Marriage And Relationship Counselling
The following represents an attempt to provide you with a snap shot (please note that it is not fully comprehensive and will not be relevant to every couple's presenting issues) of my approach to couple's therapy. It also offers some suggestions on how to make the most of couple's therapy should you choose to book an appointment.
Introduction
This document is designed to help you to get the most benefit from our work together. The first section is on how to prepare for our sessions together. The second section is a summary of brief concepts about relationships and productive couples work.
As your therapist, my primary role it to help you improve your responses to each other without violating your core values or deeply held principles. Your job is to create your own individual objectives for being in therapy. Like a good coach, my job is to help you realize them. I have many tools to help you become an effective partner but they work best when you are clear about how you aspire to be.
Preparing for our sessions
The major aim of therapy is to increase your knowledge about yourself, your partner and the patterns of interaction between you. Therapy becomes effective as you apply new knowledge to break old ineffective patterns and develop new ways of being.
The key tasks of couples therapy are to increase your clarity about:
· the kind of life you want to build together and individually;
· the kind of partner you aspire to be in order to build the kind of life and relationship you want to create;
· your individual blocks to becoming the kind of partner you aspire to be;
· the skills and knowledge necessary to complete the above tasks.
What to avoid in our sessions
A common, yet unproductive, pattern in couple’s therapy is to focus on whatever problem happens to be on your mind at the moment. This is a reactive and mostly ineffective approach to working things through.
The second unproductive pattern is for you to show up and say, “I don’t know what to talk about, do you?”
The third major unproductive pattern is to discuss whatever fight you are in at the moment or the fights you have had since the last session. Discussing such fights or arguments without a larger context of what you wish to learn from the experience is often an exercise in spinning your wheels.
Over time, repeating these patterns will lead only to feelings of hopelessness about the progress of therapy.
What to do instead
Your can’t create a flourishing relationship by only fixing what’s wrong. To create sustained improvement in your relationship you need:
· a vision of the life you want to build both individually and together;
· to strengthen appropriate attitudes and skills;
· communication skills to work as a team;
· the motivation to persist; and
· time to review progress.
In order to create the relationship you want, there will be some difficult trade-offs and some tough choices to be made.
The first trade off will be time. It takes time to create a relationship that flourishes: time to be together, time to play, plan, coordinate, nurture, relax, hang out, family time, etc. This time will encroach on some other valuable areas of your life such as your personal or professional time.
The second trade off is energy. It takes effort to sustain improvements over time: staying conscious of making slow, gradual progress, remembering to be more respectful, more giving, more appreciative, and so on. It takes effort to remember and to act in the best interests of both yourself and your partner.
The third compromise is comfort. You’ll give up some emotional comfort by going out on a limb to try novel ways of thinking or doing things. It will be uncomfortable to listen with curiosity instead of butting in, and to speak up instead of becoming resentfully compliant or withdrawing. In other words, you will need to take emotional risks if you want things to improve.
There is one more trade off that’s even more difficult for some people: you will need to improve your ways of reacting to problems in your life and your relationship. For example, if one of you is hypersensitive to criticism, and the other is hypersensitive to feeling ignored, it will take effort for each of you to improve your sensitivity instead of hoping the other will stop ignoring or criticizing.
In all these areas, there is generally a conflict between short-term gratification and the long term goal of creating a satisfying relationship. The blunt reality is that, in an interdependent relationship, effort is required on the part of each person to make a sustained improvement. It is like a pair of figure skaters – one person cannot do most of the work and still create an exceptional team.
A more powerful approach is for each person to do the following before each session:
· reflect on your objectives for being in therapy;
· think about what you might have to do next in your efforts to move towards the kind of relationship you wish create or the partner you aspire to become.
Such thinking and reflection will make demands upon your time and will require effort. Yet few people would call an important meeting at work and then say, “Well, I don’t have anything to bring up, what do you think we should talk about?” In other words, to reap the benefits of therapy you need to be prepared. This does not imply that you should arrive for each session with a detailed agenda of what you would like to address in therapy, nor should you come with an exhaustive list of the problems in your relationship (as many people do), rather you should try to arrive with a willingness to share something of your inner world, to share some of the thoughts and feelings that have been spinning around in your head in the 168 or more hours that have elapsed since you were last in the therapists rooms.
(Adapted from 'Notes to a couple on how to get the most from couples therapy' by Ellyn Baden & Peter Pearson from 'The Couples Institute' (reprinted with permission)).
Please note that if your partner is reluctant to come for counselling you will probably achieve more for the relationship by working the issues through on your own than you will by battling against your partners reluctance in the sessions. If you feel uncertain about whether you should come on your own, or encourage your partner to attend, then the best thing to do is make an appointment to discuss this issue. If it is then decided that your partner should attend I will then arrange to meet with your partner for a single one-to-one session before proceeding on to workiing with you as a couple. Furthermore, if feel that your partner would be reluctant to meet with me one-to-one but is only prepared to attend for couple's counselling this might indicate that there are serious difficulties to be addressed and so you would still be advised to come along for the first session on your own to think about what your partners reluctance might mean for you and your relationship.
Relationship breakups
"Breakups of intimate partnerships are some of the most painful events that we humans experience. People going through them roughly fall into two categories: (1) those who are initiating the divorce or separation; and (2) those who do not want to end the relationship. Those who want to end the relationship often seek help thinking through whether or not they are doing the right thing. They have doubts about getting out and need a relatively neutral party to help them think through whether they are doing the right thing or not. Generally, they do not have as much distress as those whom they are leaving.
Those who are being left often come for treatment feeling an intense conmination of anger, guilt betrayal, and fear. Often they need to work through their pain as someone who is morning the death of a loved one. Although no one has died, a relationship and the hopes and dreams surrounding it have died, and they need to mourn. When their pain subsides to some degree, they also can be helped by looking at how they got into the relationship in the first place, how they might have contributed to the problems, and what they can work on so that they will choose a healthier partner in future relationships." - Dr. Rob Burkham