A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Posts Tagged ‘argument’
Sometimes the best solution to a disagreement between partners is to agree on a compromise. Each person gives a little on their position and the couple “meets in the middle.”
How easily can you and your spouse discuss a difficult problem and reach a solution that is acceptable to both of you? The ability to reach a compromise is good tool to have in your marriage toolbox.
Here are some pointers on compromising:
- Figure out what aspects of the problem the two of you agree on. Where is there agreement? Begin by focusing on that.
- Tell each other what your goals are in this situation. Each person should clearly understand the other person’s goals.
- Now the part that you don’t agree about. Once again, be sure you understand what the other person’s position is, and why it so important to them.
- Figure out where there is some flexibility in both positions.
- Take turns making suggested compromises with some give-and-take until an agreement is reached.
We typically think of couples where the woman talks a lot more than the man. She can talk about how she feels and communicate what she wants, but the man can’t or won’t do so nearly as much.
But in some couples that I have worked with, neither partner communicates very much. Both hesititate to tell the other how they feel, what they think, or what they want.
I think this is a recipe for trouble. My typical comment in a situation like this is, “Wow. There must be a lot of things going unsaid.” When hurt feelings are bottled up, feelings of resentment rise and a blow-up is usually just around the corner. Multiply this by two when both partners are keeping their feelings to themselves.
What’s the solution? Create an environment where it’s safe to say how you feel because you are confident that you will get an understanding response.
Here is a little quiz about how well you and your spouse (or partner) resolve your conflicts. There is no scoring, but hopefully you will find it thought-provoking.
By the way: time spent with a skill marriage counselor can greatly improve your conflict resolution ability!
- Do you sometimes not say things during arguments because you don’t want to hurt my spouse’s feelings? Or can you comfortably (and respectfully) state your position?
- Do arguments over little things turn into big arguments? Or are they resolved quickly?
- Do the two of you have different opinions about the best way to handle your disagreements? Or do you have a reliable method to reach resolution?
- Do you usually end up feeling guilty after an argument?
- Do you do too much to avoid arguments? Or are arguments something that you don’t need to fear?
- Do you tend to give in too soon in order to end an argument with your spouse? Or are you able to proceed comfortably?
- Does your spouse not take your side seriously? Or does he/she respect your opinion?
- Can you not tell your spouse your feelings because of his/her possible reaction?
- Does your spouse not understand your point of view during disagreements? Hopefully he/she takes the time to see things from your point of view.
- Do some of your disagreements never get resolved? This can lead to ongoing contempt and resentment.
I was recently interviewed for the “Workin’ It” website. I’m reposting the interview here:
1. What are the five most common problems that motivate couples to attend marriage counseling?
Here are the top five, but not in any particular order:
Blended family issues. This occurs most often when one of the spouses has been married before and has kids from that marriage. If the kids are at least 10 or so, there can be trouble between them and the stepparent which then becomes trouble in the marriage.
An Affair. One spouse has been caught or has admitted to cheating. This is devastating, of course, and sometimes ends the marriage. But some couples want to work through it, and so they come to counseling.
Porn addiction. This is becoming a bigger issue due to the easy availability of pornography on the Internet. Some men become addicted to porn. They sometimes can hide it for a while, but eventually the problem surfaces.
Stage-of-life crisis. I see this more often in women than in men, believe it or not. The most common case is that of a woman who was a stay-at-home mom but who has something of an identity crisis when the youngest child leaves home. She frequently makes some significant life changes at this point and may re-evaluate whether or not she wants to stay married.
Communication problems. Many couples don’t know how to express their feelings to each other in a healthy way. At one extreme, they may argue constantly. At the other extreme, both people keep their feelings to themselves. Neither option is good.
2. Is it sometimes obvious to you after a session or two that the couple you’re treating would be better off apart?
Yes. For example, if I find out that the husband is physically abusing his wife or is extremely controlling of her and that he is not willing to try to change, then I think it’s better for the wife to leave him. I spent a year working as an intern counselor at a domestic violence shelter, so I am quite familiar with this pattern of behavior on the man’s part. Sometimes the man will claim that he had ‘no choice’ but to hit his wife because she ‘provoked’ him. Or I might find out that the wife has to let her husband know where she is at all times and that she is not ‘allowed’ to go certain places or see her friends. These are all red flags to me.
3. What problems do you sometimes see that can’t be solved through the counseling process?
Occasionally I will get a couple where one spouse has announced that he/she wants out of the marriage. The other spouse doesn’t want the marriage to end and has convinced the unhappy partner to attend counseling in an attempt to patch things up before agreeing to separation or divorce. Unfortunately, by this time it is usually too late to fix things because the unhappy spouse has been unsatisfied for years and already has one foot out the door. This is a case in which the couple should have begun counseling several years earlier.
4. Do couples have to be married to engage your services?
No. I see unmarried couples as well as married ones. This includes young couples who are planning to be married as well as older couples who have no plans to marry. Although many relationship problems are common to both married and unmarried couples, I have noticed that unmarried couples are more likely to have “trust issues.” They suspect that their partner is cheating on them and so will be spying on them by reading their email, checking their phone, looking at their MySpace page, etc. A lot of times people with trust issues have been cheated on in previous relationships so it’s not hard to understand why they fear that it will happen again.
5. Do you occasionally get couples with very minor problems that can be worked out quickly, but simply need an intermediary?
Yes. A couple may be generally happy and satisfied with their relationship but be stuck on one particular issue. It might be something to do with job choice, a financial decision, or a major decision involving children. When this happens they may come to me for a few sessions just to have an impartial third party engender a healthy discussion and point out options that may not have been considered.
6. Do you find that people are often surprised by what is said by their partners during a counseling session?
Yes, this happens sometimes. For example, sometimes a person will ’save’ an issue for the next counseling session rather than bringing it up at home. This is because he/she feels safer discussing the issue with me in the room; I won’t let the discussion get nasty or out of control.
7. What general advice can you give to couples who want a long, successful partnership?
Try to see things from one another’s points of view. I’ve written about this recently on my blog. It sounds easy, but in fact it’s not easy at all and requires some concentration. If you can put yourself in your spouse’s shoes and feel things as if you were in his/her position, you go a long way toward being able to understand him/her. When both spouses understand each other at this level, conflict goes way down.
The sad fact is that many couples will argue just for the sake of trying to convince each other of who is right and who is wrong. They completely gloss over the hurt feelings that caused the argument to begin in the first place. They should really be talking about the hurt feelings and not who is right and who is wrong.
8. How many jobs have you held in your life?
Fast food worker, warehouse clerk, landscaper, radio station engineer, electrical engineer and therapist. I guess that’s six.
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!
Recently I’ve been counseling a larger-than-usual number of couples who have issues with lying in their relationship. Yes, that’s right: husbands and wives who lie to one another! I think most people would agree that lying is a sign of dysfunction in the relationship. If you can’t be honest with your life partner, something is very wrong,
Psychologists who study dishonesty say that a person who is lying is undergoing strain just by being dishonest. This stress can usually be measured by skin and heart sensors, as in a lie detector. Besides the stress of telling the lie, it can be mentally tough to continue the deception, as sometimes more lies must be told to cover up the fact of the original lie.
So why do spouses lie to one another? I’ve noticed three reasons:
- To avoid an argument. The dishonest individual is afraid to tell the truth because it is not what the other person wants to hear, and therefore, being honest could result in conflict. What is the solution to this? Learn how to communicate so that you can talk about things you disagree about without arguing. This includes being respectful of your partner’s position even if you disagree with it.
- To defend against low self-esteem. In this case, the dishonest person doesn’t like himself/herself too well, and believes the partner feels the same way (Freud called this defense mechanism projection.) This is hard to accept, of course, so the lying person inflates accomplishments and denies things that would make him/her look bad. The liar wants to convince others that he/she is not so bad after all. What is the solution to this type of lying? Individual work to increase self-esteem.
- To cover up cheating.This is the big one, of course. All kinds of cheating, including physical affairs, emotional affairs, and porn addictions, must be covered up. Solution? Stop cheating on your spouse.
One final thought. When a spouse gets caught lying, he/she sometimes will only confess to as little of the truth as possible, and continue lying about the rest. I see this happen over and over again in marriage counseling, and I have found that it is not a good idea. When the rest of the truth comes out at some point in the future, the damage is just as great as when the original disclosure occurred. It’s best to come clean and admit everything.
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.
Joke of the day:
- Marriage is love.
- Love is blind.
- Therefore, marriage is an institution for the blind!
We can laugh out loud (LOL) at that one. But I wonder if there is a kernel of truth in it?
Wouldn’t our relationships be less conflictual and more satisfying if we could be “blind” to some of our spouse’s faults? You know that your spouse is not perfect, and you probably can reluctantly admit that you aren’t perfect either. So overlooking some of the little things about your spouse that drive you crazy could be a good thing. Remember that you are doing some things that drive your spouse crazy too.
So consider those things that drive you nuts and put on your blinders. Try it for a day, then a week, and see what happens. I bet you’ll be amazed!
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!
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