23. Introduction to Crucible Therapy with Catherine Roebuck
James Christensen: https://jamesmchristensen.com
Catherine Roebuck: https://catroebuck.com
Transcript
James: Why is this called Crucible therapy?
Catherine Roebuck: The crucible metaphor comes from metalworking. A crucible is a heat-proof container that you can put into a very hot fire in a forge. It can melt down metal, burn off impurities, and make the metal malleable so that you can form it into something different. In this metaphor, the crucible is your marriage—that's the container. The heat is the inevitable pressure of loving someone for a long time, of being in a committed relationship where you have to either grow or you're going to hurt each other over and over.
James: So the idea is, two people step into the crucible of marriage, which has nothing to do with a crucifix; it's not a religious idea. A crucible is just a container that can tolerate immense heat. So if I put two metals into a crucible and heat them, I can form an alloy. Or if I put a metal that has impurities into a crucible and heat it up, I can remove the impurities. The idea is that when two people step into a marriage, we're entering a crucible that will refine us and make us stronger if we approach it correctly. Is that right?
Catherine Roebuck: Yes, and it's an important point that it has nothing to do with the crucifix or with religion. This is really just a personal development theory.
James: People often ask me if it's a religious approach, which it's not. It's a great name, but most people have never heard of it.
Catherine Roebuck: Most people have some familiarity with the idea of differentiation, which is key to it, but they often think about it in a more limited way. People tend to think about differentiation as just growing away or apart, but it's not quite that. It's about becoming capable of being close to another person while staying true to yourself.
James: So I don't have to choose between being true to me and belonging to someone else.
Catherine Roebuck: Exactly. We all want both of those things, but they sometimes seem to be in contradiction. This is the classic problem people-pleasers have: they feel that being close to another person means they have to shift and mold themselves into who that person wants them to be. They end up giving up their sense of self and then, of course, resenting it.
James: So without differentiation, I end up choosing between compliance and defiance. If my wife wants me to do something, I feel like I either have to comply, even though I don't want to, or I have to fight back in some immature way. The third, differentiated way would be: I am going to hold onto who I am and what I want, and I'm also going to make room for what you want. But in the end, my decision is based on my own desires and values and on how much I care about you. I don't feel like I have to give up myself to be in a relationship with you. You get to make your own choices about whether you want to be in a relationship with me, but I don't feel compelled to do things just to make you happy.
Catherine Roebuck: Right. You might end up doing something that isn't your preference or that's really hard for you, but still be acting out of your own desire in the sense that you want to be with this person and you care about them. You want them to have more of what would make them happy, and you're willing to push yourself on that front. It's not the version where you only do things you're in the mood to do.
James: No, it's not. Another way to talk about it is as a way of having togetherness without giving up separateness. I can be my own person and still be together. I can be part of a relationship without giving up who I am at my core.
Catherine Roebuck: I really like that framing.
James: The next thing we wanted to talk about was self-validated intimacy, which is very closely tied to this. If I want to create intimacy in my relationship, I can reveal something about myself that might make my wife uncomfortable. The reason I would reveal that specific thing is that those are the things we hide. I've been married for a couple of decades, which means my wife already knows all the things about me that she really likes, because I don't hide those things. The things I hide are the things that she might not like so much. I'm very sensitive to her preferences and sensitivities, so I'm pretty good at masking and hiding things that might upset her, but that leads to a low-intimacy relationship. In a multi-decade marriage, the things I might hesitate to reveal are the things I know might not go over well or that she might not validate. Self-validated intimacy is revealing more of myself, even though what I reveal might not be validated by the other person.
Catherine Roebuck: Yes, and that's the act of having a self while being close to another person. You're willing to embody that, to reveal it. You're living with a sense of self, you're clear about it, and you're willing to show it. So, why don't people do that? What's so hard about it?
James: Do you have any examples of what that might look like?
Catherine Roebuck: It's anytime you take a position where you don't know in advance that your partner is going to agree. It could be anything from what car you want, to how you want to parent your children, or if you want to have a child. It could also be what you believe religiously. That's a big one for a lot of couples—taking their positions on religion or politics, knowing their partner doesn't share all of their views. It's being willing to be both open and real about who they are while also being close to and caring about this other person who doesn't see it the same way.
James: I think the single most common category is revealing to you what I think of you—showing you how I see you. Most of us are pretty good at pretending to see the other person the way they want to be seen, unless we're trying to get at them. But a lot of the time, most of us are presenting a view of the other person that is designed to appeal to them. We're reflecting back a false self-reflection.
Catherine Roebuck: I hadn't thought about that being the main way, but it is a big one. The other category that seems really big to me is just your preferences—being honest about what you want and what matters to you on anything where you can't act unilaterally.
James: One thing I've been experimenting with is asking couples to say the words, "I want you to," because it's so direct and unusual. I work with so many couples where they don't express their desires to each other at all. So I've been experimenting with this idea of saying it in the most direct way possible, which is, "I want you to start doing this," or "I want you to stop doing that." I think there's utility in going all the way to the most direct expression and then maybe softening it later. It's more pleasant to hear "I would like" than "I want." But if I'm working with someone who never expresses their desires collaboratively, I think there might be some utility in saying it in the most plain way possible.
Catherine Roebuck: Not exactly like that. I have people go from complaint to request, which is similar.
James: Can you explain what that means, to go from complaint to request?
Catherine Roebuck: It's often easier to know what you don't want and don't like than to come up with a positive. If your partner does something you don't like and you tell them, "Hey, I don't like that, don't do that anymore," they might stop, but they might do something else that feels the same way as a replacement. I think it's more effective and more intimate, in the sense of being self-revealing, to get clear for yourself about what it is that you want. It's often the opposite of what you're getting. If you have a partner who talks down to you, you could get mad and say, "You're so condescending." But you'd probably get more traction if you instead said something like, "I really want you to talk to me like we're on the same team." With most people, you're going to get more traction that way.
Another example that comes up with couples is kissing. It's really hard to work with feedback like, "I don't like how you kiss." It's much easier if you're willing to get clear about what you want and then directly ask for it, like, "I'd like it if you would go slower and be softer." Instead of leaving your partner fumbling in the dark, trying different wrong ways to get closer to you—and even picking fights is often a way of trying to get closer—you invite them into what you really want.
James: There's a certain vulnerability in expressing what I really want, because the closer I get to telling you exactly what I want, the more I'm facing the reality that you might not give it to me and that it's not my choice. So we tend to beat around the bush and hold onto a kind of plausible deniability, like, "Oh, I didn't really want that anyway." It's like holding onto the fantasy that the reason you're not giving it to me is that you just don't know. That's why I often tell people to say it in the simplest way possible. For example, if my wife is talking to me in an unkind way, I might say, "I don't want you to talk to me that way." I think there's virtue in saying things as simply as possible. If I add a qualifier like, "I think you're speaking to me unkindly," well, now the definition of "unkindly" is up for debate. But if I say, "I don't want you to talk to me how you're talking to me," there's nothing to debate. She doesn't have to change, obviously, but expressing desire is so powerful because I get to define what my desire is. It's pretty hard for someone to come back and say, "No, you don't really want that."
Catherine Roebuck: To me, this is the realm that adult love lives in: the realm of desire, of wanting, and of doing things for each other because you care about your own and the other person's desire. That's what love is—caring about what the other person wants for themselves. Short of that, I don't think it's love. It's incredibly vulnerable to face the reality of, "I really want this, I'll be sad if I don't get it, and I don't control whether I get it." As soon as I put a clear request out there, I have to face that I only get to choose how I'm going to handle myself, regardless of whether I get what I wanted. That's hard.
I think another reason this is hard for people is that a lot of parenting strategies use reward and punishment. To maneuver a child with reward and punishment, you're using your knowledge of what they want to change their behavior. If this is done by a parent who is perhaps not that mature and misuses this, kids will learn it's not a good idea to let their parents know exactly how much they want something, because it could then be withheld or taken away.
James: I never thought about that before, but that makes it so it's not in my best interest to reveal my desires to my parents.
Catherine Roebuck: Yes, depending on what kind of parents you have. Do you have parents who are likely to be withholding or to use that as leverage? If you do, you'll form a pattern of thinking, "If I reveal my desires to my spouse, they will also use this as leverage, and I don't want to be leveraged."
James: That's a beautiful thought.
Catherine Roebuck: So I see people who come from a lot of trauma having the most difficulty even knowing what they want, and then with sharing it.
James: You said something the other day that really stuck with me: that we never let go of the patterns that are already ingrained in our brains. I think that we just form new patterns that go alongside the old patterns, and now we have something new that we can do. That just really stuck with me and seems really true.
I joined a men's group a couple of years ago, and it's been so useful. I mostly listen, and it's an amazing opportunity for me to confront myself over and over on how judgmental I am. By nature, I am intensely, viciously judgmental, and I always have been. I use men's group as an opportunity to confront my own judgmental nature. When a man speaks, my instinct is to go into some sort of internal, silent judgment of him. I can look at that and ask, what is the other path?
This idea has been really useful. When I first became aware of how judgmental I was, I then became judgmental about myself—which is the same path, just with a different twist. But what I've learned to do now is to see myself being judgmental and approach that with compassion. I can imagine a parallel path and think, "Can I jump over to this other groove in my brain that I'm building?" I'm working on walking this new path, which is listening to another person with compassion and understanding, not judging them, not looking down on them, not criticizing them in my mind.
I was doing that for an hour last night, and it was a delightful, almost meditative experience. When I meditate on my breath, it's a non-judgmental notice and return. Notice I'm thinking, return to the breath. Last night was noticing my judgment and returning to compassion, over and over, probably 50 times. But I was doing it without judging myself. I would think, "Oh, there's me judging again. Okay, back to compassion." It was a delightful experience, and I left that men's group so grateful for having a safe place to practice this. It's the perfect place to notice what happens in my brain.
Catherine Roebuck: That's awesome. Part of what you're describing is the shift from, "I am judgmental" to "I have a judgmental pattern." It exists in your brain; it's wired in there. As you talked, you shifted from totally identifying with it to seeing it as one aspect of the way your brain works, and there are other ways it can work. While you were actively practicing, you were able to drop the judgment of yourself over and over. I heard Barbara Fairfield talk about that idea that we never get rid of our hard-wiring.
James: That makes so much sense. To me, it's reminiscent of myelination, the brain's process of reinforcing and hardening certain pathways. As a pathway in the brain gets myelinated, it becomes easier for the brain to follow that path. I don't know if myelination decreases over time if you use the pathway less, but I know that it can increase. I like this idea that I'm now myelinating a new pathway. Once I have a new, well-traveled pathway, it's easier to follow. But I don't have to be upset about falling back into the old pathway again. If I notice it, that's what matters—noticing what I'm doing, noticing that I'm in my pattern.
Catherine Roebuck: Right. I use the metaphor of roads. You start off with a paved highway, which is the conditioning that comes from your early life. These pathways are laid down in the first five years of life. That default path is there—it's smooth and easy to drive on. But there's also a field off to the side, a forest or a jungle. As you walk that new path over and over on purpose, you wear it down, and it gets wider and smoother. You can eventually pave it. Then you have two paved roads you can choose between. If you visit the original path less and less, eventually, it'll grow over. I do believe you get to a point where it's easier and more automatic to take the new path, but I still think the old one exists. If you get really flooded, overwhelmed, sick, or regressed, you can be kicked back in that direction.
James: You can also put up signposts to remind you there's a fork in the road. One way I do that is with questions I learned from Natalia, such as: "Does this come from the best in me?" "What impact am I having?" "What is my intention?" "Do I mean well?" They are very simple questions. With the old pathway in my brain, the answer to all those questions would be no. When I teach people these questions, it almost feels childish, but for me, they're really useful to just pause. Being aware of the pathways in my brain, I can put up a signpost to remind myself which way I want to go. That takes pausing. What we're talking about here is self-confrontation. In order for me to become a better person, I have to deal honestly with the person I am right now.
Catherine Roebuck: But why do you have to do it yourself? Why can't you get someone else to do this for you?
James: I think it's in the nature of living creatures to resist someone else trying to push them onto another path. I'm especially talking about these deeply internal processes. No one can sit in men's group with me while I'm thinking silent, judgmental thoughts. It has to be me. Also, I'm pretty good at hiding my intentions when I want to. I have been helped by people who've confronted me externally, but what they were leading me to was, "James, you need to do this for yourself."
Honestly, the most powerful example I've seen is people self-confronting in front of me. Hearing Natalia talk about her internal experience of ongoing, daily self-confrontation was really powerful because that's what I needed to know. It showed me how it actually works and normalized it. It's okay to face the constant temptation to treat people poorly. That was very liberating because I used to get pretty discouraged and would constantly look away from it, because I thought, "That's what a bad person would do." But the new perspective is, "No, this is what I do, and I'm not a bad person." I can normalize it and accept that it's okay to be this way, and I want to work on changing it. That's liberating to me.
Catherine Roebuck: As adults, we have to be in charge of ourselves. In the same way that no one else can make you take care of your body, no one can make you take care of your mind. You have to manage your own behavior. You're with yourself all the time, and you wouldn't put up with anybody else reminding you 50 times a day anyway. So it has to come from you. It's this ongoing process of being willing to look at yourself and ask, "Okay, was that fair of me? If I take a bird's-eye view, would I have a problem with what I'm saying, how I'm saying it, or the expression on my face?" It's trying to be real about what it's like for somebody to have you talk to them.
James: I love how you said "take a bird's-eye view." I often talk to people about imagining a camera on the different walls of the room and looking at the situation in three-dimensional space. I was just imagining if you took a drone and flew it around yourself, looking at yourself from all these different angles. It's really helpful. You're asking, "What was the expression on my face?" Taking that external viewpoint is powerful.
Catherine Roebuck: I like the idea of visualizing it as a drone you can fly all around. Self-confrontation is about taking responsibility for yourself and your own functioning. If you're going to do that, you have to be willing to look at yourself and be honest about what's there. It's hard to look at yourself, not just on a willingness level—it's actually hard for your brain to accurately track yourself. That's where it's helpful to have a partner, therapist, coach, or close friends who are willing to say, "Hey, here's what I see you doing right now, and I don't love it. I have some objections to it."
James: That's so powerful. We have a deeply ingrained culture of false reflection. I sometimes call it false validation, where I reflect back validation that doesn't represent what I really think of you. It's very ingrained in our culture and widely accepted. But there is a better way, which is learning how to tell you what I really think while making it clear that I'm on your side—because I actually am on your side. That's so hard to learn and get used to doing.
Catherine Roebuck: I think this is another reason self-confrontation matters so much. If we aren't willing to look at something in ourselves because we can't calm ourselves down about it, we're not going to be calm when other people show us an accurate picture of ourselves either. You end up taking out your difficulty integrating this thing about yourself on other people, getting on your partner because you're not willing to deal with it. The more you practice just dealing with the fact that you're a person who does some messed-up stuff sometimes—and can also hold real compassion for yourself while knowing that, taking accountability, and keep growing—the better. Don't be perfectionistic about it, because that's never kind. If you're being perfectionistic with yourself, you're not going to be kind to anyone else either.
James: The thing that helps me, which came from my therapist, is saying, "I'm a normal person who makes normal mistakes." It's so simple, but it's been so helpful to me. My brain, in contrast, goes to a dichotomy: I'm either perfect or I'm garbage. There's no room for making normal mistakes. I look at everybody else and think, "Oh yeah, they obviously make normal mistakes," and that's fine. But for some reason, for me, there's no room. I fall into this pit of despair and shame about being a horrible person. It's hard to describe; it's like a blackness.
Catherine Roebuck: Yes, and it's not a productive space when you're going into that shame spiral. It's really hard to work with yourself when that's going on. I really like that phrase, "I'm a normal person who makes normal mistakes." And "normal mistakes" is a really big range. Look around—people are getting a lot of stuff wrong all the time because living a human life is really hard, and none of us has done it before.
James: She offered that to me as a way to work past my fragility. For a while, she was talking to me a lot about fragility, wanting me to be more flexible and resilient because whenever I was criticized, I would just crumble. And it wasn't just that I would crumble; I would crumble and then do destructive things. I would start to hide the truth, twist reality, or portray myself as superior or innocent. I would do things that were difficult to work with. She was trying to help me move to a place where it could just be okay that I made a mistake. It sounds so silly talking about it, but it was really hard for me.
Catherine Roebuck: Yes, that shows how if you're operating in your own mind from this place of, "I'm either always doing great or I'm garbage," then anytime someone tries to talk to you about a problem with something you've done, you're going to slide into "I'm garbage." That makes it really difficult for people to talk to you about things they want you to do differently and for you to do anything differently. It's just so hard to operationalize from that place.
James: And I had this really impressive defense. I would put so much energy into proving that what they were saying was wrong, when maybe the thing I was being "accused" of was just being a normal person. It would just turn into, "It is not okay for me to be seen this way; I can't handle it." And that had to change.
Catherine Roebuck: Right, but the thing you're trying to prove is, "No, I'm not garbage." This is the whole idea in Crucible therapy: for most people, the best place to get pressured into dealing with this and becoming capable of handling it is a marriage. This is just a normal developmental process. People start in different places depending on their childhood and family, but everyone has real work to do on this. It's not easy.
I always visualize it as a mountain with a path spiraling around it. You move higher and higher, and theoretically, there is a top of the mountain where you're enlightened. I have a lot of influence from Buddhist traditions where enlightenment is a theoretical possibility, but I don't seem to get there. What seems to happen for me is I go round and round, and I am gaining elevation, but every time I look off the path, the view is pretty similar. It changes gradually over time, but it's really slow. That's that core conditioning for me. I feel like I do end up back in familiar places, and I'm not sure that will ever stop.
James: I've heard it described as a spiral because it's both an ascending path and a circular path at the same time. You can focus on the circularity: "I'm facing the same challenges over and over." I've struggled with anxious attachment for many years, and I'm always coming around the mountain again.
This happened a few days ago. My anxious attachment is very focused on my wife. She was at work, and I was expecting her to come home, but she stopped at Target and didn't get home until very late. Theoretically, I'm an adult, and I'm going to be okay. Realistically, I started to panic, which I hadn't done in a long time. It was just good old anxious attachment. I felt like I was coming around the mountain again, seeing the same marker. The spiral aspect of that is thinking, "Oh, my anxious attachment is here. I'm going to go for a run, and then I'll feel better." And I did.
So from one point of view, I was pretty disappointed to feel that panic. But from another point of view, I immediately knew that if I went for a run, I would be okay. And I was. I experienced this anxious attachment panic, dealt with it immediately, and was totally fine half an hour later. That's the idea that I am on an upward journey, but I'm also coming around to the same place on the mountain I've been to before. And it has been quite a while since my anxious attachment felt unworkable, which it used to all the time. It's still there, but it didn't really bother me that much. I even told my wife when she got home, "I'm having some anxious attachment tonight," and she was fine with it. I handled it better, and she handled it better, so it turned out to be okay. In years past, she would've gone into her own panic, like, "Oh, I failed, I'm a bad wife," when all she did was stop at Target on the way home. It wasn't that big of a deal.
