A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Archive for September, 2008
- Couple in front of Maersk building, Copenhagen
OK, I’ve already fallen in love with Copenhagen and the rest of Denmark. Here are some interesting facts:
- Copenhagen has the world’s oldest amusement park, Tivioli Gardens. Apparently Walt Disney visited it in the 1950s and used it as his inspiration for Disneyland.
- Almost everyone in Denmark speaks English well, so Americans have no trouble communicating here. Danes begin learning English in grade school.
- Area-wise, Denmark is about twice the size of Massachusetts. Population-wise, it’s about equivalent to Maryland. Not very big! Yet there is so much history here.
- Sailing, my passion, is very popular here! Copenhagen is on Oersund, or “The Sound” which connects the Baltic Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
We hired a limousine and driver to take us around today. The highlights were probably the castles that we toured. Everything is decorated just as it was in the 1700s.
We also took the ferry over to Sweden and spent a couple of hours there. We wanted to have Swedish customs stamp our passports, but the customs offices were closed! There is not a lot of (read: zero) security concern between Denmark and Sweden.
- Copenhagen Canal
Copenhagen, Denmark: It was a lot of flying, but we landed in Copenhagen about 17 hours after leaving home. We changed planes in Washington DC, but were only on the ground there a little over an hour.
After today, Scandanavian Airlines (SAS) is my new favorite airline. Great service, great food, and a cool video screen for every seat. On the screen you could watch a variety of movies, play a lot of different video games, and even follow the plane’s progress across the Atlantic on a GPS display.
We landed about 7:15 AM on Sunday local time, but it was only 10:15 PM Saturday in California. We didn’t sleep much on the plane, and the plan is to try to stay up until it gets dark here tonight so that we can quickly adjust to the new time zone. That will mean no sleep for about 36 hours, though.
We’ve already walked around the city center and taken a boat tour of the canals. There are a lot of buildings here that are more than 400 years old. Wow…there is a lot of history here.
- Regal Cinema, Dublin, California
It’s been over a year since I had a vacation, but tomorrow I’m leaving for a 3-week trip. Wife and self are flying to Copenhagen, Denmark. We’ll be there for a few days seeing Copenhagen and hopefully also getting over into Sweden. Then on Wednesday we’ll get on a cruise ship and sail back across the Atlantic to the United States. Along the way we stop in London, Dublin, Belfast, Reykjavik, Qaqortoq (Greenland), St. John’s (Newfoundland, Canada), New York City, and end in Fort Lauderdale. I’ll be back at work on October 6.
- Marine Drill Instructor Addresses His Recruits
Some fascinating new research is out on the topic of personality differences between men and women.
As just about everyone knows, men tend to be more reckless, assertive, competitive and unemotional, while women are more emotional, nuturing, cautious, and coopertive. Some people think these differences are innate, while others think they are the result of the way children are raised in our society.
The really interesting and surprising result of the research is that the personality differences between men and women are actually increasing. You would think that as women move closer to equality with men, have their own careers, etc., the differences would tend to diminish. One theory that has been put forward to explain this phenomenon is that in modern societies, as external barriers between the sexes diminish, some long-dormant internal differences are reviving.
Finally, it appears that most of the increasing differences in personality are due to changes in men. In other words, men are becoming more competitive, assertive, etc. in our society! This doesn’t sound like a good thing.
- The Altamont Commuter Express
True or False: The longer a couple is married, the more boring and passionless the marriage becomes.
False. According to researcher Richard Levenson, who for the last 20 years has been conducting a study on long-term marriages. “Marriages continue to be really just as emotional, in terms of the overall amount of emotions, in middle and late life as they do early in life,” according to Levenson.
The research data show that for some couples there is a dip in marital satisfaction during the middle years, when children are in school and careers are being built. But then, after the children leave home and as retirement approaches, those couples who stay together rediscover the love they had in the early years of their marriage.
What does the research show to be the keys to long-term marriage success? There are two: (1) communication and (2) emotional maturity.
- Extreme Skateboarder
One of the more interesting defense mechanisms is projection, which was first described by Freud. In projection, one attributes his/her own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or/and emotions to others. In other words, whatever you unconsciously don’t like about yourself is what you really despise in other people.
All defense mechanisms serve to reduce anxiety, and projection is no different. Projection reduces anxiety by allowing a person to express unwanted subconscious desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.
In couples therapy projection can crop up in a very interesting way. Someones I will work with a couple in which one partner has severe “trust issues” and constantly suspects the other of cheating, even when there is absolutely no evidence of it. On more than one occasion, it has turned out (surprise!) that the overly suspicious partner is the one who had cheated! The unfaithful partner felt guilty about his/her own cheating, and so projected it onto the innocent partner to reduce anxiety.
- Schooner, San Francisco Bay
Solution-Focused Therapy is a “brief” therapy. What are the differences between brief therapies and other, more traditional psychotherapies? Well, obviously, the therapy is brief! It could be as short as 5 or 6 sessions (which is why insurance companies love brief therapy). But there are other differences too. In brief therapies:
- The focus is on the here-and-now. There is not a lot of time spent on the past (e.g. troubles from childhood).
- Therapist and client collaborate to set concrete and achievable goals in the first session.
- Therapist and client must form a good working relationship right away, rather than having it develop over time.
- The therapist is active and involved, rather than being a passive listener.
The effectiveness of brief therapy seems to be relatively high, according to multiple research studies. I think this is due in part to the fact that the goals are made very clear at the beginning, and that by the end of the therapy, it is easy to determine or not those goals have been attained.
- East Brother Light Station
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy is a mode of psychotherapy that was developed in the 1980s. In a way, it turns traditional therapy upside down, because the therapist prefers to talk about solutions instead of talking about problems. In fact, in a strict solution-focused model, the problem is discussed in the first therapy session, but is never again brought up. From the second session onward, all conversations are about possible solutions. The therapist’s job is to help the client come up with possible solutions and then try them out.
Three maxims that guide the solution-focused process are:
- if it isn’t broken, don’t try to fix it.
- If it’s not working, try something (anything!) else.
- If it is working, do more of it!
I think maxim #2 can be applied to many troubled relationships. Many couples continue to repeat patterns of interaction that cause the same undesirable outcomes every time. In cases like this, it’s time to start trying out some new possible solutions.
By the way, insurance companies love Solution-Focused Brief Therapy because it is brief, and as a result, doesn’t cost them as much money as other types of therapy do.
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