UNNAMED DISCONNECT !!!

It is difficult to sometimes answer a client’s questions, especially when it has nothing to do with their troubles, but more to do with how I fare as a counselor, listening to people’s woes day in and day out!
I wish I could tell them; my professional domain is separate from my personal one, but at times it does merge. A close friend of mine called in today after quite a while and we got chatting, and during the course of our conversation, she wanted my counselor to surface! How to handle a spouse who no longer seems to be actually bothered about how she feels, she wondered? Superficially they were getting along just fine; he was going about his life, she was going about hers. There had been an undercurrent of discord for sometime, but while earlier he would be willing to sit and talk things out, of late she had found that he was not even evincing an interest to even counter her queries or respond to them, let alone initiate heart to heart conversations. Functional communication was happening, not interpersonal ones. She was not able to understand how to handle this, according to her, utter passivity and nonchalance when it came to understanding her need for emotional sustenance.
I guess this does happen in very close relationships, where you have not been really very honest with each other. The connect seems to start disconnecting! It is not being taken for granted; it is just that one person in the relationship may start feeling the need for a change in the way he or she may look at issues, which may not be the same perspective the partner has. This change does happen naturally, and I guess neither of them are to be blamed. I guess it has got more to do with the growth and the way individuals evolve over a period of time, and sometimes this intrapersonal evolving does surface as distance in what would otherwise seem to be a very harmonious relationship.
Then how do we get around resolving this constant conflict? It is all the more difficult, since the conflict is not very overt either. Well, one way out would be honest communication. Whether the resultant environment is to the satisfaction of both the parties involved, at least the connect is reestablished, and the hurt person has the satisfaction of knowing that the thoughts have been conveyed. Resort to electronic means of communication if need be: the mail, the chat rooms etc. I remember seeing a movie where total disconnect sets in between the partners and the wife is feeling extremely lonely. For want of anything better to do, she gets to chatting with a stranger and finds that she is really able to interact with him and they seem to understand each others’ feelings so well. Towards the end of the movie, they decide to meet, both with a sense of guilt and apprehension. Yeah you guessed right. The stranger was her husband! In the midst of his climbing up the corporate ladder, he too had started missing companionship and did not know how to connect back to his wife.
What resulted was a redefining of their relationship, a better understanding, and a greater bond. Admittedly, it was a movie but then don’t they say that somewhere the lines between fiction and reality gets blurred???
Mohana Narayanan
January 19,2011