Should You Leave? A Psychiatrist Explores Intimacy and Autonomy - And The Nature of Advice

SHOULD YOU LEAVE? A PSYCHIATRIST EXPLORES INTIMACY AND AUTONOMY--AND THE NATURE OF ADVICE By Peter D. Kramer

If you're wrestling with whether to leave your partner or try and work out your problems, Peter Kramer's new book Should You Leave? could help you decide. But don't expect any pat answers from Kramer, author of the bestselling Listening to Prozac. Kramer shuns standard self-help advice.

"When I recall advice I have valued in my own life, I see it has never turned on fixed maxims or canned metaphors," writes Kramer. Instead, he says, solutions exactly right for one couple or individual can be very wrong for another, and answers helpful at one stage of a relationship are not helpful at another.

Should You Leave? tracks the stories of fictional couples and individuals who come to Kramer at the end of their emotional ropes for advice on whether or not to leave their lovers.

"As a therapist," Kramer says, "I lean in the direction of reconciliation. I lean that way in part because of my experience that simple interventions sometimes suffice to hold together couples who seem on the verge of separation, and that those repaired relationships proceed ordinarily well." Also, Kramer points out, second marriages seldom seem gloriously better than first marriages; or if they do, it is often because the second marriage benefits from compromises that could as easily have been made in the first.

Most of Kramer's stories illuminate the importance to troubled relationships of special skills--namely, curiosity, autonomy, connectedness, humor, imagination, and pragmatism--all necessary, he says, if we are to transform our relationships and ourselves. While he does not fail to acknowledge the enormous work some relationships take, and the likelihood of failure for some despite that work, he still leaves us with a sense that there is great potential within a vast unexplored territory--namely, our own selves. "Since real change is change in level of self," he says, "the logical target of change is your own level of differentiation--not change in your partner."

Kramer appears to understand well the skewed motives that can underlie both staying and leaving. And his responses to these motives may be liberating. If you avoid the end of relationships because you don't want to face the pain, Kramer might advise you to end the relationship since leaving means facing your fears. Or if you rush to the end because you fear the boredom, then listen to his advice to Guy, who is thinking about leaving Lena:

"So, stay or go? Some men leave just for the sake of change. Didn't Kierkegaard propose the `rotation method' as a way of dealing with tedium? But you value continuity--you entered psychotherapy out of concern over your tendency to cut and run. And you know that in the end Kierkegaard recommended a different sort of rotation, not wandering but rather tending to one field and rotating the crop, which is oneself. The answer is not moving on but staying and altering perspective; limit yourself, Kierkegaard recommends, and become fertile in invention."

Should You Leave? is rich with imagined characters and written with depth and nuance and the kind of complexity that encourages you to peel back the layers of rigid, probably not very accurate, definitions you've attached to your behavior. When all is said and done, while this book may help you decide whether to stick it out or bug out, it's more likely to make you understand yourself. And it seems that in the end that is of more value to a relationship than anything.

RELATED ARTICLE: EXCERPT: SHOULD YOU LEAVE?

I have been trained to mistrust claims of happiness. Too often they are bargaining chips, put forth to conceal evidence of a partner's cruelty in a relationship a person fears she cannot do without. And you can just be mistaken about happiness. Living in fog, you forget what sunshine feels like.

Should You Leave? A Psychiatrist Explores Intimacy and Autonomy--and the Nature of Advice; Scribner, 1997; 320 pages, hardcover; $25

COPYRIGHT 1998 Weider Publications
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