of opportunities to get precise and clear about what's really going on.

James: There was this one time in therapy. We were sitting right here, and I was going through some really hard feelings during the session. Molly reached over and grabbed my hand, and the therapist said, "Molly, take it back. Don't do that. He needs to figure out how to handle this." Molly sheepishly pulled her hand back. The therapist said, "Let him deal with this for at least 30 seconds before you reach over." She was right — it really is good for me to learn how to handle my own feelings. If I constantly try to outsource that to her, it's not a long-term solution. It doesn't work in adult relationships for someone to be constantly taking a parental role.

Catherine: No, it doesn't work. It leads to burnout and resentment on the side of the person doing it. It typically also leads to resentment on the side of the person receiving it, because it's never actually enough. And there's this powerlessness or panic of, "What if you were to stop?"

James: Exactly. It just prolongs the problem — now I'm even more dependent. But as the marriage gets better, we naturally get more warm and kind and caring, and these things get easier to handle. That's a byproduct of us getting stronger. The strength comes first and the kindness and caring comes second, not the other way around.

Catherine: And then it has a different meaning. It's more about "I'm here and I care," not "I'll solve this for you" — which you can't.

James: Right. It's not "I'm going to keep you from feeling this horrible thing." It's "I actually care a lot about you and I care about my impact on you" — which is different from "I'm going to avoid what I feel when you feel strong things" or "I'm going to accommodate my anxiety by trying to do something about your anxiety."

Catherine: Yeah, that makes sense. So if someone's watching this and thinking, "Okay, I can see it — I wear a mask all the time, at least around my spouse," what do they do? How do you take the mask off?

James: It's been such a hard process for me. I don't even know where to start. This has been really hard for me, and it's really hard for me to help clients with. I think I'm still kind of stumbling through it. What I have told clients is what my therapists have told me: tell your wife what it's like to be you right now. But be careful, because that can quickly turn into manipulation. It's this delicate thing of revealing your inner state to your wife while being really careful not to use it to manipulate her. And that's really hard.

In the past, part of my justification for not revealing was that I've seen this used to manipulate people so often. That was part of my hesitance. But there is a way to say, "I'm feeling really angry right now" or "I'm having an abandonment panic" where it's not designed to manipulate — it's just what's happening.

Catherine: Yeah. Sharing your internal experience, but not making up a story about the other person being the cause or solution to it. Something we've done together is improv classes — just to learn to respond to things in the moment when it's actually moving too fast to manage masking the whole time. It's been a lot of fun and very effective for learning to access and show a range of emotional expression in real time. It was crazy hard at first, but it's gotten easier over time.

James: Improv has been one of the most humbling experiences in my entire life. I did a play in high school and I view myself as someone who's good at speaking, so I thought I was going to go to improv class and shine. I got on stage the first time, they gave me the scenario, and I couldn't say anything. My mind went completely blank. I tried again and again, and I fell on my face consistently. To this day, I've spent hundreds of hours in improv training, and I'm a mediocre performer. It doesn't come naturally to me because it requires me to let go and genuinely respond to what's happening right now without thinking it through first. That's really hard for me.

Catherine: I think a lot of it is building your connection with yourself. There are different pieces — do you even know what's going on for you? And then, can you handle showing it in real time? Figuring out what's even going on for you can be helped a lot by coaching or therapy, connecting with friends who are interested in deeper connection, doing bodywork or yoga — anything that gets you to be present with yourself more.

I also think self-compassion is really important, because you start to come in contact with things you don't like when you look at your own internal experience. The more you're able to face something intense without going into a spiral of judgment, shame, and despair, the more you're able to get to know yourself and tolerate showing what's really going on to other people. Sometimes people will have a bad reaction — they'll shame you or judge you or be harsh with you. That's life. And if you can't handle those reactions inside yourself, you're definitely going to struggle when it comes from outside of you.

James: You're reminding me of one of our mentors who said, "It's okay that you pulled my pants down, because I know how to pull them back up." She was talking metaphorically, of course — someone had done something designed to undermine her in a public setting. That had an impact on me. If I get up on the improv stage and make a fool of myself, it's that same feeling of being really embarrassed in public, which is super hard for me to handle. Can I comfort myself and take care of myself and support myself in that moment? Can I handle the feelings and handle the reality and center myself and be okay again?

Catherine: I think about it as: can I restore my own dignity? Whether it comes from humiliation or from exposing something yourself that you then regret — can you get your feet back under you? Deal with the heat in your face? Deal with the thoughts in your head? Integrate this into the overall sense of being a human who's alive and imperfect?

Building on that is super empowering. You can handle taking more risks and being closer with people when you know how to restore your dignity or take care of yourself after that kind of exposure — or even after an attack. Sometimes people really aren't kind or fair to you. Do you know how to have that experience without turning on yourself as well?

James: It's so critical. We have this defect model in psychology where you have this disorder or that disorder, and it seems so harmful to me because it's like imagining there's some perfect human out there who has no disorders. I don't see it that way at all. We're all trying to help our brains grow into becoming capable of loving and caring — especially in marriage. I don't think any of us are natively capable of having a good marriage, but we can learn to be capable of having a better one.

That's not a defect model, it's a growth model. I'm perfectly fine the way I am, and I want to be a better husband. I'm okay the way I am, and I want to have a better marriage, and there are things I can do about that. It starts with accepting myself just the way I am — a difficult and critical first step.

Catherine: I think marriage puts pressure on everyone to some degree, and it puts much more pressure on you if your early attachment experiences were more hierarchical or difficult. It's an attachment experience that is peer-to-peer — there's not a more powerful other with more capacity who can lift you up. You actually have to show up and expect as much of yourself as of your partner, and that can be a new experience.

There's a huge range in how difficult it is based on where you come from. How much have you ever experienced telling someone you have a problem with something they did and having them just take that in without getting defensive or mean? How much do you know how to do that yourself when someone gives you feedback? How safe was it to let people know what you were feeling in real time, where you came from?

James: I think it's useful to keep in mind that the level of difficulty is significant for everyone. It goes from difficult to extremely difficult. It's an adult attachment experience where I choose a person, and that person moves into the place in my brain of "this is the person who's supposed to love me, the person who's supposed to put me first." That place was formerly occupied by my parents, and because of that, a lot of my brain wiring around that person is inappropriate for an adult relationship. I'm going to expect them to handle themselves a lot better than I handle myself, to be more regulated, more kind, more loving than I am.

As you said, that makes no sense at all, because we marry at our own level of emotional development. If some woman who was way more developed than I am had been out there, she's not going to marry me. I'm going to end up marrying someone who's operating at a similar level. It's not reasonable for me to expect my wife to be a lot more mature, settled, regulated, or kind than I am.

Catherine: Yeah, because that would interfere with attraction.

James: Right. And there's this experience where you meet someone who's significantly more developed, and there's just no attraction there.

Catherine: Or you could admire someone but think, "They're out of my league. I wouldn't want to let them too close because they're going to see what's going on inside me."

James: I had this experience in my twenties. There was a woman I'd liked when we were teens, and we met again in our twenties. I really liked her, but she said, "I used to like you and now I don't." I think she grew up more than I did over those years. She saw me as someone who was kind of stuck, which was true. She had moved on and I hadn't.

Catherine: A last thought about building your tolerance for taking off the mask: I think it's about tolerating the intensity of person-to-person, mind-to-mind contact. One way you can work on that is to give yourself experiences of spending time talking with somebody who can offer you more contact than you can tolerate right now — like a coach or a therapist. You want to give your brain time to map the experience that someone could see more of you and continue to mean well toward you, continue to be fair, continue to have compassion for you. That can actually help you build on it yourself. I think this is transmitted human to human. It's not something you can read in a book — you have to actually experience it.

James: I've been toying with the idea of writing a book, and I'm bumping up against exactly what you said. I don't know how to transmit this in a book. I barely know how to transmit it in person. I would love to find a way to teach a lot of people at once what we're talking about right now, but I'm not sure it's possible.

Catherine: Yeah. I don't think it can be done en masse at the level it can be done in small groups or person to person.

James: I've seen it done with a couple dozen people, and that's the best I've seen. If I imagine that group expanding to 50, 60, or 70, it seems like it's going to drop off because that level of contact becomes basically impossible.

Catherine: Right. It's how many human minds can you track at a time?

James: Exactly. I can maintain contact with 10 or 20 people, but can I really maintain contact with 50 at the same time? Probably not. Okay, should we end there?

Catherine: Yeah. Thanks, James.

James: Thank you, Catherine.