A reminder of the series: four broad types of problems become genuine poisons for a couple if they are not treated — incivility, immutability, infidelity and immaturity. The second one gives itself away in its very name: it concerns couples who start functioning in a mode of non-change.

Very little novelty, if any at all, and a whole set of stereotyped rituals that have become airtight: on the one hand no new ones are created, on the other the existing ones are perpetuated, again and again.

When change becomes a threat

This functioning sets in from the moment change is perceived as a threat to the couple’s balance. There is then a will to build a monolithic temple in which nothing moves, and which seems to protect from every danger.

It is encountered in particular in people who have lived through a great deal of change, or periods of prolonged morphogenesis: this may have left an imprint, a traumatic trace. They will then devote all their energy to building something stable, sometimes to an extreme, in the hope of a space of total security. The home becomes a known, predictable place where everything has its place.

Even sexuality may suffer from it: it becomes an obligation to be honoured, an appointment in the calendar, whereas it is supposed to be a space of creativity, freedom and play. And anything perceived as an anomaly with respect to the established norm triggers a crisis, followed by attempts to put things back in order.

The relationship to the outside is often a source of conflict, with a retreat inside the house at the slightest opportunity. One sometimes observes that savings, retirement planning or other investments are conceived from the outset as ways of creating a closed place, protected from the turbulence of daily life. The conjugal space then starts to resemble a museum more than a territory open to the unpredictability of the living.

A tendency to repeat the same anecdotes, almost in the same way each time, is often noticeable. Those repeated stories are in fact the narrative form of that museum: this is how the couple’s history is built and consolidated, as something unmoving, something that cannot change. And any outside event liable to upset the balance of daily life is perceived as potentially destructive.

What immutability costs

Certain stages of the life cycle then become far harder to cross. A family very much centred on its children will go through a major crisis when those children want to leave: it is precisely immutability that is under attack.

One also observes that both members of the couple begin to forget their attributes of seduction, what initially appealed to the other. Locked into routine, they no longer really wish to seduce or to bring in anything from the outside: one must remain inside, partitioned off. Attempts at seduction gradually disappear, affection becomes a due, and what is lost is the awareness that seduction is a matter to be renewed, into which energy must regularly be put. In this domain, nothing is ever definitively acquired.

That is precisely what troubles people who seek immutability: what they are after is things acquired permanently, and having to sustain that effort strikes them as terribly draining. The same movement is found at work and elsewhere: these are the people who, when asked why they do things this way, answer that this is how it has always been done. Any proposal for change is then rejected: there is no reason to change something that has always worked that way.

A dysfunction that is hard to treat

This must be kept in mind: immutability is rather difficult to treat in the therapeutic space. The work consists in subtly introducing the idea that there can be both reassuring zones of stability and zones of creativity and change.

For what triggers the crisis, as a rule, is that one of the two members of the couple is almost inevitably less comfortable with that immutability: they want a little more movement, a little more of the outside, of creativity, of surprise.

From this follows a principle of intervention: one must not invite one partner to fight against what seems essential to the other in their need for stability. What matters are the intermediate zones: finding spaces that allow the one who suffers most from immutability to experiment with small territories of creativity, openness and novelty.

Another path consists in strategically looking, in elements of the past, for what belongs to old wounds and explains this need for immutability. Once that need is understood by the other member of the couple, it becomes far easier to identify the zones from which change can be obtained.

The third great dysfunction, for its part, is the most frequently voiced reason for consulting: it is infidelity.