MS. STEAD SELLERS: Hello, and welcome to Washington Post Live. I’m Frances Stead Sellers, a senior writer here at The Washington Post.
Today we're continuing with our Well+Being series, and I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Orna Guralnik. She is a clinical psychologist, a psychoanalyst, and the host, as many of you will know, of the hit Showtime show, "Couples Therapy."
Dr. Orna Guralnik, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live.
DR. GURALNIK: If I'm supposed to be hearing you, I can't hear a thing.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I think we have a little technical problem with sound here, so we'll just wait for a moment while that picks up. Thanks for your patience in waiting.
DR. GURALNIK: If any of you can hear me, I can't hear a thing.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: We will be back in a second. Thanks to your patience. We just have a small technical problem. We're settling right now. Thank you.
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MS. STEAD SELLERS: I'm delighted again to welcome Dr. Orna Guralnik. Dr. Guralnik, a very warm welcome to Washington Post Live and apologies for that slight hitch.
DR. GURALNIK: Thank you. Thank you. Good to join you.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: We're delighted to have you, and I am so curious about how this show got off the ground to start with. Tell me how it began and whether you had any reservations, perhaps ethical ones or otherwise.
DR. GURALNIK: Absolutely. It was the brainchild of Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg. They came up--they've been cooking this idea for a while, not sure if it's going to work or not, and it was kind of a documentarian's experiment.
And they approached me through the Psychoanalytic Institute I belong to. I graduated from that institute. I teach there, and they were interviewing therapists and somehow got to me through my institute. And I didn't plan on doing it. I just thought, okay, I have some background in film. I mean, as a college student, I studied film, and I thought maybe I'll consult to them. And we started talking, and the idea sounded like terrific, very out there, edgy and risky, but terrific if they could pull it off. And we really hit it off. We--our conversations were very exciting. The vision they had was exciting, and they--like true documentarians, they had the capacity to somehow invite me into this unusual world of documentary filmmaking and kind of in a way challenged me to give it a try.
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MS. STEAD SELLERS: You refer to it as "documentary filmmaking." How is it not reality TV? What's the difference in your mind there?
DR. GURALNIK: To be completely honest, I don't know anything about reality TV. I've never watched reality TV, not even one show. So I would assume that the way it's different is that there's no attempt to influence what's going on. The cameras and the directors and the editors, they're kind of sitting back and letting just the work unfold, and there's no way trying to influence. The filmmakers are not trying to influence. They're just trying to capture what goes on.
And then we've also had the incredible good fortune that the network that has hosted our show has not tried to intervene in any way. It's really about sort of letting the work unfold and trying to capture it in the most honest way possible. So I assume that's why it's documentary and not reality.
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MS. STEAD SELLERS: Still, your clients are on television, and does it have any impact from your perspective on how they do, negative or otherwise? They come in knowing that they're going to be on camera.
DR. GURALNIK: Right. It definitely--yeah, it definitely has an influence, and to be clear, we're--with every season that we make, we're learning more about the impact it has. So in the beginning, we didn't know what kind of impact it's going to have and if it's at all possible to do the work, but it is. We learned to just engage in the work and really focus in on what's going on and let the cameras, in a way, slide away. So in that sense, it doesn't have that much of an impact, but it--in a more subtle way, I think it does have quite a profound impact in the sense that everyone feels like the work is documented. And there's a certain kind of call to presence, call to being present in a way that a regular session doesn't always have. In a regular session, you feel like, wow, this session, I didn't really feel like showing up, but there's always another session. There's no end in sight. But the camera kind of calls for everyone to really show up.
I mean, you might feel that in your own work. I mean, there's a way in which the camera demands presence. So in that sense, it's therapy on steroids.
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[Laughter]
MS. STEAD SELLERS: You're currently in the third season. You have this huge audience. It's been an enormous success. How do you explain that? Are you doing therapy now to the masses through this medium?
DR. GURALNIK: I think--I mean, we've all been kind of stunned by the success of it and by the appreciation that we've received, both us and the couples that participated. Like, they get a lot of love from the world.
I think one way that I've explained it to myself--and we've been talking about it here in the team--is that, you know, one of the things that therapy really relies on is a certain kind of commitment and search for truth. It doesn't work if you're not really after the truth, and I think that's something that is difficult for us nowadays as a culture to find and to know how to locate what is true.
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It's a complicated topic, and going deeper, deeper into like the subjective truth between two people, like to be able to work towards honesty and sometimes brutal honesty, I think it's very refreshing nowadays. So...
MS. STEAD SELLERS: You base your approach on something called "systems theory," and I wondered if you could help me understand that and our audience understand it.
DR. GURALNIK: Sure. My approach, I'm trained both in psychoanalysis and in systems theory. Psychoanalysis, I think people kind of know what it is. We think about the unconscious, the way the past influences the present, trauma.
Systems--the systems approach means that I look at the couple. When a couple presents for treatment, I look at the couple as the unit which I'm treating. So it's not only about treating each individual what they need, how they bring their past into the present. It's also what the couple as a unit needs and how they create certain kind of patterns that have a function for the unit rather than for each individual.
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So for example, you know, I just--I'm on set right now. So I just let a couple go, and one of them was saying, "Yeah, but how--if I keep pressing my partner to do this, that will be better for me or that will be better for our son?" and I say to them, "That might be true, but it's not going to be better for the marriage as a whole, for the unit as a whole." And that's a different way of understanding what the dynamic is serving.
Another way to think about a system is if you think about a family, family system, a teenager can show up with a lot of behavioral, acting-out problems, and if you address only the issue for the teenager herself or himself, you might miss the fact that the teenager is presenting those problems in an attempt to address something between the parents and the family system as a whole.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I guess those last two responses make me want to ask you a little bit more about the search for truth and the system when I'm thinking about society more broadly and our very frayed society now. How do you approach that through therapy, or is that even part of it? Is it just the couple or the family as the unit, or are we talking about a bigger unit that is we all, many of us believe struggling right now?
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DR. GURALNIK: I love that you asked that. Thank you for asking that question.
Share this articleShareYeah, huge problem, and I can answer it from a few different angles. I mean, one thing is we actually do have a hope that what we're doing with the show is trying to address a larger splitting that we have in our society and struggles with truth that we're suffering from as a culture and how to address that.
Many, many things one can say about it, but if I had to say a few short things and borrow from the language of couples work to how I imagine a society could address its issues, it would be, first of all, to try to be more mindful of the ways in which we other, meaning the ways in which we take parts of ourselves that we don't like or that we don't want to own, project them, project onto our partner or project them onto a part of society, and then treat that other as if they're the enemy, rather than be more honest with oneself about parts of ourselves that we struggle with and try to understand our partner as reflecting to us parts of ourself.
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MS. STEAD SELLERS: You just wrote a very interesting piece about how the language of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter had come into the therapy you performed. Can you talk to me a little bit more about that linkage and how the language of those movements has maybe surfaced differences or problems in people's marriages in a different way?
DR. GURALNIK: Yeah.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: And not marriages. Relationships, I guess I meant to ask.
DR. GURALNIK: Yeah. Marriages, relationships. Yeah, that's kind of a continuation of what you were asking me before. I think each relationship, each marriage, each family, us as individuals, we are not discrete units. We are part of the collective to which we belong, the ideologies that circulate in the collective, the themes that the collective is busy with, and I think the--I mean, we've had like a resurgence of very, very powerful social justice movements in the last few years, I mean, that were exacerbated to a great deal by the pandemic and by all of us being kind of cooped up and the many issues that came up with that.
But we are part of what's going on in society, and the Black Lives Matter, in particular, has had like a profound influence on all of us, and for some of us, it's been a blessing like in terms of like us being able to really take account of the place from which we're operating, the privilege from which we're operating, and for some of us, it's been like a great threat to what we hold dear and what we could lose if we indeed stop othering.
But all of those questions are relevant to each tiny little unit. The same questions come up between two people when they're trying to get along. They're not different.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Oh, no. I was so struck by your covid special, and I was just looking at it recently, and I thought the pandemic had almost--and I don't mean to belittle anything, but it had almost done the job for you in terms of surfacing these concerns. Am I right in that feeling, and that you actually talked a little bit more about your own otherness in some of this, about your background? There's a transformation, right?
DR. GURALNIK: Absolutely. Yeah, the pandemic, I mean, it's been--I still keep processing it now when I'm working with people and we're kind of back to at least somewhat more normal functioning. The pandemic has been huge. It's been kind of a boiling melting pot for lots of issues to surface, for us to look at it. We were also kind of cooped up at home and locked down, and we have to look at things that we didn't want to look at before, not to mention that certain issues that have been more hidden, like certain differences between us--and again, I have to reiterate the issue of privilege has been like really in our face. And that has been a blessing. I mean, it's been a lot of suffering that's been exposed, but it's also been a blessing in terms of removing a certain veil on what's happening both in society and between families and individuals and who's alone and who's supported.
Yeah, it's been profound, and it's forced me to, in a way, come out of hiding the way, as psychologists and psychoanalysts, we can sometimes hide. There's a way in which we were all forced into a shared arena.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So I'm not the only person who gets to ask you questions, and we have audience questions coming in, including one from Judy Moore in Virginia. And this is what Judy asks: How can one prevent the transmission of generational trauma?
DR. GURALNIK: Wow. That is a big question that one spends, you know, a long treatment exploring many books and theses written about this. But if I had to say--if I had to say something about that, it would be pausing and finding ways to formulate what the previous generation didn't have the bandwidth or the capacity to formulate. The more we can bring into mindfulness, into thought, into feeling, things that happened in the past--and usually, with transgenerational trauma, we're talking about big events that happened in the past--the more we can give it thought, lend some mind space to what happened, the less we will need to transmit and, you know¸ kick the can down the road.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Let me ask you a sort of rightly question because I deal with this a lot. You are in a room dealing with people who approach issues from their own perspective, and how do you figure out what's really going on when you have two essentially, potentially unreliable narrators in the room? How do you figure out the truth or get them to?
DR. GURALNIK: Right. It's a good question. I think what I do--I mean, tactically, what I do is I try to join people when they speak and try to really understand people on their own terms, and it's a certain kind of migration into the world of another, as much as I can, and try to really hear it. And then I do the same for the other person. I really try to imagine what it's like for them as much as I can, immerse myself in their experience on their terms. And I kind of saturate myself with that, and then I move back and I listen to the other person and do the same thing and move back.
And it's kind of this amazing thing that we humans are capable of, but when we do that, when we leave the comfort of our own perspective and we migrate into someone else's experience, lots of things open up. There's a certain kind of creative space that opens up that makes it possible for new things to emerge, and the truth then kind of somehow miraculously bubbles up.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Let's take a look at you in action in a clip that I think is particularly telling, and I think it shows you coming in and then moving out back. But let's take a look.
[Video players]
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So without getting into personal details about that case, tell me about your attention to that word "need," which is so striking in the narration.
DR. GURALNIK: Yeah. It's one of the things that a psychoanalyst learns to do. It becomes kind of second nature, which is that we listen to language in a particular way. There are certain words that they just hit you. As an analyst, when you--when you hear them, they hit you as they're like little nuggets that--that have a root in something that has some kind of unconscious meaning.
And when Christine was talking about need, that word just--I went--indeed, like she was saying, I kind of joined in with her, and that word stood out for me as a word packed with meaning. And indeed, it had a lot of history of their relationship in it, just that word.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: They are talking about polyamory. I believe from numbers that it's on the rise. I guess it's not your role to judge, but do you think that's a good thing? And do you have advice for couples who are navigating their way through it?
DR. GURALNIK: Oh, I definitely don't--I'm not a judge at all, and I'm--part of this change in the culture in terms of like I'm seeing indeed more and more people come into my office like questioning many things about this typical, let's say, heteronormative structure of relationships. And I think, in a big way, the jury is definitely out as to what works nowadays for people.
But I'm in awe of people's attempts to experiment and try out new things. So I don't have a general response to is polyamory good and what's the way to do it. My general questions as an analyst is, what's the function of it? What's--what need does it address? Is it responding to a certain need, or is it a distraction from something else? Is it an attempt to find a language to speak to something that couldn't be said before? I just have questions.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So let's get to another audience question. This comes from John Behring in California, and John asked a big question: How do we keep our marriage fresh and together after 48 years?
DR. GURALNIK: Sweet. Very sweet. You know, it goes back to what we were saying just a little earlier. I think the way a marriage keeps alive is when the two people can keep making room for their partner's otherness, change difference. When there's some--when there's a certain kind of space for surprise, that remains between two people.
Now, of course, a long-term marriage also provides other things like safety and familiarity and belonging, but I think there needs to be some room for, for lack of a better word, surprise in terms of allowing another person to show up with their newness and with how they change which--
MS. STEAD SELLERS: I wanted to ask you--yeah. Right. Change brings things--a freshen thing, and he's asking you about a fresh--freshening a relationship.
Another thing that changes a relationship a lot is children, and we're also seeing a rise in childlessness. And again, I'd love you to help me think through what that trend means and the very different ways people have children these days through adoption, surrogacy, and all sorts of other means of creating families.
DR. GURALNIK: Yeah, great question. Rich with so much to say about that.
I think one of the things that has really lit up the question of whether to have children is the climate catastrophe that is coming our way fast, and I think younger people are less dissociated about it, and they take that into account. So there's a certain kind of feeling about the future that is very different for young people that at least people of my generation were spared. So the future looks different for younger people.
In addition, because of many social movements--feminism, queerness, the different ideas of otherness that race theory has brought, and the new technologies that make it possible to form families differently--sorry--and actually the trans movement as well. So all these like normative way of imagining gender, relationships, family structures have been kind of opened up for questioning, and people are rethinking. And if you--if all of that is open and then you have the climate catastrophe coming and, in a way, shortening the future, then the question of whether to have kids and how to have kids is a very different question nowadays.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Orna, I want to--we're getting close to the end, and I want to finish with a big question, and that is really about accessibility. And we know that in this country, there's a mental health crisis, and we watched, indeed, the privilege of people who are able to devote time and resources to spending an hour or so with you and unlocking their own problems. But how should we be thinking about this mental health crisis, and how should people get access to the kind of help they need to deal with relationships and all the other issues that are making life so very difficult today?
DR. GURALNIK: Yeah, a great question, really great question.
A few things. I'll actually say two things. I mean, one thing is that I can tell you that, for example, psychoanalytic training institutes are thinking about this matter very, very seriously and thinking about how to introduce community psychoanalysis into--both into training and sort of make more headway in the public in terms of finding different ways to offer what we have to offer to the public. And our show is one of the many ways we're trying to do that, but really to make psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic thinking much more available, we'd have to get through the bureaucracy of managed care and the way the health care system in this society is structured and which ties to the other thing I wanted to say, which is that the mental health crisis is not a thing on its own. It's an expression of what's happening in this society. It's dealing with it only on the level of mental health is missing the big picture, which is that, for example, teenagers nowadays are responding to what's happening in society, I mean, whether it's like climate crisis coming their way or the incredible divisions in terms of like the way wealth is distributed in this country and the hopelessness about like being able to tackle that. That's all contributing to the mental health crisis, and really to put it only on the level of like how mental health--the mental health profession is dealing with it is really kind of closing our eyes to what's the factor contributing.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Orna, as a last question, it really brings me back to the beginning and what I was asking you at the top, and that is, are you getting any sense that what you are doing through this show is a form of community psychoanalysis or a way of helping people psychologically, even if it just gives them a sense of what going to a therapist is like?
DR. GURALNIK: Well, that is absolutely my hope and our whole team's hope is that we're doing that, and from the letters we're getting from all over the country and all over the world telling us that we're making a real difference, I'd like to believe it's true. It's not enough, but it's something.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: Let's hope it's true. Dr. Orna Guralnik, thank you so much for joining me here on Washington Post Live.
DR. GURALNIK: Thank you so much.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: That's all we have time for today. I wish we could have asked more questions. I had plenty.
You know where to find future programming from Washington Post Live on WashingtonPostLive.com. We have great shows coming up.
I'm Frances Stead Sellers. Thank you for joining us.
[End recorded session]
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