Reed Lindberg, M.A., L.P.C., is the Managing Director of the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute. He is a couples therapist with 20 years experience. He refers to his work as "Relationship, Sex and Romance Counseling". Reed works to restore playfulness and trust to a relationship that may have grown mired in everyday life. His therapy is a mutual exploration of a couple's issues and strengths. He works with both individuals and couples.
Reed uses an existential perspective supplemented by Gestalt therapy and other approaches. Existential therapy starts from the assumption that we do not have a "static self" and are free to make significant changes in our lives and in the ways that we relate to each other. It encourages each person's freedom while building relationship. It works with authenticity. Neither freedom nor connectedness are ignored.
Reed understands that current life choices rest on a bedrock of past events, but that we are fully capable of revising outmoded ways of coping. The past is important therapeutically in so far as it impacts the present. Reed respects the difficulty in dealing with seemingly insurmountable situations and the impact of trauma from the past.
A therapist must be willing to "go there" with clients if he is to help them extricate themselves from the impact of the past. But he believes that it is the release of creativity and authentic relatedness in the present that is the aim of psychotherapy.
Reed also works with language and communication to help change the style of a couple's dynamics. Resentments and even anger may tinge a couple's interactions - a trusted third party, through observation and coaching, can help modify the words and attitudes that bring frustration to a relationship. Reed works with couples of all sexual orientations, and feels privileged to share in the inner and interpersonal worlds of his clients and to work with them on their personal and relationship issues.
To understand, respect, and be present to the lived reality of others is one of the great privileges of living in relationship and of being a psychotherapist.
As an enthusiastic couple's counselor, I'm interested in how the life force is exchanged in relationship. What is life force? My practical definition is that it is the enthusiasm we feel in the giving and taking of attention, affection, touch, eye contact and conversation. It's the desire to engage one another in excitement, passion and curiosity - tempered with trust and safety.
Couples seek counseling when this exchange of life force seems lost. They describe their anxieties: Something doesn't feel right. Something is lost that was there in the beginning. There is betrayal, unfaithfulness, boredom - or conversation has dried up. The couple may seek therapy to jazz things up, restore romance, or enhance communication.
In the beginning of the relationship everything is new. The partners feel free, enthusiastic and spontaneous. Later they reign-in their freedom to enter into an agreement of commitment and reliability. Although promises are made of undying love and enthusiasm, there is usually little discussion about freedom. Freedom is not even in the fine print.
And for some people this works. The life force is managed within the contract. The couple looks with disapproval at the "contractual dishonesty" of others, at flirtations, affairs, looking at other persons, alternative or gay arrangements, masturbation when no one is looking, pornography, or even romance novels. This mutual disapproval may be part of the little lie that supports the notion of perfect love. An undercurrent of resentment, boredom, and secret desire may be suppressed so that the contract can be held sacred. New ideas, sexual conversation, flirtatious exchange of life force with others or contractual modifications would disappoint, upset or betray the agreement.
But curiously pornography is a multi-billion dollar form of entertainment and distraction. Perhaps obsessive thoughts of affairs and flirtations roll around in the secret places of partners' minds. Then one day something may be revealed, stemming from this hidden world of mystery, fantasy, need, and desire. One partner bursts into an act of defiance and freedom (referred to as lying, betrayal or dishonesty). The question, "Where does the lie actually reside?", is not entertained. The guilty one offers amends, perhaps couple's counseling. Or the relationship ends, perhaps to the tune, "It was never right anyway."
French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls the fundamental lie that undermines relationships "bad faith." It is pretending that I and my partner have essential fixed natures, and that we can cast our relationship in stone. It is putting myself and my partner in boxes - having a comfortable relationship from which the mystery, adventure and passion drain away. The alternative is authentic relationship in which each values and supports the partner's freedom.
Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, his companion of fifty years, tried to live such a relationship. Their relationship supported the mutual flowering of extraordinary creativity. Although Sartre and Beauvoir had an open relationship, the point is not monogamy, polyamory or any particular mode of behavior. Rather we need to support each other in our free development - and communicate about conflicts that may arise. Emotional paralysis often results if we box ourselves in to please one other.
A distressed marriage need not be broken if a new spirit of relationship can be embraced. Sartre calls this the spirit of play as opposed to the spirit of seriousness. Our commitment to each other is not undying sameness, but authenticity of feeling and expression. Freedom isn't predictable. It may sometimes be threatening, but it can also be exciting and playful. This dilemma, freedom vs. security, requires discussion, flexibility, care and creativity.
We can't have it both ways. As one partner in a relationship said: "I want you in a box. I want to see you as fixed. I don't want you to move in any way, or change. You might leave, or not love me. But I don't want you to be boring!"
