Marital Jazz - Finding a Couple's Language

As with all postings, materiel changes to any descriptions of clients are made to protect their privacy.

I've been working with Hank and Mary for about a year.  They often struggle due to the confluence of a many challenges between them: diabetes, depression, ADHD, and a history of verbal fights that can be pretty sharp.  Divorce has been in the air, more, I believe, as a signal of desperation than intent.  When they're both calm, they genuinely express their love for one another.  And this has gone on for decades.

After one of their tougher disagreements - they didn't speak much for a couple of weeks following a disagreement on how to manage their business - they came in having reached the predictably calm after the storm state in their marital music. The atmosphere between them was soft and caring, unlike the last meeting we had when they were in the middle of their business argument.  So I made an observation, drawing on their mutual love of jazz - not that I'm a big jazz guy, my tastes go much more towards classical and classic folk, rock, blues - but I know enough about music and jazz to through around a few comments.

Hank and Mary riff back and forth with one another all the time on themes of her sense of guilt and responsibility - honed at the feet of her critical parents - and his accommodation of her penchant to feel guilty, often depressively so, by criticizing her actions, inactions, or whatever tune she throws to him.  One common topic of their conflict is their business - though somewhat surprisingly, given their frequent ups and downs, it's been very successful.

We discussed the subtle ways in which they can go back and forth on the theme of Mary's sense of guilt and the way she over performs in their relationship and business to try to make things better, to try to make Hank happy.  And Hank can be somewhat irascible, so she has a broad canvas (if I can mix metaphors) on which to paint.  The more Hank's unhappy about this or that issue, expressing his riff on their song, the more Mary will play back with her variation of her wanting to make it right by over functioning, trying to come up with a different, better, novel idea in their business or marital life, rarely to the mollification of Hank and, the improv is on.  She struggles to accommodate his dissatisfaction with his topic of the day, and her lack of success in molifying him breeds yet another reprise of the tune of her trying something else, ultimately leading to her fatigue, frequent depression and tears and so often a fight between them.

They've been at this for years, so I don't know if their participation in our discussion using their shared love of jazz might help them see the dance in which they're engaged (mixed artistic metaphor #3 if you're counting).  It's a discussion we've had, in one way or another, a few times already, but they have yet to inhibit their repetition of the chorus.  Maybe speaking their jazz language will help.