Every relationship has implicit ground rules that serve the participants’ goals, that further their agendas about what kind of relationship they want or expect. For example, marriages vary in the extent to which the partners keep each other up to date about the daily vagaries of work. If you want to know what kind of marriage a couple has (or that you have) on this score, you can get a lot more information by probing the implicit rule about downloading work details than you can by asking them what kind of marriage they want to have. If you try the latter, two very different couples might both tell you that they want a marriage that’s a true partnership that’s playful and vital, and that they keep spouses up to date about work. Instead, you will learn more about the couple if you can determine whether they tell each other about major conflicts at work, about puzzling problems with colleagues, or about whether the coffee room ran out of skim milk. (This is an example of the more general directive in psychology to get examples.) A couple that describes itself as faithful can condone an enormous variety of sexual behavior with other people. You can learn more than the description by probing the rules about flirting—are full out affairs allowed? Internet or phone sex with strangers? Sexual validation by trolling for passes? The occasional sparkle in the eye? Revealing the face in public? Marital disputes that seem to be about “trust” and “respect” can often be focused, and resolved, by negotiating the rules. (But don’t forget power theory: the rules only at first foster the goals of the couple; eventually the rules become enshrined and need to be re-evaluated as goals change.)
Implicit and explicit rules define all sorts of relationships, including those between friends, colleagues, and even restaurant servers and diners. A list of rules shared in a geographic location is called a culture; a list of rules shared in a relationship is called a frame.
An important rule in any interaction concerns the amount of information you are supposed to consider in performing the role you are in. The classic example is not noticing a stutter, but old acquaintances also, for example, don’t bring up adolescent indiscretions when they find themselves working together. (They might, later, though, when rebuilding their friendship after work.) In this respect, the set of rules that govern a relationship are like the frame of a painting; the frame of a painting tells you the kind of thing it is and how much of it to consider.
A widespread rule is that you don’t tell people what you are really thinking, not about the seasoning on the meals they prepare, not about the wild sexual and aggressive thoughts that go through your head, and not about the ugly secrets from your past. This rule facilitates most social interactions (that is, it fosters the goals in almost all relationships), but it leaves people hungry for intimacy if they don’t have any friends, lovers, or family members who really get them. (One reason widowers have so much the harder time of it than widows in our culture is because when the wife in a straight marriage dies, the widower has often lost his only intimate relationship.) The inverse of the rule against intimate disclosure is that you are generally forbidden from commenting on the behavior of other adults if the comment identifies aspects of the self behind the social mask.
Many forms of individual therapy depend on access to thoughts, wishes, and memories normally kept behind the social mask. Good therapy also authorizes the therapist to comment on the patient’s behavior. The frame of therapy—its set of implicit rules—is designed solely to facilitate these two relational goals, disclosure and interpretation. Much is known about which rules lead to disclosure and interpretation and which inhibit them (which I will discuss in a subsequent post). The social rules against disclosure and interpretation are so pervasive that the frame of therapy must set it apart from all other types of social relating. The rules around professional relationships (as opposed to a therapeutic relationship)—learned in relation to doctors—push the therapist into an expert role that inhibits the interpersonal process. The therapist wants to be neither social nor professional, and yet the therapist and the patient are just two people trying to have a conversation (social) and the therapy is indeed a professional service. These are the Scylla and Charybdis of therapeutic relating, and the therapeutic frame requires an extraordinary effort. Of course, that’s like teaching an only child how to act like a sibling, and if the therapist has never experienced a therapeutic frame, it’s hard for her to believe that such a thing exists.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 