A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Posts Tagged ‘Communication’
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.
As I’ve written about before, probably more than half of the couples I meet with tell me that they have communication problems. Following are some questions that I ask to try to clarify exactly what the problem is. Ask yourself these questions!
- Can you tell your partner about things that are bothering you? Or do you keep those things to yourself because you don’t want to upset your partner? People who don’t talk about hurts can build up resentment.
- Do you feel “heard” by your partner? Does he/she respect your opinion and consider your point of view?
- Can you ask for partner for things that you want? Or are you afraid of being turned down or punished in some way?
- When you are partner disagree about something, do one (or both) of you refuse to talk about it? In other words, does one of you “withdraw” as a defense against possible conflict?
- Do you wish your partner were more willing to talk to you? Are you lonely and wanting deeper conversations?
- Does your partner always know how you feel? He/she will only know if you are feel free to talk about your feelings! (See #1)
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.
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!
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.
John Gottman writes and speaks about how important it is for couples to have lots of conversation. He points out that a good conversation every day has a big effect of reducing stress between two people. In marriage counseling, I frequently find myself in the position of trying to get couples to talk to each other more than they do. I doing so, I have met the enemy, and the enemy is television.
I am amazed at how much television people watch these days. When I ask couples how they spend a typical evening, many of them say something like “eat dinner, watch TV all evening, then go to bed.” I point out to them that it’s hard to have a conversation with the television on. In response, some people say they talk during the commercials! This is when I roll my eyes (actually I can’t roll my eyes, but if I could, I would do it at this point). Even if you mute the television while the commercials are on, most people are still looking at the screen. So how good can the conversation be if (1) it can only be as long as the commercials last, and (2) instead of looking at the person you’re speaking with, you are looking at the television? Not very good.
Of course, this presumes that both people are watching the same television. Some couples tell me that one person watches television in one room while the other watches a different television in a different room. This is because they don’t like the same shows. Yikes! Don’t people want to be together anymore? And what happened to compromise, at least when it comes to deciding what to watch?
As a marriage counselor, I work lots of evenings because that’s the only time a lot of couples can attend counseling sessions. Because I work evenings, I couldn’t watch much TV even if I wanted to. I don’t even know who is in the running for American Idol. I’ve never seen House or Desperate Housewives. Oh well.
So, a modest proposal: turn off the TV an hour earlier (or turn it on an hour later) than you normally would, and do something (anything) else. Play a game (Twister, anyone?). Go for a walk. Give each other massages. Oh yeah, and talk to each other.
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!
Every couple has some issues that they disagree about. If you would like to make your marriage even better, you can polish your discussion skills. How can you do that? Here are five good ways recommended by author John Gottman:
- Start Softly. It’s important to start the discussion in a calm and respectful way. It’s good make I statements, not You statements, and describe the problem without making a judgment.
- Make and Receive Repair Attempts. Throughout the discussion, remember to point out the aspects that you agree about. This helps to deescalate tension. Maintain a sense of humor. If you realize that you’re wrong about something, don’t hesitate to say so. Apologize if you say something you regret.
- Soothe Yourself, Soothe Your Spouse. It’s hard to think rationally when you’re angry. So it’s best for an angry person to soothe himself or herself before continuing the discussion. Take a break. Go for a walk. Then come back and continue the discussion when you’ve calmed yourself.
- Compromise. In a happy marriage, there is going to be a lot of compromising. If one person gets their way most of the time, the other person is going to build up resentment. If you’re going to compromise, you can’t close your mind off to considering what your spouse wants.
- Be Tolerant of One Another’s Faults. No one is perfect. If you expect perfection, it’s going to be difficult for you and your spouse to solve problems. Instead, focus your thoughts on your spouse’s positive aspects so that you can live with their imperfections.
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