The Courage to Confront

I’m nearly an hour into my first session with a couple when I interrupt the wife. “Wait a minute,” I say. “You’re screaming at him in front of everyone as you’re about to board a plane? What led up to that?”

She covers her face and sobs.

“I know it’s wrong, but he absolutely refuses to discuss anything! It’s been so many years of him shutting down and ignoring issues in our household, and I just can’t go on like this anymore!”

After listening to both partners share what they think is the main problem in their relationship, it’s become quite clear to me that while the wife has been acting out her anger and frustration in some pretty boundaryless ways, it’s actually the husband’s stance—walled off and grandiose—that’s at the heart of their issues.

“We have a good life,” he says, his tone flat. “Why can’t she just be nice and enjoy our life together? I don’t want to fight.” As he says this, I notice his jaw is set and his arms are crossed. There’s an absence of warmth and compassion in his face and body. His words say he doesn’t want to fight, and yet his energy is fighting.

The husband, I learn, has been dismissive, minimizing, argumentative, and self-focused. He’s failed to set appropriate limits with his adult son, who has lived with them without paying rent or contributing financially to household bills. His son has backed over her freshly planted flowers with his truck and made no offer to pay for the damages. He leaves messes for the wife—his stepmom—to clean up. When she has tried to share these issues with her husband, he downplays his son’s actions or tells her, “That’s between y’all. I’m not getting in the middle of it.”

It’s enough to make anyone want to tear their hair out and scream at him in frustration. And that’s exactly what his wife has done—scream at him. A lot. Once you understand the context, the scene at the airport makes sense. I don’t condone the wife’s behavior, but I get it! And now the husband has stubbornly dug his heels into his position as the angry, entitled, self-righteous victim of her reactive behavior. Oh boy….

As I ponder my next move, I remind myself that as a certified Relational Life therapist, I’ve been trained to speak truth to power—to confront the more grandiose partner (called “the blatant”) and take sides with the disempowered one (“the latent”). Terry Real, the founder of Relational Life Therapy, has taught me to do this by joining through the truth and waking the grandiose partner up to how their behaviors are perpetuating the exact dynamic they’re complaining about.

However, swirling in my mind alongside my clinical training, is my experience as a 45-year-old Mexican -American woman living in South Texas. This man I’m about to confront is more than 10 years older than me, white, and living in a rural town known to be largely conservative.

Not only that, the cultural backdrop of this session is Trump’s America. ICE is targeting Latino immigrants in my community, carrying out raids and detaining people in an attempt to identify and deport undocumented people. People who look just like me. People with whom I have a shared ancestry and culture. People who’ve been demonized, criminalized, and stripped of their humanity. People who are being told they don’t belong in this country. Right now, I’m carrying this reality in my body alongside my clinical training. And the man I’m about to challenge is, in every way that would have mattered to my grandparents, exactly the kind of man my family doesn’t cross.

To help move this couple out of their shared misery and into shared intimacy, I know what I need to do. But what I need to do as a clinician is the exact opposite of what I need to do to keep this white man from blowing up at me. For a moment, I feel these two contradictory pulls in my chest.

And as if the pressure of that isn’t enough, this session is also being live-streamed to hundreds of RLT practitioners and trainees as a real-time demonstration of the model. They know as well as I do that the next powerful move entails confronting this man and waking him up to his bad behavior. I can’t wimp out now.

I look down at my notes, close my eyes, and take a breath, allowing the silence to fill the space between us. Am I really going to speak up and tell this man the truth in front of his wife and all these other people?

I smile internally. Damn right I am.

Little Brown Girl

In the ’80s and ’90s, long before this counseling session, I lived in a town on the Texas Gulf Coast called Corpus Christi, home of Whataburger (iykyk). Depending on your generation, you might know it as both Farrah Fawcett and Eva Longoria’s hometown. For me, it will always be the hometown of Selena, the slain Tejano singer who managed, in her short 23 years of life, to change an entire industry, inspire millions of Latinos around the world, and leave a legacy that extended far beyond her music career.

My grandparents owned their own business—still do, as a matter of fact—and my dad worked alongside them. But in the early years, they’d tell customers they were “just the workers” because in the ’60s white people wouldn’t support a business owned by Mexicans. They feared that taking up their authority as shop owners would anger their white patrons, or at least inspire distrust. So they stayed silent to survive.

I should mention that my grandparents always referred to themselves—and to us, their children and grandchildren—as Mexican, despite being born in the US. In fact, several generations before me were US-born, making us full-fledged, natural-born citizens. We’re Americans. But it always seemed like the adults in my family felt more connected to their cultural and ethnic community than to the community around them. Maybe, despite loving this country, they never truly felt accepted as Americans. It’s only in the last 10 years that I’ve begun to identify as Mexican-American myself, as a way of embracing the multidimensional aspect of my identity.

While I learned from my grandparents that telling white people what they wanted to hear was a way to avoid incurring their anger and mistrust, I also learned it was important to be strong and stand up for yourself. Strength, resilience, and not taking any shit from anyone were survival strategies, too. So growing up, I fluctuated between accommodating and dominating. While being a “fiery Latina” is a trope, it was one I could live with. Being a fighter felt powerful. It was admired and reinforced in my family and in my Latino community. When I moved into accommodation, I felt small, powerless, and scared.

Years later, during my RLT therapist training, Terry Real told me, “You saw that you could either be the hammer or the nail. You chose to be the hammer.” That changed everything for me. I walked into that training wanting to become a better couples therapist, and I walked out with a complete reset on how I’d been approaching intimacy. It was the first day of my own relational recovery.

In the coming months and years, I learned about soft, loving power, the kind that allows you to stand in your own truth and advocate for yourself while staying connected, that allows you to communicate authentically without sacrificing the relationship. Soft power showed me how to assert the I without losing the thread of connection to the we.

Fierce intimacy, I discovered, began with remembering love and holding myself and others in warm regard. It required me to get off the seesaw of accommodation/domination and stand firmly in my healthy self-esteem. I began cultivating a more complex internal boundary system that gave me agency over what I allowed in or kept out. I also got better at sitting with big emotions, difficult conversations, and tension without reflexively yielding or controling.

I’ll never forget the first time I exercised soft power in my own relationship with my husband. A dynamic was playing out the same way it had a thousand times before. He did something I didn’t like. I got loud and demanding and told him he was doing it all wrong. He went cold and silent, shutting himself off from me completely. But this time, instead of continuing to escalate, I took a deep breath. I remembered that I loved the man in front of me dearly and that I’d vowed to cherish him.

“I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that,“ I said. “I’d like to talk about this if you’re willing, but I don’t want to fight with you. I love you. Can I start over?”

His shoulders relaxed and his eyes met mine. “That would be great,” he said.

Finding my relational voice in my marriage gave me confidence to try this in sessions with clients. I could relate to them as a fellow traveler, rather than as some all-knowing, perfectly-attuned-at-all-times relational expert.

“Listen,” I’d say. “I’ve been where you are, fighting to get control or over-accommodating to avoid the stress of conflict. It will protect your ego in the moment, but it will cost you your marriage over time. I learned a better way, and I can teach that to you if you’ll let me. What do you say?”

And like all healing, my relational recovery deepened my connection to a larger community. I found and confided in mentors, colleagues, and friends. Some offered embodied examples of what it looked like to use a healthy, relational voice. Others offered encouragement and support when I felt myself retreating into a smaller version of myself. Because like all recovery journeys, mine is subject to relapses. And on a bad day, I can still hear a voice in my head whispering an old narrative: You’re just a little brown girl from South Texas. What do you know?

When I shared this story with a childhood friend, herself a “little brown girl” who grew up in Corpus Christi, she said without hesitation, “Oh yeah? You’re just a little brown girl from South Texas? Well, so was Selena.”

Speaking the Truth with Love

I think of that now as I look up from my notes and make direct eye contact with my white, male client. “Can I be direct with you?” I ask.

“Yeah. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” he replies with a shrug and an air of sarcasm.

“Alright,” I calmly tell him. “Take a breath because this might sting a little.” He does. “As I see it, you’ve been incredibly dismissive, unsympathetic, and minimizing of your wife’s experience,“ I begin. “You’ve indulged your son far too long and have contributed to your wife and son’s failing relationship by neglecting to set reasonable limits with him. After years of this, she’s fed up and angry and acting out that resentment by yelling at you. And the more she yells, the more you shut her down. This is eating up all the love and care between the two of you.”

I pause to let these words sink in. Then I ask for confirmation. “Do I have that right?”

He stares me dead in the eye. I don’t flinch. I take a deep breath and tilt my head a bit. I wait for him to speak as the silence stretches between us. He opens his mouth and shuts it quickly. Finally, he says, “Yeah, you’re 100 percent right.”

There’s a softness in his voice that I haven’t heard yet. The energy shifts. His wife, surprised, whips her head up to look at him. Then she turns to look at me and begins to cry softly. Her energy has also shifted. The palpable despair she carried into the session has transformed into something lighter: hope.

Healing my self-esteem and cultivating healthy boundaries were absolutely necessary so that I could speak truth to power. Because you can’t speak truth to power from a one-down, over-accommodating place. You can’t do it from a one-up stance of domination and control, either. You can only do it from a place of “same-as.” My worth is the same as your worth. I’m no better and no worse than you or anyone else on the planet. It’s not about bravado or grandiosity. It’s about choosing to take the risk of authenticity and sit in the vulnerability of honest sharing. This man took in what I had to say not because I was right and out-argued him, but because I was intimate with him. And it felt good.

From a much softer, more vulnerable place, the husband says, “I know I build walls. And I’ve let my wife in more than anybody else. But when she yells at me, I don’t know what else to do, so I put that wall right back up.” He takes off his glasses and wipes away tears with his t-shirt. “It’s lonely behind those walls,” he adds.

I smile internally. Now we’re getting somewhere.