A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Archive for the ‘Communication’ Category
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!
OK, today is our day on the blog tour of Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott to promote their new book Trading Places: The Best Move You’ll Ever Make in Your Marriage. We submitted a question to the Parrotts and are publishing the question here, along with their answer.
Q: Les and Leslie, Are there practical ways to keep the methods of empathy you suggest really front and center in our minds, even when times get tough? It seems as if we always get side-tracked and bogged down in an argument or tense situation and only afterwards does one of us realize that we forgot all about the ways we should have handled the conflict. How can we make sure that we think of the Trading Places steps sooner rather than later?
A: We can tell you what works for us. We have a little code that one of us will, hopefully, utter before a conversation gets too heated. One of us will simple say “90 percent.” Why? Because we know that research says that whatever a couple is fighting about, once they see the issue from each other’s perspective – once they Trade Places – the issue ill completely resolve itself 90 percent of the time. Isn’t that amazing?
Think about that! Forget about all the other bells and whistles that we “marriage experts” teach couples to resolve conflict. If all you did was practice empathy – accurately seeing issues from your partner’s point of view – you would eliminate 90 percent of your arguments. We can tell you this is true not only from research studies, but from our own marriage as well.
Once you see the nearly instant results of trading places during these tense times, you’ll be a believer. That’s why, for us, we do our best to use the trigger phrase of “90 percent” to help one another press the pause button and empathize.
Of course, another strategy that might help you trade places when you feel a conflict emerging is to take a proverbial “time out.” Before one of you gets to a place where you’re beginning to lose it, press the pause button. Agree to take a time out. But – and this is important – also agree on the time you’ll come back together. It may be 5 minutes or 5 hours, but be sure to set a time that you can count on reconnecting. And during your time out, as your gather your wits and become more objective, try to put yourself in your partner’s shoes. If you’re having a tough time doing that, write a list of questions you want to ask him or her to help you see the situation from his or her perspective.
The other day, I had a few hours between meetings with clients, and I went for a bite to eat. While I was sitting in a restaurant, I happened to overhear someone use these words: “If I were in their shoes…”
Have you ever thought about really being in someone else’s shoes? Not, literally, of course; being in someone else’s shoes is a euphemism for empathy, which is to know exactly how some else is feeling. That’s hard to do in a world where we taught to get in touch with our own feelings. Should we even bother to be empathic? And, if so, how can you do it?
This the subject of a new book written by Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott called Trading Places. The cover of the book has a clever illustration of a shoe whose front half is a man’s shoe and the rear half is a red high heel! The Parrots point out that empathy is an extremely important characteristic to have in a good marriage. Putting yourself in your partner’s shoes (or “skin”) is a way of understanding where they are coming from. This does wonders for reducing conflict between spouses.
Walt Whitman wrote, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I become the wounded person.” That’s empathy - actually feeling what the other person feels. Analyzing trades places in the head, sympathizing trades places in the heart, but empathizing does both. It is to understand from both the head and the heart.
So what does empathy (or “trading spaces”) do? I’m glad you asked. Here’s a list of a few things that empathy can accomplish in your marriage:
- reduce criticism
- eliminate nagging
- make conflicts shorter
- makes you better friends/partners
- reinforces commitment
- brings “grace” to your marriage
- makes for a longer life
- allows for dreams to flourish
As Dr. and Dr. Parrott say: “When you accurately see any situation from another’s point of view, when you can experience it like they do, you instantly take a different approach to it“.
On Tuesday, May 6, this humble blog will be the host of the Parrotts’ two-week “Blog Tour” in which we’ll post a question to them, along with their answer. So stay tuned! In the meantime, you might want to try out trading places with your spouse.
During marriage therapy sessions, I hear about many arguments between husbands and wives. Couples can argue about little things and big things. They can argue about important things and unimportant things. They can even start out arguing about something small and unimportant, and before long, the topic has somehow switched to something big and important. People can even argue about things that happened years ago, as if it were possible to somehow change something that’s already happened.
I try to get couples to “soften” the things they say to one another during disagreements. As I’ve said before in this space, name-calling is never a good idea. Nor is it wise to compare your spouse negatively to someone else (”John’s wife earns a lot more money than you do!”). But I thought I go a bit further and make a list of ten “soft” phrases that could and should be used in disagreements.
Here’s my list:
- I’m sorry. I didn’t really mean what I just said. Let me retract that and try again.
- I can understand what you’re saying.
- I love you.
- What you just said really hurt my feelings.
- How can we work together to solve this problem?
- We’re starting to get worked up. Let’s take a 15-minute break to cool off, and then continue talking.
- Can I have a hug?
- I agree with some of things you say.
- I appreciate it that you ….
- What you just said was pretty harsh. Could you please rephrase it?
Sound corny? Maybe. But I think they work to keep things calm, to remind yourself not to overreact, and to periodically disarm your partner with your own kindness and vulnerability.
Try it out!
In the very first marriage counseling session with a couple, I want to find out what they think their main issues are. I’ll say something like, “What brings you guys here?” or “What do you two need help with?” It’s always interesting (and informative) to see what happens at that point. Who talks first? And how long does he/she talk? Do both spouses allow that the partner has a different view on things which may have some validity?
But here’s what’s interesting. Around 80% of couples tell me that they have a communication problem! (Usually the wife is the one who says this.) It’s so common that after a while I began to wonder exactly what people mean when they say “communication problem”. They can’t all mean the same thing, right?
So now I always ask people for more details. A common answer (but not the only one) is that the wife feels like her husband doesn’t listen to her, doesn’t respect her viewpoint, and won’t tell her how he feels about things.
This will be my last post in 2007. See you next year!
This week I’m in Pasadena, studying Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT). The workshop is being taught by two of the best-known researchers in the field.
Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy is quite different from many other marital therapies. There is no educational aspect to it: no lessons in communication skills or conflict management. Also, there is no behavioral aspect to it (such as trying to do more nice things for your spouse).
The three stages of EFT are:
- De-escalate the conflict cycle.
- Changing interactional positions (such as softening blame and getting the withdrawn partner to re-engage).
- Consolidate and Integrate.
EFT has done very well in effectiveness testing with real couples.
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