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Approximately 30% of the couples who begin marital therapy do so as a result of an extramarital affair. Usually when a couple comes to see me for the first time the affair has been revealed within the past week or two. Obviously at that point the wounds are still very fresh.

These days spouses often discover their partner is having an affair by finding emails, cell phone calls, or text messages to or from the third party. It can be hard to cover your tracks these days. (Of course, some people want their affair to be discovered. But that’s a whole other article.)

Inevitably the question in therapy becomes: how will the wife get over what has been done to her? (For this article I’ll assume the husband had the affair since that is more common). As I’ve written about before, it’s not unusual for the man not to want to talk about it. He has apologized and now he thinks his wife should “get over it.” Of course, he typically feels guilty and embarrassed about what he did, so it’s not easy to talk about it. I normalize this.

Usually the wife wants to know why he did it, how could he think it was OK to do it, and details about where, when, and how often. It’s common for the wife to ask these questions over and over again during the months that she is recovering. One of my jobs is to convince the husband that this is normal and that it’s in his best interest to patiently answer the questions as many times as necessary.

The recovery process is long and difficult but it can be worth effort. My goal as counselor is for the couple to end up with a relationship that is stronger than it had ever been before.

Bird on Berkeley Pier

Just kidding about that title. I’ve heard The Secret the Credit Card Companies Don’t Want You to Know commercial on the radio too many times. However, I do want to write about something that may come as a surprise to you.

Some couples begin counseling with the belief that they should feel warm & fuzzy about each other at the end of every counseling session. When that doesn’t happen they think that I must not be doing my job very well. I’ve even had couples drop out of counseling after a difficult session.

The fact is that some couples are conflict-avoidant, meaning that they don’t talk about things that might lead to an argument. Those subjects that they don’t talk about at home are things that we need to talk about in my office. That means that at the end of the session they may feel worse about each other than they did at the beginning of the session. They won’t be feeling warm & fuzzy about one another when they leave my office! But in the long run their marriage is going to be stronger because they have made progress on a key issue.

Aleut Couple, Qaqortoq, Greenland

A great study was published yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Although it’s not specifically about marriage counseling or couples counseling, it does do a lot to validate that counseling (or “talk therapy”) is effective.

The researchers wanted to determine the most effective way to treat severe anxiety in children and adolescents, ages 7 to 17. What they found is that the best approach is to combine counseling with antidepressant medication (the study used Zoloft). It turned out that after 12 weeks of treatment, 80% of the patients who received the combined treatment improved significantly. Patients who got the medication but did not also get the counseling improved at a 55% rate.

I wanted to mention this study since I’m always interested in proof that counseling is effective.

Dolphin, Kauai

Here’s the latest news on infidelity, according to recently published studies:

• Older men are cheating more than they used to. In 1991, 20% of men over age 60 said they had been unfaithful at some point in their life. In 2006, the rate increased to 28%. (These data are reported by Dr. David Atkins at the University of Washington Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors.)
• Younger women are now cheating almost as much as younger men: For people under age 35, 20% of men at 15% of women say they have been unfaithful. These numbers are up significantly from 1991. The increase is blamed at least partially on Internet pornography and women working more and travelling more.

Of course, it can be hard to determine what percentage of people are unfaithful, because not everyone who has cheated will admit it to a researcher.  That’s why researchers now use anonymous computer questionnaires to compile their data.

One more thing: those high rates of cheating that you see in the surveys done by some women’s magazines are not accurate because the people who take the survey are not a random cross-section of the population. Instead, they are the ones who choose to respond to the survey, and they are more likely to say they have been unfaithful.

Kids and Teacher, Qaqortoq, Greenland

I usually have at least one new client couple per week. I like it that way; I enjoy meeting new couples and getting them going in the counseling process. The first session is always fascinating to me.  Will this couple be similar to others I’ve worked with?  Or will they tell me something unique that I’ve never encountered before?

In the first session I ask about the conflict level.  Occasionally a couple will tell me that they never argue.  “Never argue?  So you agree about everything?” I ask.  Well…no.  They don’t agree about everything.  No two people agree about everything.  What they are really indicating is that a lot of issues aren’t being discussed.

If one or both partners wants to avoid conflict, they might just not talk about what is bothering them.  Thus, the couple never argues!  Of course, they probably are feeling distant from each other, and they may be one reason they are in my office.

How to help the couple that never argues?  Convince them that it’s better to talk about problems than to act as if they don’t exist.  And teach them to talk about issues in a mutually respectful way, where both partners remain calm, there is no name-calling, no put-downs, and both parties feel understood.

Mauna Kea, Hawaii. July 2007.

It’s hard to have a happy and satisfying relationship if one of the partners is depressed. Think about it. The depressed person has symptoms such as trouble sleeping, a loss of interest and pleasure in things that used be enjoyable and important, and feelings of sadness. The depressed partner turns inward emotionally and focuses on his/her own problems. The joy of being with each other, the interest in the other person’s life, and the emotional connection between partners: all of these are diminished when one person is depressed.

In my office I also see the problems that result when one partner’s depression is manifested as anger toward the other partner. This can be especially hard on the relationship if the anger is severe. The recipient of the anger is frequently at a loss to explain why his/her partner, who used to be easy-going, is now in need of anger management. If the anger is severe enough to cause verbal or even physical abuse, the relationship may be close to ending by the time the couple finally comes to my office.

You can be sure that I’m always on the lookout for signs of depression when I work with couples. If I see it, I won’t hesitate to suggest getting treatment, because I know it will not only be good for the depressed person, it will also be good for the relationship.

Statue of Liberty, 10/2/08

My vacation is over and I’m back at work. Just in time to see our economy crumble!

The turmoil in the economy has been dominating the news recently. It even seems to have overshadowed the presidential campaign, which is significant given that there are less than four weeks left before the election.

So every day we read about the stock market losing another few percent, about banks collapsing, and about the government making unprecendented efforts to restore stability.  What we don’t seem to hear too much about is how these events are affecting real people like you and me.

I’m guessing that many people must be suffering a great deal of distress over what is happening.  I’m imagining a family where in the past few weeks the value of their retirement nest egg has lost about 25% of its value, their jobs are in jeopardy because their employers are close to bankruptcy, and their house is worth less than what they owe on it.

What do these stressors do to a marriage?  As I’ve written before, problems like this that are external to the relationship itself can either bring a couple closer together or drive them apart. 

How can it bring a couple closer?  Easy.  They decide that they are going to get through this hard time together together, no matter what.  The agree that they are going to support one another, and that no matter what happens, they still have each other.  Give that a try.

Woman on Bench, Qaqortoq, Greenland

After two days at sea, we arrived at St. John’s in Canada on Monday. St. John’s claims to be the oldest town in North America, but I wonder if that’s really true, and it may depend on how you define the word “town.” We took a morning tour around the area and took a lot of photographs.

St. John’s is the home to many fishermen, and we went down to the docks to see a lot of fishing boats in various stages of repair and disrepair. We did see a couple of boats arrive back with their catch and we watched the guys cutting up the fish right on their boats.

Our ship was scheduled to leave at 5 PM, but at that time there was a very thick fog and the captain said it was too dangerous to leave because the inlet to the harbor is very narrow. The fog didn’t lift until about midnight, and the ship left soon after.

Right now we are on the way to New York; we are scheduled to arrive on Thursday. The sea has been pretty rough since we left St. Jon’

Qaqortoq, Greenland

I’ve seen some “crowd psychology” at work on this cruise ship, and I find it to be both fascinating and repugnant.

It seems that when you get a group of about four or more men doing something together, such as watching a performance in the theater or playing a trivia game, they begin to do and say things they wouldn’t dream of saying or doing if they weren’t in a group. Normal inhibitions go out the window and being boorish and/or crude becomes the norm. I suppose alcohol consumption is also a factor in this behavior.

The facts that (1) I don’t drink at all and (2) I don’t like the crowd-type behavior are enough to keep me out of situations like this.

We have played some trivia games, though, and in fact we won the Beatles trivia contest, scoring a perfect 21 out of 21. The moderator asked if anyone in the crowd had ever seen the Beatles perform, and I was one of three who had been to a Beatles concert (I saw them in Indianapolis in September, 1964).

We are now heading almost due south from Greenland to St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada and are scheduled to arrive there on Monday morning. I see that Hurricane Kyle is heading north up the Atlantic coast to greet us! However, right now it looks like the hurricane is going to make landfall in Maine, and so I think it will pass to the west of us.

Daycare in Qaqortoq, Greenland

The ship arrived in Qaqortoq, Greenland about 8 AM this morning. I never dreampt that I would get to visit Greenland, but here I am!

Qaqortoq only has about 3000 residents, and given that there are 2700 passengers on this ship, I think we overwhelmed this sleeply little town. We have been told that whenever a cruise ship visits this port it’s a huge deal to the town. School is cancelled so that the children can see the tourists and help guide them around (I think this is because the children speak English better than the adults now that it is taught in schools).

We spent about the four hours walking around the town, and I concentrated on taking photographs of the residents. Interestingly, the people are descended from both the Danish settlers (from hundreds of years ago) and the native people, called Inuits.

The few stores in the town were crawling with other ship passengers,so I tried to avoid going in them.

We were told that the high temperature today was forecast to be 38 degrees, but it didn’t really seem that cold.

I was fortunate enough to get several photographs of the people of Qaqortoq. I’ll be posting them here over the next few days. Be sure to click the photo in order to get the full-size image.