“Maybe you can help me with this,” he said now to Coché, “because I’m not feeling good about” Marie. He couldn’t explain his reaction to her behavior much beyond that, which was typical for him, and Coché intervened. This wasn’t just about Marie, she said. This was an opportunity for people to consider how they cope in their own lives with silent, smoldering presences who swat them back by insisting everything is “fine.”

The group had plenty to say, though nobody directly condemned Marie, despite palpable frustration at how she kept repeating “fine means fine.” The young wife who feared her husband might turn into Clem went so far as to thank her — and sounded as if she meant it — for helping her to realize how pained she was when she recently called home and her father picked up the phone and passed it wordlessly to her mother. (“He loves you even if he doesn’t always show it,” her mother stammered.) Her father had always retreated into silence when he didn’t know how to solve her problems, she said, and while she didn’t know exactly why he was upset this time, she thought that perhaps it was because, as she’d previously informed the group, she’d had a miscarriage and her father wanted her to wait longer before trying to become pregnant again.

As the colloquy ground on, Marie’s eyes just got narrower, her protestations more verbose, until Coché offered that maybe, just maybe, Marie was “transferring” onto the group members, transforming them into siblings, such that she could never be persuaded that the people surrounding her here 30 years later weren’t merely attacking her.

“O.K.,” Marie said, simply. It was as if she’d awakened from a nasty fugue. In the next group, she was practically cheerful — was it because she and Clem had had a good month, as they both said, or because Marie’s considerable pride had been wounded by the Pilates debacle and she wanted the group to know that she was still a force to be reckoned with — that she wasn’t going to stay in the role of traumatized victim? The respite was brief, however. Veiled belligerence toward Coché and indifference toward her fellow group members — many of whose names she told me near the end of the group she could barely recall — would continue to emanate from Marie. And every so often she’d say something that overtly betrayed her attitude, like when Coché asked whether she’d help the young wife with a difficulty the two had in common. Marie paused for what seemed like forever, before saying: If by help you mean letting her listen “as I explore this issue,” fine, I’ll help — but don’t expect anything more from me.

Still, Coché believed that the group had Marie to thank for amping up the level of intensity and frankness in the room. The group was a little low on the “affect side,” she told me, meaning for quite a while people seemed stuck in the superficial “joining stage,” unwilling to feel, never mind express, much emotion. Marie got their “juices flowing,” as one of the men put it, if only because she stoked their ire. For instance, during the Pilates weekend that I came to regard as “Marie’s Insurrection: Part I,” the young wife and her husband had their first honest, heartfelt exchange about how divisive and frightening it had been to suffer a miscarriage. Until that point, the woman had alluded to the loss only in abstracted psychobabble: “I’ve been trying to honor the missing.” Or: “I feel very healthy about not worrying about not being sad.”

As locked in her ways as Marie could seem in the group, she and Clem reported an upswing in their marriage during the second half of the year. Several times, Clem said he was realizing that he’d contributed to their knot of unhappiness by repressing his own anger and dissatisfaction and was trying to be more vocal and assertive. The group noted that his posture seemed better; he’d stopped slumping on the couch like a teenager being scolded by his mother. Marie, who went for years believing she didn’t have “the right” to expect anything from a man other than what he decided to bestow, was asking for what she wanted from Clem and doing so more considerately, they both agreed. Her so-called submission didn’t work, anyway, she acknowledged, because her fury just festered (and was hardly hidden). The couple were having sex a little more, Clem said, and once he went so far as to say he felt “lucky” to be married to Marie.

But the progress was fitful, and the group observed how defeating it would feel to live with someone whose main weapon was to become more passive, more (spitefully) a good guy. Clem and Marie got into a protracted debate about why he had “disregarded” her and taken a basket of clothes to the basement, when the previous night she unambiguously stated that she wanted to do the laundry herself. For at least an hour, the group batted around how Marie could have made the request more gracefully — with Clem chiming in to say he was just trying to help out.