The Gentle Double

HAVE YOU EVER had the experience of being really angry, totally ‘losing it,’ flying off the handle at someone and yet, at the same time, part of you seems to be standing off to one side, watching the whole performance?

Since several different areas of the brain are involved in our reactions to emotional stresses, perhaps this common experience of being in a rage and at the same time calmly watching ourselves being in a rage is simply our own inner perception of two brain areas working side by side.

As a therapist with couples, I found it very useful to focus on this apparent ‘split.’ Most people are able to develop it with a little practice, even if they haven’t been aware of it before. Once we know how to split in this way, we can make good use of it.

The main reason couples find it so difficult to work through conflict is that when a fight occurs, each person is so busy defending his or her own position that neither has time or willingness to sit quietly and really listen to the other, to get inside the skin of the other, appreciate how he or she really feels, to ‘walk a mile in the moccasins’ of the partner. We may listen with half an ear, but even as we listen, all our energy and thoughts are moving towards our next reply.

This is why couple counseling is often so effective. A good counselor will make sure that couples really listen fully to each other, something they find it so hard to do at home.

One of my techniques has often been to invite couples to swap seats and ‘replay’ their arguments from each others' points of view, as though they were actors in a play and the director had asked them to exchange roles. This is amazingly effective. And the reason it works so well is that it tricks each player into seeing things through the eyes of the other, often for the first time. However, we don’t necessarily need a counselor in order to find ways of seeing each other's point of view. We can train ourselves to do it.

Once my opponent and I can truly see things from each other's point of view, even though those points of view might be very different—or completely opposite— conflict begins to shift. That deepened understanding enables our energies to move away from self-defense, towards co-operative resolution of the problems before us, whatever they might be. And the more often we are able to do this, the deeper the bonds of love become. Jordan and Margaret Paul call this ‘replacing the intention to protect with the intention to learn.’

I have found that for many couples it is surprisingly easy to start listening to each other fully once they have mastered the knack of splitting the anger process off from the listening/learning process. This trick involves temporarily splitting ourselves in two, creating what I like to call the Gentle Double. We don't have to stop being mad. We simply have to become two people—the mad one and the curious, gentle one—and let the curious, gentle one take over for a while. Like good cop/bad cop.

Imagine your partner is saying or doing something that is making you really angry . You feel your rage boiling up inside. You are summoning up arguments in your mind with the speed of a general mobilizing an army. You may feel like hurling insults—or dishes—or screaming or flouncing out of the room. Now imagine yourself standing back from that process, just a tiny bit, watching it as it happens, like watching a video.
In that moment, you have become your own ‘double.’ This double is not mad—just curious, interested to see what will happen next.

Here is the crucial moment. It is as though you were able to press the ‘pause’ button on the anger process. You still feel angry, and you still have a million darts you are itching to throw, but for once you are going to put all of that ‘on hold’ as it were, just for a few minutes, while your Gentle Double (the ‘good cop’) takes over. It is important, at this point, to promise yourself that there will be the opportunity, later, to put forward your argument, fully and completely. Silently tell the angry one, "Your turn will come ." We all know how to wait, to take turns. We learned it in kindergarten, right? So your angry self must wait while you employ your Gentle Double to interview your partner and find out what is really happening inside his or her head.

This is why it is important to be gentle. When you are gentle, your partner will gradually calm down and start to open up about what is really going on. You may even find, as this gentle probing and allowing process continues, that the real issue deep underneath the anger is something else entirely. Listen, for example, to this dialogue between Steven and Jane.

Steven: (flinging a book down on the table) "You are damn well wrong and I can prove it!"

Jane: "Quit yelling at me!"

Steven: "Well you piss me off with your know-all habits. If you don’t know something, why do you always have to make out that you do”?

Jane is now feeling not only hurt, but indignant. This sort of argument has happened before, many times. She starts to defend herself, opening her mouth to say “I DON’T always make out that I know things, that is unfair…" etc. But she stops herself. She sets aside all her reactions for now and switches into her Gentle Double.

Jane: (quietly) "So it seems to you I always like to make out I’m an expert, is that what you’re saying?"

Steven: "EXACTLY! And I am sick of it. You do it constantly."

Jane: "Do I really do it that much? I didn’t realize it was that bad."

Steven: "Well you do it a lot. Perhaps not all the time."

Jane: "I wonder why I do it. I’ll have to think about that. Maybe you could help me figure it out. And ‘ld really like to figure out why it makes you so very mad. I guess it must be a pretty annoying habit. But you seem to get more than usually mad about it. Really over the top mad, sometimes. Is there any special reason for that?"

Steven (thinking) "Oh I guess maybe it’s that you remind me of my Dad. He was like that. Whatever I said, he’d always correct me or contradict me. He always wanted to make out like he knew best about everything."

Jane: "That would be difficult for a kid to cope with."

Steven: "Yes it was. Oh look, I'm sorry. You aren’t like him at all really. It's just that I’m really sensitive to that stuff."

Jane: "Yeah, of course. Anyone would be. Steve, I’d like to talk for a minute about my side of it now, OK?"

Steven: "Sure"

Jane: "I felt very hurt and abused when you yelled at me. It may be you have a point, and maybe I do act a but superior at times (though I certainly don’t intend to) but it’s hard for me to acknowledge it when you stomp around and yell…"

Using her Gentle Double to interview Steven, Jane has discovered deeper roots to the problem. She now understands him better. She also finds that a lot of her anger, while it was ‘on hold’ has now dissipated. She is keeping her promise to her angry self to let it have its say. However, now she can talk about the anger without actually splashing it around. She is even able to face the possibility that Steven may have a point. Perhaps she does come on like a bit of a know-all at times. Perhaps she knows this deep down and feels guilty about it and that is why she gets so defensive when he accuses her of it. In being gentle, and encouraging Steven to be open, she finds herself becoming willing to allow more of her own vulnerability to show. It is now time for her—maybe with Steven's assistance, if he can be gentle too—to explore the roots of her own issue. Chances are, it, too, has its origins in childhood and in relationships with parents and/or siblings. Most such issues do.

So try out your Gentle Double next time you get into a fight. You may find it changes the whole boring routine into something much more interesting and useful—and loving.

And here are two really useful books on dealing with couple conflict:
'Do I Have to Give Up Me to Be Loved by You?' by Jordan & Margaret Paul
'Taking the War Out of Our Words' by Sharon Ellison