Crucible® Therapy: Normal Marital Sadism

Hostile relationships can be salvaged by addressing mean vindictive things partners often do to each other. By dealing with sexual and non-sexual Normal Marital Sadism (NMS), couples on the brink of divorce get a new chance to stay together. NMS is emotional fusion and borrowed functioning wherein you feel entitled to frustrate and torture your mate. Normal Marital Sadism involves tearing your partner’s heart apart by being humiliating and demeaning, lying to inflict pain, restricting his/her autonomy, and manipulating to establish compliance and dominance. NMS often involves stealing your partner’s choice by procrastinating or withholding. We learn how to deliberately frustrate him/her while seeming to respond to a request. Lousy sex may be born in ignorance, but it is perfected in marriage. Poorly differentiated people are more likely to engage in NMS, less likely to acknowledge it, and have more need to address it more directly. Handled properly, dealing with Normal Marital Sadism can create intimacy, enhance differentiation, and expand your capacity to love. This requires a no-nonsense direct differentiation-based approach, because only the best in you can to deal can deal with the worst in you. Contains in-depth illustrative case examples. Recorded at 2000 Family Networker Symposium. Running time: 2 hours.