Nun Offers Singular Advice to Couples
She talks with compassion about the hurt married couples are experiencing when they seek her help for problems in their relationships--crises often complicated by alcoholism, emotional difficulties or job-related issues.
Speaking deliberately, her seriousness occasionally softened by a infectious smile, she draws upon the wisdom of nearly 20 years as a marriage and family therapist.
Only the small wooden cross on the lapel of her rose-colored suit gives a clue: This therapist is a Catholic nun.
Sister Helen Szekely, 59, is the director of the Pilgrimage Family Therapy Center in Orange, a private nonprofit mental health center sponsored by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange.
The center, a homey suite of offices in a former family residence on East Chapman Avenue, offers therapy for individuals, couples and families on a sliding fee scale.
Despite the center’s religious affiliation, Sister Helen and the center’s four other therapists do not impose religion on their clients, she said. However, she and her colleagues, who are not members of a religious order, “are very aware of the spiritual resources of people, and we help them get in touch with that.”
Sister Helen good-naturedly acknowledges that some people may find it unusual that a nun is dispensing advice to couples caught in the throes of marital difficulties.
“How can a nun do marriage counseling?” is a question that does come up from time to time, she said. Being a nun gives her distance, she said. “Not being married, I have that advantage of objectivity--that I don’t bring into the therapy session my own marital struggles.
“The other thing is all the issues that come up in marriage also come up in other adult relationships, so they come up in my life, too. . . . I still need to work out a lot of the issues of listening, being supportive and not being demanding.
“I think the fact a lot of other therapists seek me out as a consultant and as a mentor gives me confidence that celibacy is not a detriment to being a good marriage counselor. When people come in and they feel that their relationship is just right but they have a sexual problem, I refer that couple to a sex therapist. So where I am limited, I refer them to someone who is better.”
Sister Helen estimates that nine out of 10 of her clients know before their first appointments that she is a nun. “Some do come with some misgivings,” she said, “but once they get to know me, they feel at ease.”
In fact, one Tustin couple experiencing communication problems after 22 years of marriage saw the fact that their marriage counselor is a nun as a bonus.
“Basically, I’m very leery in general of many in the counseling profession, but she was absolutely trustworthy,” said Patrick, who asked that his last name not be used. “It actually helped for me that she was a nun. I felt I could trust her more because she is a nun.
“I consider her brilliant. She has a lot of insight.”
‘Good Insights’
Joan and Walt Horn of Seal Beach similarly had no misgivings when they decided to see Sister Helen about 1 1/2 years ago. Married 23 years, the Horns have what he calls an “excellent marriage.” “It was not a troubled marriage but a marriage with troubles,” he said. Chief among them were what he described as ineffective communication compounded by mid-life changes.
Sister Helen “is very intelligent, and she’s got a lot of good insights based on just sitting down and talking with you,” Walt Horn said. “She can cut through very cleanly what is a problem. She has a very warm and inviting personal attitude.”
Sister Helen has put a lot of time and study into counseling, a career she took up in mid-life. Previously a religion teacher, she had been asked by her superiors in the late 1960s to retrain to become a clinical social worker. She realized she did not know enough about family therapy, she said, “so I directed all my energies to learn. And I really enjoyed it, because I began to understand not only people but also my own relationships.”
Over the years, Sister Helen, a native of Hungary, has earned a Ph.D. in sociology (with an emphasis on marriage and family therapy), founded Pilgrimage (in 1981) and joined the faculties of the Orange County campuses of the California Graduate Institute and the University of San Francisco. “Once a teacher, always a teacher,” she said.
Over the years, she also has counseled hundreds of married couples struggling with conflicts.
‘Definite Quality’
And, as time has gone by, she said, she has found that the fundamental things indeed do still apply.
That was borne out by a study she conducted while working on a master’s degree in social work at USC 18 years ago. The study involved 120 people: happily married couples, married couples undergoing counseling and divorced individuals.
She wanted to find out what made happily married people different from those who had marital conflicts or were divorced, Sister Helen said. “What I came up with is there really is a definite quality that people report. I labeled that a ‘mutually warm and supporting relationship.’
“The components of that I found are trust, esteem, acceptance of each other and freedom to be different. And when these qualities are there, people experienced an ability to resolve conflicts, sexual communication was enjoyable, and it didn’t make a difference whether they had the same recreational interests or not. They didn’t think that was important.”
The five highest-ranked attitudes she found that differentiated the people who were happily married from those who were divorced:
- They believed they had found an understanding companion. A quality of friendship was present in the relationship.
- They felt they could share their innermost feelings and thoughts with their spouses.
- They did not have to avoid discussing certain matters pertaining to both themselves and their spouses. They had freedom in communication.
- They had an unspoken awareness of God strengthening their marriages.
- They felt that their spouses were patient and understanding of their shortcomings and mistakes.
After reciting this list, Sister Helen broke into a wide grin.
“Now, what I’ve learned since then, in my almost 20 years of practice, is that these (attitudes) don’t just happen,” she said.
Line of Development
A marriage, like a personality, has a line of development, and each developmental phase has its own period of crisis, she said. It’s only when these crises are resolved that a “marriage moves toward this quality of a mutually warm and supportive relationship.”
In her calm and precise manner--her speech retaining a trace of a Hungarian accent--Sister Helen explained the developmental phases of a typical married couple’s relationship.
“The first phase of their relationship is falling in love, and I think falling in love is a wonderful way of nature to engineer mate selection because people usually fall in love with someone who has complementary qualities,” she said. If, for example, “two extroverts or two intellectuals fall in love, it would be one-sided, so people usually fall in love with complementary characteristics.”
But there’s a down side to this natural process of mate selection called falling in love, she said.
“People tend to project positive qualities onto the other person that they don’t have. Love is blind, people say. You see what you want to see, not what is there. The subjective experience is, ‘This person makes me happy,’ so the unconscious assumption is this person is going to make me happy the rest of my life. The reason this is bad to assume is that it doesn’t work.”
Source of Trouble
However, it does work for a while, she said. “When people get married, they really try to please the other person. But on another, more subconscious level, they try to shape the spouse into someone that meets their needs, and this is where trouble begins.
“People don’t notice how they work against a marriage,” she said, adding that in failing to reshape the other person an awareness “slowly creeps in that this is not possible, and there is a period of crisis.”
In this crisis period, usually about five years into a marriage, Sister Helen said, immature couples tend to fight a lot or withdraw from each other. They become involved in other things--their children, their careers or social activities--the upshot being that the relationship between the two “kind of cools off.”
Another way couples cope with this crisis is by moving into what Sister Helen calls “the phase of shoulds”: You should do this. You should do that. It is “a mutual demand and power struggle,” she said.
“One of the failures of this phase is (thinking), ‘If you really loved me, you’d know what I need.’ And this is a point where we really can help, by clarifying their expectations and assumptions.”
Some Are ‘Too Married’
When couples come in for counseling, she said, “they are emotionally highly reactive to each other. I tell couples the trouble with you is you’re too married. They’re surprised: ‘What? We don’t even communicate.’ Of course, they do communicate--by their absence of understanding and fighting.”
A lot of people struggle through this phase “more or less with success and go on,” she said. But even if they do, that doesn’t necessarily mean clear sailing is ahead.
“I think a new crisis in marriage is when people begin to hit middle age--maybe in their late 30s to middle 40s. What happens then is there needs to be, psychologically, a turning inward--finding one’s identity in a new way.”
At this stage of life, Sister Helen said, people’s intents and values change. Many people change careers, for example, and women are more free from the responsibility of raising young children. At the same time, people often feel “that they’re imprisoned, as it were--locked into a relationship--and, because of that (they feel) they won’t become who they are. And it’s interesting; married people project this feeling of being imprisoned on their spouse, but everyone goes through (this feeling of imprisonment).
Sister Helen said couples at this point need to re-evaluate their values and goals in life and to reassert their individuality. Many also may need help in clarifying those goals and in letting go of the original expectations they had for their spouses.
Need for Mutual Acceptance
“There are a lot of assumptions they still go by they haven’t talked about for years,” she said. “Some of them need to bury their dreams (that this person is going to fulfill all their needs). They have to accept their own limitations and the limitations of their spouses.
“If they can achieve that mutual acceptance and allow each other to be the person not of their dream but who they really are, then friendship and their appreciation for each other deepens. And that’s when this quality of a mutually warm and supportive relationship emerges.
“To see that is really my reward for being in this business--not that they’re not going to have any problems, but valuing the person is more important than the issue that causes the problem.”
SISTER HELEN SZEKELY’S TIPS FOR A HAPPY MARRIAGE
- Be a good listener.
- Make no demands, but request clearly what you want.
- Accept what you receive.
- Never fight to win.
- Be generous with gratitude and affection.
