A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Archive for the ‘Specific Problems’ Category
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.
This week I’m in Phoenix, studying treatments for sex addiction at workshop given by the International Institute for Truma and Addiction Profesionals (IITAP). I’ve been interested in sex addiction for a some time, mainly because of the number of men I’ve worked with who had an internet pornography addiction.
This workshop is being led by Dr. Patrick Carnes, who was a pioneer in the research and treatment of sex addiction. His book, Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, written in 1983, was the groundbreaking book in the field. Also teaching is Dr. Kenneth Adams, who has also written books on the topic.
Sex addiction is an increasing problem in our society, due in large part to the internet. Online, it is easy to access pornography of every variety, find partners for casual anonymous sex, and locate prostitutes. The discovery by a spouse or partner of a secret sex addiction is, of course, very damaging, and often brings couples into marital therapy.
Are you married to a narcissist? Not sure? Some (but not all) of the characteristics of a person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder are:
- Lacks empathy for you and for others. This may surface as an inability to pay attention to you when you are talking.
- Requires excessive admiration from you.
- Exaggerates his or her achievements.
- Takes advantage of you and others.
- Has a sense of entitlement.
That’s not a complete list, nor it is it enough to make a definitive diagnosis, but it should be food for thought. By the way, there are more male narcissists than female ones, so I will use the pronouns “he” and “his” for the rest of this article.
Narcissism is something I am looking for from the very first marriage therapy session. One clue is that the narcissist will typically try to get me to take his side and try to convince me that all (or almost all) of the problems in the marriage are actually attributable to his wife’s shortcomings. He will, of course, fail on both counts: I won’t take his side, nor will I believe that everything is his wife’s fault.
Trying to convince the marriage counselor that everything is the fault of the other person was deemed the fundamental attribution error by John Gottman. I like that terminology. And I have yet to see a case where everything wrong with the relationship was the fault of just one of the spouses.
So, once I realize that one of the spouses is a narcissist, what to do? I have to tell him, right? Well, that news isn’t always well-received by someone who thinks he is special and superior to others, so I have to do some of that professional marriage therapist “stuff” and handle it with kid gloves.
I work hard to increase empathy between the two partners during couples counseling, and clearly that is going to take more time with the narcissist. But I’m up for the challenge.
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