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Books-and-Authors.net: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?
BRYCE KAYE: I grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey which was a suburb town just outside of New York City. It was your classic small town Americana but was limited by the 50’s white prejudiced culture to the extent that our whole school had only one black student. My mother was a teacher and she made sure I had a rich array of educational and cultural experiences. However, my real passion was always psychology. In high school, I conducted sensory deprivation experiments in a chamber my father and I built in our basement. As a result, I was befriended by a renowned scientist, Dr. Jay Shirley, who invited me to Oklahoma to see his research on sensory deprivation. When I was in college, I participated in therapy groups run by recovering heroin addicts in the Bowery of New York City. They were former thieves and prostitutes but they had radically re-grown their own personalities. When I met them, they were several years clean and were totally devoted to truth, responsibility and integrity. I think they were my greatest inspiration. Because of their influence, I decided to switch my major to psychology against the wishes of my parents and I had to cut them off in the process. I refused their money for my schooling and support, took out loans, drove a cab in Manhattan and put myself through Columbia. It’s what I had to do to follow my vision.
Books-and-Authors.net: Your new book is The Marriage First Aid Kit - Briefly explain your background and experience which helped write this book.
BRYCE KAYE: I did my doctoral research on the topic of how people emotionally react when they perceive that they are losing their freedom. That was a definite early influence because it helped me to later understand why married partners do some of the things that they do. For years, I also studied psychophysiology to help me evolve more effective techniques for psychotherapy. After working with a few thousand couples for over 30 years, I’ve been able to notice what works and what doesn’t.
Books-and-Authors.net: In your opinion what makes The Marriage First Aid Kit different from others in the self-help marriage genre?
BRYCE KAYE: Just about every marriage self-help author emphasizes how to get closer by improving communication and providing a partner with more love messages. David Schnarch who wrote “Passionate Marriage” is the only author I’ve seen who emphasizes that passion is maintained by a balance between attachment and autonomy. The Marriage First Aid Kit goes into much greater detail about how to maintain that balance. It also discusses what to do about the hidden forces in the partner’s unconscious that degrade communication. Other self-help books aren’t based on the science that emotions are conditioned reflexes. They don’t describe how those reflexes interact and evolve over time.
Books-and-Authors.net: What are some of the most common syndromes causing marriage problems and marital conflict?
BRYCE KAYE: OK. Here are a few:
Emotional depletion syndrome occurs when partners are always in a perpetual responsibility state around each other. No affection gets replenished unless they’re sometimes in an enjoyment state, called a “paratelic” state. After a while, the partners are fighting about really stupid things like somebody didn’t put the salt shaker back in its correct place. Both partners don’t know that they’re unconsciously feeling ashamed about seeming to be unimportant to the other. The pain leaks out sideways and fuels the fights.
Another syndrome is what I call “relationship depersonalization. It occurs when one partner is terrified of conflict and lets the other partner call all the shots. The conflict phobic partner won’t negotiate or express his or her own positive desires. The problem is that, over time, they lose a sense of their own self because what they want and love is the core of their own identity. If they don’t express their desire, they eventually lose touch with that part of their self. That’s what you hear from them. “I don’t know what I want.” “I don’t know who I am anymore” “I feel numb.” or “I feel like I’m suffocating.” Attraction in the relationship is one of the first things to go. Very often the person winds up having an affair because it feels like he or she is getting their oxygen supply back. Relationship depersonalization is a HUGE problem for many couples and most people don’t even know anything about it.
Then there’s the delinquent helper syndrome. This is usually where the husband is completely passive about parenting and chores while the wife expects him to “help” her in these domains. The problem is that both partners have jointly created a bad system. Anytime someone is expected to be a routine helper, they’re expected to be inferior. Compulsory helpers are subordinate and people naturally resist this inferiority in a relationship. The resistance may not be conscious but it’s still there. The wife usually labels it as being “passive aggressive.” However, she’s doesn’t admit that she’s hogging all the authority over both the parenting and household domains. The husband is expected to help but not to have full equal authority. The husband also collaborates in setting up the bad system. He’s all too willing to let his wife become his memory. It’s convenient to not have to track on as much stuff and let his wife remember everything…..except that it comes back to bite him when she tries to tell him to jump when she wants him to jump. Both partners suffer. In my book, I outline a negotiation process that makes both partners assume equal authority and equal responsibility. The delinquent helper syndrome is prevented.
There are other syndromes I describe in the book but these three are probably the most common.
Books-and-Authors.net: In The Marriage First Aid Kit you write, "There's a big difference between affiliation and intimate communications." Explain
BRYCE KAYE: I use the term affiliation to describe when two partners only loosely connect with each other while sharing activities. They may see a movie together, go out with friends, or play some tennis together. Their eyes are focused on the world and they only share their emotional reactions from time to time. The outside world is their focus. When two partners share emotional intimacy, their internal worlds are their focus. They’re usually looking into each other’s eyes and each other’s minds. They’re exploring each other’s memories, fantasies, and the meaning each person places on their experiences. It’s intense stuff but it’s very powerful in helping someone to feel loved. I like to say “one minute of intimacy equals one hundred minutes of affiliation.” When life gets complicated and you don’t have much fun time to spend together, it’s smart to switch to the high octane stuff.
Books-and-Authors.net: Briefly discuss the fear of emotional intimacy.
BRYCE KAYE: I noticed that you qualified your request with the word “briefly.” This is a little bit like asking me to briefly explain the brain’s neurophysiology. OK. Here goes. The fear of emotional intimacy is really the fear of shame. Except that almost no one really knows that fact because everyone is so busy keeping their shame stuffed down in their unconscious. Few people are willing to admit that they fear that that “they’re not enough” or that they’re afraid that they may be so flawed that they’re unlovable. When we expose ourselves to intimacy, our partner can wound us with their disapproval like no one else can. The “hurt” feeling is actually some shame shooting up out of what some neuroscientists call our inhibitory system. If our parents emotionally wounded us in childhood, then our vulnerability to shame is even further magnified later in our adult relationships. Our potential for pain may be 100 times greater and we’ll really fear intimacy. There it is. “Briefly.”
Books-and-Authors.net: What is "Responsible Capitulation"?
BRYCE KAYE: Responsible Capitulation is a term I invented to represent the idea that sometimes it’s important to let your partner win a conflict. If you’re wise enough to know that a minor sacrifice for you may bring a huge gain for your partner, then you can feel good about giving in. You may appreciate that you’re being responsible to the relationship. However, this type of self-sacrifice needs to be made out of wisdom and love, not fear. If you give in out of fear and intimidation, then you’ll hurt yourself and the relationship. It all depends on the frame of meaning that you create for yourself and your behavior.
Books-and-Authors.net: What do you hope to achieve with The Marriage First Aid Kit?
BRYCE KAYE: I want to teach people how to grow affection over time. It’s as if people don’t know how to grow their garden. You need to make sure that your garden has the proper nourishment but you also have to take defensive measures against insects and weeds. In a relationship, you have to nurture attachment to each other in order to grow affection. You also have to prevent shame from infecting your positive emotions or destabilizing your identity. I want people to see that there’s a method for growing love over time instead of ignorantly watching their love wilt.
Books-and-Authors.net: What was the last book you read?
BRYCE KAYE: It was probably Michael Apter’s book “Reversal Theory: The Dynamics of Motivation, Emotion and Personality” I read a lot of technical stuff that would probably bore most people. Michael and I like to trade ideas back and forth and I’ve been impressed by some of the other research folks in the Reversal Theory Society.
Books-and-Authors.net: What's next?
BRYCE KAYE: That’s a hard one because I don’t know. I’ve been approached by someone in the film industry to co-write a pilot for a TV series. I’m not at liberty to give any more details while we have the treatment still floating around Hollywood for takers. That would be exciting! Another possibility is that I get my captain’s license and take couples out on my sailboat for 3 day interventions. That would be a lot of fun too. But I also have fun just doing what I’m doing now – inventing new forms of treatment and researching how the human mind does what it does. I don’t know exactly what I’ll do but I’m sure it will be fun whatever it is. I’ll leave you with my favorite motto because it’s relevant to my approach to life as well as your last question.
“It’s not the dough, dummy. It’s the dopamine!”
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Ph.D. in psychology and personality from the University of Illinois.
His earliest research focused on how the elimination of freedom
causes psychological reactance, consistent with his life-long
interest in human boundary interactions. In the course of his
career, he has evolved different forms of treatment based on
psychophysiology and his experience