A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
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.
Tags: Communication, congruence, defensiveness
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 1:28 pm and is filed under Communication.
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