A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Archive for June, 2008
I ran across an online article entitled Why Marriage Counseling Doesn’t Work Anymore which was, not surprisingly, very critical of marriage counseling. The article made many claims that I think are just plain wrong. Here are a few of them of them, along my comments:
“When you turn to marriage counseling, the focus is on behavior, action and doing.”
Not true, at least not in my office. I practice Emotionally Focused Therapy which goes beneath behavior and gets at lower level emotions in order to make lasting changes in a relationship. Making positive behavioral changes is not a bad thing, but they usually don’t last. When you get at the root of the problem, the chances of the changes “sticking” are greatly improved; satisfaction goes up because each partner feels heard and understood.
“Did you know that most marriage counselors do not believe your marriage is valuable?”
This is an outlandish claim! I believe strongly in the value of marriage, and I’ve never met a marriage counselor who feels otherwise. How could a marriage counselor not believe in the value of marriage? Does a medical doctor not believe that wellness is valuable?
“Many of them [marriage counselors] have already divorced”
Since it’s a fact that 50% of marriages end in divorce, I’m sure there are some divorced marriage counselors out there, but what constitutes many? I’ve never been divorced; my wife and I will celebrate our 30th anniversary in August. Of all the therapists (marriage and otherwise) I am personally acquainted with, I would estimate 15% are divorced. Is that many?
“They [marriage counselors] believe marriage is simply expendable and that the kids will be ok.”
Certainly not. Marriage is worth saving, and the negative effects of divorce on kids are well-documented.
“Many of the couples I’ve worked with over the years who have attended marriage counseling told me that their marriage counselor actually advised them to divorce!”
This probably does happen once in a while. However, in my practice, it is very, very rare for me to advise a couple to divorce. One exception to this would be if there is ongoing violence which a man is refusing to address. Then I might recommend divorce, or at least separation, for the safety of the woman and/or children.
“marriage counselors need to take a good look at their massive failure rate and realize that they’re doing more harm than good.”
Wrong. The Journal of Marital and Family Therapy reported a study where clients of 526 marriage counselors were surveyed; 91.2% of the clients said they were satisfied with the amount of help they received.
“they [marriage counselors] prefer to work with each person individually, instead of as a couple.”
Wrong again. I prefer to work with the couple, because the problem is usually not with one of the individuals. The problem is in the relationship, and both people need to be present to work on that.
“Our marriage counselor took sides and made my spouse angry.”
Marriage counselors usually avoid taking sides because it is counterproductive to long-term counseling success. As I mentioned above, the “client” is the relationship, not one or the other of the individuals. That said, if I feel one partner needs to make a change in a particular area, I’ll say so.
“Counselors throw a wrench into the works of marriage by encouraging you to talk about problems”
How do you solve a problem if you don’t talk about it and address it? Would you ignore a problem at work and not talk about it? It’s important to talk about problems early in therapy. It’s how we get at the underlying emotions. Once we get to that point, however, the focus is off the problems and instead is on solutions and using emotions to heal the relationship.
I think it’s safe to say that a large portion of the people bashing marriage counseling are doing so because they want you to buy their book or CDs on how to fix your marriage. Unfortunately, a lot of these folks are unlicensed and/or underqualified.
As of June 25, 2008, material from this website has been plagiarized three times. Each of the offenders were found by the the program “Copyscape,” which I highly recommend and all three offenders removed the copied material after I took action. Here’s a brief blow-by-blow:
- A marriage & family therapist (MFT) in San Francisco took large amounts of material from my home page and used it verbatim as the “couples therapy” page on his website. Copyscape detected this on December 2, 2007. I emailed the offender, who replied within a few hours and apologized. The plagiarized material was removed from his website as of December 8, 2007.
- A MFT couple with offices in Santa Rosa and Petaluma, California, took 174 words from my home page and wove it into the main page of their site. Copyscape detected this on December 7, 2007. I emailed the offenders, who did not reply to me. After waiting 48 hours, I contacted their web hosting company and asked that either the plagiarizers be required to remove the copied material from their website, or, failing that, that the hosting company remove the site from the Web. This is my right under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). I received a reply from the hosting company saying that would investigate. As of December 12, the copied material had been removed from the other site. Update: on December 17, I received an emailed apology from the offenders.
- On June 21, 2008 Copyscape reported that a blog called Family Marriage Counseling : 11 Stubborn Barriers had copied my post Has Your Marriage Therapist Even Been in Therapy? in its entirety. The blog owner’s email address was nowhere to be found on the blogsite, so I had no way to contact him/her. Therefore, I fired off a DMCA complaint by fax to Blogger, the blog hosting site (which is owned by Google). I heard from the Blogger legal department after a couple of days; they said they would look into it. As of June 25, 2008, my work has been removed from the other blog.
I often see low self-esteem in one person having a negative impact on a relationship. More often than not, it’s the woman who has the self-esteem issue. She may think that she’s not attractive, not valuable, not loveable, not as good or as smart as others, etc. Therefore, she fears that her husband/boyfriend doesn’t find her attractive, valuable, or loveable, and this causes her anxiety.
The relationship problem results because the woman has a tendency to intrepret things that her husband/boyfriend says or does in a negative way, even when the man doesn’t mean to be saying something negative. For example, the man makes a comment on his wife’s appearance which may not be 100% positive (maybe it’s only 80% positive). Unfortunately, the wife, due to a systematic bias in her thinking, interprets the man’s comment as something like “I’m fat” or “I’m ugly.”
This upsets the wife greatly because her husband’s good opinion is very important to her due to the fact that she doesn’t have an especially good opinion of herself. At this point she may reply to her husband in anger or in some way “picking a fight” and an argument ensues.
So the woman’s self-esteem issue is causing a problem in the relationship. If follows that a person can improve his or her relationship by working on his or her own self-esteem!
Marriage counselors often talk about the importance of a person achieving congruence in his or her communication with others. What is congruence? In a nutshell, it’s having your words match your feelings at all times. In other words, your words should be congruent with your feelings.
If you are hurting, lonely, or angry, can you tell you spouse/partner? That’s congruence! Do you keep your feelings to yourself for some reason? Or, even worse, do you pretend that nothing is wrong? Those are examples of incongruence.
Good communication in a couple relationship includes congruence by both partners. When a couple comes to me for marriage counseling, it’s not unusual to have blocked communication. For example, a man might be afraid to tell his wife how he is feeling because he fears her angry response. In this case, I work to (1) help the man overcome his fear of his angry wife, while at the same time (2) help the wife to respond to her husband with less anger and less defensiveness.
Once in a while I have a couple in marriage counseling who are so used to arguing with each other that they think they can just continue to fight while they are in my office. They’ll come in for their first session and while one of them is telling me his/her point of view, the other will interrupt to try and tell me the other side. Pretty soon they are no longer talking to me, but instead are arguing with one another, as if I weren’t even there. They must think that this is healthy, a good idea, and that I won’t mind.
Wrong.
I intervene pretty quickly and tell them that if they want to argue with one another, they can save a lot of money by doing it for free at home rather than paying me to listen to it. That usually gets their attention. Sometimes I have to repeat this process a few times before it really “sticks” with them, but eventually most couples learn that I’m not going to allow them to play the blame game while they are in my office. We then start working on healthy communication right away.
I’ve had a few couples who simply could not stop blaming one another during marriage counseling sessions, no matter how many times I intervened. When this happens, I stop seeing them together and start seeing them separately in individual sessions. We work on communication individually and get that down before we start meeting together again.
And no, I don’t give couples foam bats to hit each other with!
One more post about domestic violence. It’s a good one, though.
When we think about men who are violent towards women, we naturally think of the man as of being in a position of power over the woman. Typically, he is physically stronger, and he is using his strength to hurt her and to intimidate her.
Yet ironically, even though we think of the abusive male as being powerful, he is being abusive because he feels inadequate. He feels bad about himself for some reason, and he defends and compensates against this feeling by exerting his physical strength against a weaker victim.
What are some things that the violent man might feel inadequate about? Here are a few:
- he has just lost his job, or had some other major setback in his life.
- he doesn’t like his job or is doing poorly at his job.
- his wife/girlfriend is more successful than he is; perhaps she makes more money or just received a promotion.
- his wife/girlfriend has a better education than he does.
- his wife/girlfriend has left him (possibly due to previous violence).
All men feel inadequate at times. The issue is how well the feelings are dealt with. Obviously, a man with a strong ego and decent self-esteem is able to handle situations like these in healthier ways.
A Brief History of Plagiarism & Copyright Infrigement of this Website
©2007, 2008 Jay Slupesky, M.A., MFT. All rights reserved.
Referer: none
East Bay Couples
Counseling
Three Convenient Locations
- San Ramon: Off I-680 at Crow Canyon Road
- Livermore: Near Valley Memorial Hospital and LifeStyleRx
- Walnut Creek: Off I-680 at South Main Street