Why I Love Couples Therapy

There are those therapists among you that SAY they do couples therapy, but the truth is, they see two people who are in relationship to each other and treat each individually.

I don't do that.

I figure if you have two people in a room, you have the ingredients for a family, and a family is much more than the sum of its parts.

I love to see couples in counseling because people create such problems for themselves. They bear tremendous delusions about being married when they come in, and what marriage can do.

I'll just list a few of them so you can get a sense for what I'm talking about:

• "If you love me, you'll never find another person sexually attractive."
• "This is important to me, so it should be equally important to you."
• "You don't want sex with me, so you don't want sex."
• "My relationship with my family is your job, too."
• "There is one right way to (raise kids, clean the house, etc, etc) and you aren't doing it.
• "When you love someone, you always want what's best for them." (No, sometimes you hate them and wish they were suffering, sort of)

I read Craig's List once in a while, to read what people want to talk about regarding their relationship. A lot of the topics have to do with stuff I have very strong opinions about, but many people posting says stuff like: Don't tell me to see a therapist! so it makes me reluctant to give serious advice.

It's sort of like saying "I'd like some advice. My roof is leaking, but don't tell me to hire a roofer!"

Well, the truth is, it isn't exactly like that, because for the most part if you get a referral for a leaky roof, the roofer fixes it. There's no such guarantee with marriage counseling. There are several reasons why.

The first reason is that people usually wait 6-7 years after the problems get started before they even GO to a marital therapist. If you waited 7 years after your roof started leaking to call a roofer, you'd expect a big bill, wouldn't you?

The second reason is that the profession has done a pretty lousy job helping troubled couples, and have waited for way, way WAY too long to do the longitudinal research necessary to figure out what makes marriages truly work.

John Gottman from the University of Washington, Seattle did, and what he found out wasn't rocket science, but it was a surprise to a lot of people. And counter-intuitive.

One shocking thing his research group found out, is that they could review the first 15 minutes of tapes of dating couples during a structured interview, and figure out which ones would divorce (if they got married) from which one's would not with remarkable accuracy.

One nosy grad student wanted to see just how much data was needed to still predict pretty darn close, and her answer was too shocking to be believed: three minutes.

So, why I love couples therapy so much is that if you can help people figure out what they want their futures to look like, and what parts of those futures they want to work on together;

•  if you can teach them how to trust themselves enough to say what's on their minds (the ones near breaking up are usually easier to help on this point); 
• if you can teach them something truly practical about sex that allows them to have and enjoy it more often; 
• if they can figure out how to work together on being parents and friends---boy all of that really makes them happy and grateful to you. That's nice.

You can't really "do" marital therapy with individuals, although I used to be willing to start out that way. The problem with helping individuals with a troubled marriage is that they can't possibly seem to describe what's wrong with their marriages and their partners. They can only give you their own delusional reality about it.

This usually has little or nothing to do with the actual person you'll later meet. BUT, the reason I'll do it initially, is that talking about one's spouse has EVERYTHING to do with the speaker. That can be useful, but pretty darn frustrating if what you were hoping for was a sympathetic ear who's just going to agree with you.

Now, it's nice to have a 'bartenders' view' of a troubled marriage at times.

That's when a person tells his or her bartender: "You have no idea what I put up with. She's cold as a fish. She yells at me all the time. I get an earful every time I want to come here and have a beer, and the house isn't fit for a pig" and the bartender says "Geez, Mac, that's tough."

Maybe that's what Craig's list posters are looking for.

But if you get that from someone claiming to be a marital therapist, you should run, not walk out of there.

A good psychologist knows that there's more to the story. Of course, there is. What was she like when you married her? Was she a sweet and passionate lass who slowly turned? (What 'environs' encouraged that transformation?) Was she always that way, and you took one look at her and said: "That's the one for me!"

These questions require the person to take responsibility. Yuk.

There is a magic wand a good psychologist has tucked behind her or his file cabinets, and one wave:

• warms a cold fish, 
• makes a man put down the toilet seat (it doesn't work in one's own family), 
• cause compulsive attention and passion about changing diapers and oral sex,
•  and prevents faltering erections. 

And no, I won't wave it at you, because you don't pay me enough.

Marriages ARE impossible because PEOPLE are impossible.

One good sign is that the best marriages have quite a few problems, but they have something else that no magic wand can fix: they have a sense of humor about their problems. They have other things I'll be talking about more as time goes on, but the sense of humor thing is no small whoop.

Psychotherapy is an impossible profession.

I stopped my psychotherapy practice years ago, to give myself time to recover from my own divorce. It just didn't seem right to me to counsel people about how to keep their marriages together when I was in the crazy period of ending my own. There just seemed like a contradiction to me, as simple as I am.

That was years ago, and my ex- and I get along pretty good now. He's involved with a nice woman, and I remarried a friend I knew in high school. The darn fool was in love with me then and kept the home fires burning for me ever since. Jumped at the chance to grab me in my 40's when was grey and lost all that lovely honey-blonde hair. Love.

So, what was I saying? I stopped for a while and did other things. I got into gardening. I developed a passion for chickens. I developed a profound respect for farmers and for rural country life, and for learning how to depend on people and ask for help. I've realized how profoundly oil depletion is going to impact l of us, and started to write about that in a blog you can find here. I learned about business in a builder-distributorship my husband owned and then this happened. If you haven't been affected by it, yet, or know someone who has, wait a while. You will.

So now, I'm thinking that it might be pretty darn smart to try and strengthen the community around me in any way I can because strong marriages make strong families. And strong families make strong communities. And we are all going to need all the strength we can get from our own families and our communities in the months and years ahead.

If you live near me, and you are having troubles at home, you can read more about what I believe and how I work at couplestherapyinc.comCouples Therapy Inc. If you live far away, you might want to seriously research a good roofer in your area, if your roof is leaking. Or wait seven years, and see if it fixes itself. Or fly to see me for a weekend.

In good times, a bad marriage can be eased with consumer spending, holiday travel, or even a drive in the country.

In bad times, folks, things will get 'up close and personal.' Already, money is the number one most popular thing couples fight about. Sex and communications are up there too. If you feel that you've lost respect for your partner, chances are you've lost your interest in pleasing them sexually too. If you don't feel like you have a friend next to you, and can't talk out your problems, you'll be unlikely to have things improve with age.

I hope you'll find these posts entertaining and informative. If you're local to me and want to sit down and talk in person, let's do that.  Otherwise, you can see one of my associates across the USA or in Ireland.