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Therapist offers
soul food for midlife singles
(November
2006 Issue)
Breaking up may be hard to do but starting over is even more difficult…especially
if you are well past the age of hanging out in bars or meeting potential
loves at band practice.
With roughly half of all marriages ending in divorce, the number
of single mid-lifers has steadily risen over the past few decades.
It's an interesting population niche: young and vibrant enough to
have a second romance, a second marriage and even, in some cases,
a second family, yet mature enough to be aware of the pitfalls of
making the same mistakes all over again. These are people for whom
any new relationship comes with baggage that has nothing to do with
their partner and is quite capable of destroying whatever happiness
they might find.
Therapist Philip Belove, MA, Ed.D., saw a unique career calling
and business opportunity in this situation. A survivor of two divorces
himself, Belove has gone through his own crises and has seen first-hand
how it is possible to rise above and find love a second (or in his
case third) time around. After spending years working in conventional
therapy, he decided to specialize in counseling middle-aged people,
ages 40 to 60, who are hoping to find a stable relationship. Most
of his practice is now done by telephone from his rural Vermont
home where he is also working on a book on the subject.
Belove spoke with New England Psychologist's Catherine Robertson
Souter about his practice and the system he has developed to address
the issues of this age group.
Q: After making initial contact through email, you primarily
"see" clients by telephone. How does that compare to traditional
therapy for you?
A: have some friends who say unless it's face-to-face they really
can't do anything, but my second therapist was blind and he was
pretty effective. And early analysts would always sit behind the
patient. Plus, I'm a musician and I have a really good ear. I pick
up a lot of nonverbal signals - tone of voice, pacing, words, sentence
structure. I get a lot of paralinguistics that way. There was research
done this year that showed that telephone therapy is about as effective
as face-to-face and, in some circumstances, people are more candid
with the voice in the ear. I've had some experiences with people
who were much more comfortable talking on the phone. Also, I have
a fairly precise specialty.
Q: You can't be expected to be licensed in every state. What
do you need to do to work across borders in this way?
A: My clients are from all over: Florida, California, Illinois,
North Carolina, occasionally Jamaica. I am licensed in Vermont and
the state requires that I send my patients a form telling them about
the ways to report malpractice. They have to sign it and send it
back to me and I keep it on file.
Q: When you made this career switch, you went from a general
practice to working primarily with issues of relationships. Why?
A: Well, I have always been interested in relationships. I think
at a personal level I always wanted to figure out my parents' marriage.
If it happened today I doubt they would have stayed together because,
well, think about the timeline on this stuff. In the 1960s, you
had the pill and then shortly after that the sexual revolution,
the rise of feminism, and the no-fault divorce. Now that it was
legal to get divorced and you didn't have to prove that other person
was terrible, the whole way of thinking about marriage changed.
Marriage isn't a given but something you have to tend. It means
that now people are in relationships by choice.
Q: What approach did you use to develop your therapy model?
A: The rise of divorce in the 60s produced a world of midlife
singles. There was never a problem quite like this. In order to
figure out how to deal with it, I had to synthesize a couple of
disciplines. I had to look at what happens when people go through
a midlife change and also at adult developmental psychology. I found
a Harvard guy, Robert Kegan, Ph.D., who wrote a book called "In
Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life." His proposition
was that, in order to get along in the modern world, you have to
know your own goals, understand how to heal yourself and adopt lifelong
learning. At midlife, you have to get a perspective on yourself
and manage your own life.
Another resource was the 12-Step Program. The program was designed
for people who are trying to get control of their lives. In much
the same way, at midlife people start to say, 'this isn't at all
what I thought it ought to be.' There is a lot of lore in how you
get hold of your life in the 12-step programs that has been worked
out by lots of people over the years.
So I combined all of that plus everything I knew about how couples
formed and lore I collected from workshops and talking to people.
I knew that finding short-term relationships is not the problem.
The problem is how to create something that is stable, that works,
that feeds your soul over time and especially when there is always
the option to leave. That's the challenge.
Q: And the result of your research?
A: From what I can see, there are four agreements people need
to create a stable relationship. First, they have to have a sexual
connection. Secondly, they have to be safe with each other, able
to let their guards down. There's a point when people start to have
disagreements and rather than being able to keep it civil, even
in anger, they will try to damage and weaken the other person. This
is where you see a lot of personal baggage.
The third one is that they have to be able to support each other's
"personal growth," to use the cliché. People at midlife are looking
at as many years ahead as they have already lived and something
inside of them says, 'Well, what do I really want to do with my
one and only life that is going to be meaningful and make it worth
living?' They are going to need a partner who is going to support
them and enjoy doing that with them. That's called high friendship.
The fourth negotiation is every bit as crucial. By the time you
are 40 you have a social world created for yourself that will include
exes, children, friends, parents - and every one of those relationships
is in some way going to be more important to you at 40 years old
than this new person who has come into your life. If you have to
choose between taking good care of your kids or taking good care
of your boyfriend, the boyfriend is going to lose. People have to
find a way to fit into each others' worlds.
Q: You have said that it's not hard to meet people, but that
the difficult part is establishing a stable relationship.
A: On the one hand, older people have a certain kind of inner
flexibility about relationships, but on the other hand we are really
pretty rigid. I have a line on my Web site that says, 'When you're
25 and single, you're just single. But when you're 45 and single,
you're single with an explanation."
Q: How is your book going?
A: I'm on the home stretch. It's been a long time. What was
hardest about it was deciding on the four negotiations. That was
the critical piece. That and one other one - from what I have seen,
people go through fairly predictable series of changes so there
is a developmental model I also have. I see echoes of it in the
12-steps, which makes me think maybe I'm onto something. At first,
people are kind of chaotic, and just reacting. Then people will
go into a retreat and I consider that phase two. They just really
start calling things into question and they stop being so crazy.
They develop boundaries and a capacity to say 'no' and they begin
to have a perspective on themselves.
In phase three, people start to venture out. I call it remedial
dating, just to see what they want. At stage four, people are really
ready to do something. Some of the stories I have collected are
of people who had stopped dating and come back out and suddenly
get married.
One of my favorite stories is of a man who asked a woman if she
wanted to go out on a date and she said, 'I've done all the dating
I ever want to. If you want to get married, let's talk, but otherwise
leave me alone.' And they ended up getting married.
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