One of the most important steps in the super marital sex treatment program was to help the couples understand their marital system in measurable, behavioral terms. This is difficult, because we tend to speak in the terminology of pseudopsychology, using such words as “defensive,” “aggressive,” “regressive,” “passive-aggressive,” “neurotic,” “masochistic,” and “infantile.” We have become what Martin Gross calls “psychologically directed,” seeing normal reactions to daily life as “sick.” Anger, despair, and frustration are viewed as “problems.”
Our sexual diagnostic terms reflect this same psychology orientation. A NIMH study reported that virtually no family in the nation is free of mental disorders, and that up to sixty million Americans exhibit deviant mental behavior related to schizophrenia. The same thing that has happened to our sexual health has happened to our mental health. We have been declared statistically sexually ill. Masters and Johnson indicate that over half the couples in the United States have sexual problems, and they provided the terms that, with slight modifications by the American Psychiatric Association, are the new sexual-babble of our time.
Here is a system for formulating your own “diagnostic system” from the fourth perspective. “Talking it over” is much more important than “labeling it.”
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