We Can Do Hard Things
Couples Therapy: The Tools You Need with Dr. Orna Guralnik (Best Of)
Sun, 06 Apr 2025
1. What we are really fighting about when we’re fighting about the dishwasher. 2. We can stop asking whether what’s missing is a “want” or a “need” – and the question to ask instead. 3. How to use what most frustrates you about your partner to bring you closer. 4. How to start thinking of our partnerships as our own mini political systems. 5. What to do if your partner won’t go to therapy, or if you’re feeling invisible in your relationship. About Dr. Guralnik: Dr. Orna Guralnik is a psychoanalyst and writer, who serves on the faculty of NYU PostDoc, National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Stephen Mitchel Center, and the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender & Sexuality. Her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis, dissociation, and cultural studies. She has completed the filming of four seasons of the Docu-series Couples Therapy, airing on Showtime. TW: @DrGuralnik IG: @ornaguralnik To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Orna Guralnik?
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. Today, we have a very special, to us, to Abby and me, and to a lot of the world, Dr. Orna Guralnik. She is a psychoanalyst and writer who serves on the faculty of NYU Postdoc, National Institute for the Psychotherapies, the Stephen Mitchell Center, and the Editorial Boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies.
in gender and sexuality her writing centers on the intersection of psychoanalysis dissociation and cultural studies she has completed the filming of four seasons of the docu-series couples therapy airing on showtime oh my god that's my favorite i know abby and i watch just wrapped wrapped. We love the show. We love the couples on the show and how they work things out or don't.
And we truly are enamored with you. Yes. And I know that a lot of people have become enamored with you and it's a very interesting phenomenon. And I know that's not what you're most comfortable with. You're there to show the work. True.
Exactly true.
True. Yes. But before we start, I do need to tell you that Abby just found the things that I have Googled about you. Okay. I have Googled, what kind of dog does Orna have? Does Orna take new clients? Where are Orna's sweaters from? Where do I get Orna's scarves? Articles about how Orna listens like that. And how is Orna so calm? I'm speechless. Yeah. Yeah.
The calmness, I would just love to start out with, because it makes me think of this part of, I read in My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Manakem, where he says something like, they think they're coming to me for answers, but they really come to sit with someone who has a settled nervous system. Does that ring any bell with you?
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Chapter 2: What is the role of calmness in therapy?
Rings many bells. D.W. Winnicott talked about the containing environment. He talked about it more as sort of the maternal environment, the responsibility of the maternal environment to provide for the fussy infant, where if you provide a containing present environment for someone who's fussy, their nervous system will calm down. They'll have the space to make sense of their own experience.
So in a certain way, I guess you could think of The analyst's role as doing that, that's one of their roles, is to simply provide an environment in which the other person can sort out what's going on with them. My own, what you're calling my calmness, it is the result of many years in analysis myself.
Ah. Oh, that's interesting. The show, it takes these fussy people. We're all fussy. We're fussy as hell. And then they sit and they wait in that little hallway, which is like the purgatory, the fussy purgatory.
I love that place.
The canal, right?
What happens there is so good.
The canal. And then they're birthed into your room and the room, it's so, it's a womb. Yeah. Yeah. pup and the little dog bed and the colors in there and your soft sweaters. I love this description. It's so beautiful. I mean, and we feel it when we watch, right? Yeah. It's like we finish our fussy day and our fussy arguments.
And then when we turn it on, when we get to your room in the hallway, we're stressed because they're still fussing. Yeah. Those couples are still fussing. And that's why they have all those like in the hallway, they have the little puzzles.
Yeah.
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Chapter 3: How can therapy be democratized?
So what kind of political system do you believe in? What are your ethics about difference? And try to have that guide you. Holy shit.
That's interesting. So we need to become more political system, less evangelists for our own way. Love it. Exactly.
Yes. And isn't that interesting? Because when you think about the otherness, it either leads to this pattern of kind of righteous, I am correct and you are wrong blame cycle, or it leads to, I see that you are other and incorrect and therefore I have married the wrong person.
Well, those two are kind of the same way of thinking. Right. They're both one is right, one is wrong. And you need to either squash difference or get rid of difference. But none of that involves opening up to difference and figuring out how do you live with difference? How do you live with both understanding who you are and who your partner is and figuring out a third way that will involve both?
A third way. We just need a Disney movie. We need a Disney movie where the princess set meets her princess, other princess, and then says, now we negotiate our political system of otherness instead of you complete me. Happily ever after, right? She needs to sit down with Dr. Orna. Dr. Orna needs to come in after the wedding and sit down with Nico and negotiate the otherness. That's good.
Okay, go ahead. I think before the wedding.
Maybe before the wedding. Pre, pre. What is the fear that underlies this issue of otherness? So I'm not necessarily mad because you do X and I do Y. I am deeply disturbed by this because I have some fear of what?
That is huge. That is a huge question. You can try to answer that question on many layers. I mean, some people say that we were kind of wired to understand the world by creating differences in our mind. Like we have to create distinction to be able to even have any kind of thought. So there's some way that we always have to like separate what's this and what is it not. So what I am is not you.
What you are is not me. So there's some way that it's kind of inherent. But then what is the fear? There could be all sorts of fears and you could talk about like early childhood fears that get triggered. Like what is the fear? If I depend, will that other abandon? If that one is other than me, is there immediately the question of who is better?
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of 'otherness' in relationships?
What is the fear of otherness? Dang, start with a big doozy.
I mean, I think it's also interesting the way you're talking about it from a political system and otherness. And I think especially in the last few years, we have experienced a huge polarization and many people are experiencing it in their own homes. And even if they're not politically polarized with their partners.
One thing I love about your work is you honor feminist theory within your psychoanalysis. So there's this whole idea of an awareness of the political reality within the realities of our relationships. And so what have you seen... That's a major otherness.
If you're in, like I am, a opposite sex marriage and you're having a very different experience of the last four years just by nature of who you are than I have had, I have noticed myself these resentments, these kind of the anger, that I have to experience being a second class citizen in this country and you never will. And therefore you cannot understand me. You are so other. Yeah.
Have you seen that more in the last?
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. I mean, first of all, what's happening now in the States, I mean, it's not only happening in the States, it's happening in Europe, it's happening in Israel, it's happening. Across the world, it's like a disease. But this business of more and more extreme polarization, you know, and we can see it like between Democrats and Republicans, red and blue.
But when that is the... the way of thinking that has marked our time, then it will make its way, of course, into like gender dynamics. It will make its way into the smallest difference around like how to load the dishwasher. When people are in the mindset of what I would call splitting, and I'll explain what I mean, it goes everywhere. It goes in relationships between parent and children.
It's really a disease. And what I mean by splitting, and that goes to this question of difference and response to differences, this British analyst, Melanie Klein, I mean, many years ago, really emphasized this primary defense that we all come into the world with or start our life with, which is this trying to distinguish good from bad internally.
There are things that feel good and things that feel bad. There's the breast that is giving milk and then the empty breast that is keeping the baby hungry. And those differences between good and bad are very important. Like we need to preserve the good inside us and then project the bad outside of us. It's sort of a basic way of organizing an experience.
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Chapter 5: How do gender roles affect relationships?
So, okay. A non-friendly way of describing that is as toxic. That passivity is another way of asserting a certain kind of dominance. It's toxic in its own way. I encourage myself to, not to split and to try to understand all sides. So I've given a lot of thought to this like kind of new form of masculinity that is indeed on the face of it, it defined by passivity. Um,
And lots of things are happening, I think, in gender politics and in the distribution of roles. But one thing that is happening is it's pretty confusing to be a man, an aware man in today's world. the coordinates of what makes you perform your gender well have been scrambled. Like society is no longer asking of men simply to be a breadwinner or simply to be dominant women.
and clueless about anything else. So a major defining role has been removed. On the other hand, there's still all sorts of like very powerful fantasies, phallic fantasies, like fantasies of what masculinity is, And I think it gets really confusing when on one hand, there's like this great pressure to perform some kind of masculinity.
On the other hand, the clear coordinate of what that is have been devalued. Women are making more money than men. They're taking on positions. I mean, there's no longer an expectation that women will just subserve and take a secondary role. So How is a man to perform masculinity? What are they supposed to do?
It'll take a few generations to socialize men to actually find other ways to bring themselves into society and be valuable, like to connect with other parts of themselves. So they're left with a kind of a vacuum while there's still a great deal of pressure to perform something. And I think men are confused and paralyzed. I mean, this is a great generalization. I mean, they're- Sure, of course.
Yeah. But that's what I think of this passive situation.
I can feel myself understanding passivity in this way because it's like the structure of being dominant, being the breadwinner is very clear. And now when you, when you take that away and then you're left in this other pot of like, I have, I could decide all of these other options. It's scary. It's like, wait, where do I even fucking begin?
Well, So one of the, you're not like me with what I just did. I just split. Yeah. Is that why you're such a good listener? Are you always avoiding splitting? Because sometimes when I watch you do the show and I think clearly she's going to tell that guy that he's a jackass. Like clearly that's the next thing to do. And you just have this way of double down, get deeper, deeper, deeper.
And you, is that what you're doing? You're resisting- judgment? What are you doing?
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Chapter 6: What is a paradoxical intervention?
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Chapter 7: Is passivity a new form of toxic masculinity?
To be unconscious on the same piece of furniture for eight hours. How did that become a symbol of love?
How did that become a thing? Yeah. That's great. So I'm again, just going to think out loud. This is no, there's no cookie cutter answer to something like that. But I would pursue two different questions, two different ways of thinking about this. I mean, one would be, yeah, whoever decided that's a thing.
There's plenty of ways to live life and not everyone needs to live in this kind of put it all in one box, all in one bedroom, all in one apartment. Plenty of people choose to be in a romantic relationship and not live together, not sleep together, give a lot of space. People have different needs in terms of how much together and measurement they need and how much space they need. And I'm like,
figure it out. There's not one way to live life. That's on one hand. So whoever decided that's a thing is a very good question. It doesn't have to be a thing, but I'm also thinking, you know, sleeping, being unconscious on a piece of furniture is a time when we are indeed very vulnerable and trusting, right. And, And you might want to ask yourself, what is scary about that?
What is your unconscious telling you about like, What could happen to you if you let loose and fall asleep in the presence of another person? What are the dreads that come up around that? What is the kind of mixing up that sleeping together threatens?
I wouldn't take it as simply like being very sensitive as far as hearing, although who knows, maybe that person is like a highly sensory person, but maybe there's more to it. Maybe that unconscious has something to say. Hmm. Fascinating.
We always end with a teeny segment called The Next Right Thing, which is just one little thing that if people don't try anything else that they can do. And even though it's called We Can Do Hard Things, we like for this to be an easy thing. Is there some way to operationalize the embracing of otherness? Like what does that look like or sound like in a relationship?
Because it sounds like that's the main thing that we have to forget the complete me and celebrate the otherness that relationships insist we celebrate. How do we do that? What do we say? What do we stop doing? What do we do today?
That's a good one. How would I operationalize it in a nugget? Maybe challenge yourself to think of the thing about your partner that is the most disturbing to you, that brings you the most agita, to try to imagine it as the thorn from which the most growth Can happen.
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