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As of January, 2009, material from this website has been plagiarized four times. Each of the offenders was found by the the program “Copyscape,” which I highly recommend. All four 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.
• On December 23, 2008, Copyscape reported that a blog called Ask the Marriage Counselor had copied two of my posts: Those Cheatin’ Hearts and Glass Half Empty? Relationship Trouble Ahead!. The posts were copied word-for-word and in their entirety. Again, I fired off a DMCA complaint by fax to Blogger, the blog hosting site. Once again, Blogger did their job, and as of January 6, 2009, my work has been removed from the other blog.

“Turning Torso” apartment building, Malmo, Sweden

Snooping on spouses has been taken to the next level.  The next lower level, that is. I just started hearing about it recently and this one is downright creepy. Before I get into this devious new method, though, let’s review the common garden-variety spouse-snooping that has been going on for some time. All of it is made possible by modern technology such as the internet and cell phones.

• Who is the the spouse calling and texting? If a cell phone is left unattended, it’s easy to review text messages sent and received as well as check the call logs to see all incoming and outgoing calls. And if the cell phone is not easily accessible (perhaps it’s being carefully guarded), the phone bill, showing all calls made and received, can be checked online on the cell company’s website.
• What is the spouse doing online? If a computer password is easy to guess, of if an account is accidentally left logged on, the suspicious person can read all email sent and received and see all websites visited (unless the computer user intentionally deletes this information).

I want to be clear that I do not recommend spying on your spouse. In other words, don’t try this at home!

OK - I hear you asking - what is the new and scary way that spouses are spying on one another? They’re doing it with the location-reporting features built into the newest cell phones. Verizon calls their service “Chaparone” and according to their website it allows you to “easily locate your family member’s cell phone from your Verizon Wireless phone or your PC - in real time, at any time.” The service will show you on a map where the person is, and it can even give you the street address! In other words, you can be tracked wherever you go.  No need to hire a private detective any more.

Sprint cellular offers the same service; they call it “Family Locator.”

Most of Verizon’s and Sprint’s promotion of this service is understandably centered around keeping track of where your children are. But if you read carefully they do make it clear that the service can track any other person who is on your cell phone plan.

So how could a person spy on his spouse this way without the spouse knowing about it? Here’s how. Buy the spouse a new phone (makes a great Christmas gift!) which has the Chaparone capability. Then simply turn on the Chaparone feature before giving the phone to the spouse. Of course, don’t say anything about the Chaparone service. Then start tracking her from your PC or your phone.

You don’t believe people would do this to their spouse? They would and they have.

Again, I do not recommend spying on your spouse. My motivation for writing about this new technology is only to warn people that it exists and could happen to you.

Kitten

As any communication-oriented marriage counselor will tell you, it’s always better to make an “I statement” than a “You statement.” What you say should be about yourself and your own feelings (and hence it can easily begin with the word “I”) as opposed to a blaming or criticizing statement about someone else (and such a statement which probably would begin with the word “you.”)

I thought it would be fun to dream up some You statements and turn them into the likely I statement that should be made instead.

You statement: “You are always angry.” I statement: “when you act that way I worry that you are angry at me.”

You statement: “You don’t pay attention to me.” I statement: “I’m worried that you aren’t as interested in me as you used to be.”

You statement: “You don’t say you love me anymore.” (I think that’s a song lyric!) I statement: “I’m afraid that you don’t love me anymore” or perhaps “I feel unloveable.”

You statement: “You’re mean to my friends.” I statement: “I wish that my friends could see what a great person you are.”

And one more. You statement: “You are a selfish narcissist.” I statement: “I worried that my desires aren’t important to you any longer.”

Think about how you react if your spouse made some of these You statements to you. Then think how you would react to the corresponding I statements. Hopefully your reaction to the I statements would not be defensive or attacking but would be another caring I statement.

Fruit Stand, Canterbury, England

Dan Wile has some great thoughts about communication in marriage. He says that at any moment intimacy is just one or two sentences away. The problem is figuring out what the sentences are!

Let’s look at some possibilities.

• You could attack or defend. For example, “Why didn’t you call me today? You said you would.” This turns your partner into the adversary. No intimacy is achieved.
•  You could avoid.  For example, ”How was work?” You hide your disappointment about not getting the phone call. No intimacy is achieved here either.
• You could confide your feelings. “This is kind of embarassing to admit, but all day long I was looking forward to you calling me. I really missed talking to you.”  Intimacy now results because you’ve turned your partner into an ally instead of an adversary.

The great thing about confiding feelings is that frequently triggers the other person to do the same thing. In other words, intimacy is self-reinforcing.

In marriage therapy we work on making these kind of statements all the time.

Fishermen, St. John’s, Newfoundland

Wile’s “Collaborative Couple Therapy” does a great job of explaining the cycles that all couples go through. There are three phases in any relationship:

• Collaborative phase, in which the partners are speaking what is on their minds. They are making “I statements” which are not blaming and which express deep feelings. For example, a wife says to her husband, “I get lonely when you work late.”
• Withdrawn phase, in which partners are not speaking what is on their minds. To continue the above example, even though the wife is unhappy with her husband working late, she doesn’t say so. She may say nothing, but she probably feels resentful.
• Adversarial phase, in which partners are blaming each other. In this phase, the wife might fire off a name-calling/blaming statement such as, “You are a workaholic and it’s destroying our marriage.”

Obviously, the collaborative phase is the best place to be. In this phase, spouses are allies and work things out together. When the husband hears that his wife his lonely, he is touched and may feel some guilt. He’s then in the mood to talk about it and to work together (collaboratively) towards a solution. Contrast this with the husband who is greeted with the “workaholic” accusation: he will be in no mood to respond positively. He may fire off his own salvo or he may just withdraw. Neither of those options does anything to improve the situation.

It can be a challenge to learn how to avoid blaming and to make the kind of statements necessary to stay in the collaborative phase. That’s a major goal of marriage therapy.

Young Boy, Qaqortoq, Greenland

People who call me to talk about beginning marriage therapy usually want to know how long they will be in counseling. Since I’ve had couples who came to only one session - and couples who came for more than a year - it’s hard for me to predict how long a particular couple will be in therapy.

The most variation I see is with couples who begin therapy as a result of a crisis. For example, the couple has been through an argument that got hot and heavy and lasted all weekend. With these types of couples, we usually have made a lot of progress after four or five therapy sessions. The crisis is behind them and they are starting to feel better about one another. At this point they are in the honeymoon period of marriage therapy.

Sometimes couples end therapy at this point. They think they don’t need counseling any longer since the crisis has passed. I try to tell them about the honeymoon phenomenon and that while yes, we have dealt with the crisis, we have not yet addressed the underlying issues in the marriage that led up to the crisis. Usually they listen politely but end therapy anyhow. I can’t stop them, of course, but I fear that at some point in the future they are going to be facing another crisis and not have the skills to deal with it.

The wise couples stay in counseling and do the real work required to repair the flaws in their relationship.

New York City

Approximately 30% of the couples who begin marital therapy do so as a result of an extramarital affair. Usually when a couple comes to see me for the first time the affair has been revealed within the past week or two. Obviously at that point the wounds are still very fresh.

These days spouses often discover their partner is having an affair by finding emails, cell phone calls, or text messages to or from the third party. It can be hard to cover your tracks these days. (Of course, some people want their affair to be discovered. But that’s a whole other article.)

Inevitably the question in therapy becomes: how will the wife get over what has been done to her? (For this article I’ll assume the husband had the affair since that is more common). As I’ve written about before, it’s not unusual for the man not to want to talk about it. He has apologized and now he thinks his wife should “get over it.” Of course, he typically feels guilty and embarrassed about what he did, so it’s not easy to talk about it. I normalize this.

Usually the wife wants to know why he did it, how could he think it was OK to do it, and details about where, when, and how often. It’s common for the wife to ask these questions over and over again during the months that she is recovering. One of my jobs is to convince the husband that this is normal and that it’s in his best interest to patiently answer the questions as many times as necessary.

The recovery process is long and difficult but it can be worth effort. My goal as counselor is for the couple to end up with a relationship that is stronger than it had ever been before.

Bird on Berkeley Pier

Just kidding about that title. I’ve heard The Secret the Credit Card Companies Don’t Want You to Know commercial on the radio too many times. However, I do want to write about something that may come as a surprise to you.

Some couples begin counseling with the belief that they should feel warm & fuzzy about each other at the end of every counseling session. When that doesn’t happen they think that I must not be doing my job very well. I’ve even had couples drop out of counseling after a difficult session.

The fact is that some couples are conflict-avoidant, meaning that they don’t talk about things that might lead to an argument. Those subjects that they don’t talk about at home are things that we need to talk about in my office. That means that at the end of the session they may feel worse about each other than they did at the beginning of the session. They won’t be feeling warm & fuzzy about one another when they leave my office! But in the long run their marriage is going to be stronger because they have made progress on a key issue.

Aleut Couple, Qaqortoq, Greenland

A great study was published yesterday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Although it’s not specifically about marriage counseling or couples counseling, it does do a lot to validate that counseling (or “talk therapy”) is effective.

The researchers wanted to determine the most effective way to treat severe anxiety in children and adolescents, ages 7 to 17. What they found is that the best approach is to combine counseling with antidepressant medication (the study used Zoloft). It turned out that after 12 weeks of treatment, 80% of the patients who received the combined treatment improved significantly. Patients who got the medication but did not also get the counseling improved at a 55% rate.

I wanted to mention this study since I’m always interested in proof that counseling is effective.

Dolphin, Kauai

Here’s the latest news on infidelity, according to recently published studies:

• Older men are cheating more than they used to. In 1991, 20% of men over age 60 said they had been unfaithful at some point in their life. In 2006, the rate increased to 28%. (These data are reported by Dr. David Atkins at the University of Washington Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors.)
• Younger women are now cheating almost as much as younger men: For people under age 35, 20% of men at 15% of women say they have been unfaithful. These numbers are up significantly from 1991. The increase is blamed at least partially on Internet pornography and women working more and travelling more.

Of course, it can be hard to determine what percentage of people are unfaithful, because not everyone who has cheated will admit it to a researcher.  That’s why researchers now use anonymous computer questionnaires to compile their data.

One more thing: those high rates of cheating that you see in the surveys done by some women’s magazines are not accurate because the people who take the survey are not a random cross-section of the population. Instead, they are the ones who choose to respond to the survey, and they are more likely to say they have been unfaithful.