relationship skills

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Couple Counseling: What is the Most Common Problem?

Couples Therapy

The problems couples face are often caused by what is actually normal growth in their relationship. Couples grow through stages in a relationship, and when it happens that each partner is at a different stage, the result is often pain and confusion.  It is at these times that couples most often come to therapy, and it is often the biggest problem for couples. Couples therapy can help by guiding both partners to an understanding of what is going on between them and helping them both grow together.

Development in a Relationship

I am certified by the Couples Institute in California in couples therapy. I use the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy to help many of my clients. This is an approach to relationship counseling and therapy developed in the 1980s by Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, of the Couples Institute in California.

This approach focuses on the development and growth of each partner individually in addition to the development and growth of the relationship. It identifies a number of stages in the evolution of every couple’s relationship. The first two stages of couple growth are Symbiosis and Differentiation.

Symbiosis – The Initial Stage

All couples start out here – feeling romantic, delighting in their newfound similarities, wanting to spend all their time together. This brings about important bonding, your becoming a couple.

Differentiation – The Second Stage

As time goes on, usually within the first two years, Differentiation begins: one person, or both, need to identify themselves as who they are as an individual person. Now is when you recognize that you have differences in feelings and thoughts than your partner, that you don’t always agree.  You may want to go out and explore their world, have time with old friends or start a new hobby.

When Stages Happen at Different Times

If this isn’t happening at the same for both people, the one not moving into this second stage often feels hurt or abandoned. “Why am I not enough for you anymore? Why can’t we be together all the time like we were when we were so happy?”  The resulting confusion, unhappiness, and stress is the most common time for couples to seek couple counseling.

A Real Problem Caused by Normal Growth

There’s that common problem I was talking about: the normal growth of one person moving to the second stage of the relationship while the other is still in the first stage. The person feeling left and hurt is in the first stage, Symbiosis, and the other has moved into the second stage, Differentiation. It would be so much easier if both people moved from the first stage to the next, but it often doesn’t always happen that way. So they show up in a therapist office, wondering what went “wrong.” Actually, nothing went wrong, they are growing as a couple, but unevenly.

Understanding What is Happening

Learning about these normal stages of growth helps enormously in understanding and normalizing what is happening for both people, and these are taught without judging either person.  There are lots of reasons why people go through these stages at different times, and that can be understood by looking at their relationships with their important childhood caregivers, usually their parents. For our purposes here, suffice it to say it is normal, but when one person is at one stage and the other moving into another, it’s a stressful time for the couple. There are more stages to normal couple growth which I can explain elsewhere.

Learning the Skills

In couple therapy, you both can learn the skills of the second stage: Differentiation.  These skills include you each acknowledging and stating your own feelings, needs, thoughts, and preferences even when they are not the same as your partner’s.  You learn you can maintain your own perspective and not attempt to change your partner’s to match your own. You can agree that as a couple you really are two different people. Being heard and being understood as a separate but still loved and accepted person is a wonderful experience, different than the first stage, but equally bonding.  It brings you two together in a new way, with new respect and clarity of who your partner really is and being seen as you really are. It can be exciting and enhance intimacy.

Of course, there can be conflict, and learning how to deal with conflict rather than being afraid to face it is another skill of living in an honest and vibrant relationship.

What does the therapist do in couple therapy?

  • Provide a safe environment where both people are able to speak  and be heard, and  where both sides come to  be understood and validated
  • Show how your backgrounds  (yes, your baggage) are being triggered and affecting the present, and what to do about it.
  • Help each person explore their feelings and thoughts without being blocked by taking their partners’ opinions. Learn to do this at home without the therapist being present.
  • Get clarity about what is going on so the couple can understand themselves and progress.
  • Discover patterns that are destructive or at least not productive.
  • Provide ideas about what to focus on between sessions.
  • Specific advice and guidance for your particular relationship

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Relationship Therapy

In the middle of war, people are still very preoccupied with the state of their love relationship. Love is so important, and it is so easy to mess it up.  Many people find maintaining a good relationship to be one of the hardest jobs there is. However –

There are skills you can learn to help you communicate honestly and productively with your partner; there are things to learn that better the satisfaction in your sex life. Good relationships make each person a better, happier and more successful version of themselves.  The opposite is also true, an unhappy relationship can and does hold you back.

I encourage you to try relationship therapy. Surprisingly, it pushes each person in the relationship to grow, to mature basically, sometimes even more than individual therapy does. I am particularly skilled and catching the small things that people do that affect each other – both positively and negatively. Recapture what it was that brought you together in the first place, and activate those feelings at the stage of development your relationship is at now.

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Power Fights: When it’s more important to be Right than Close, and How to Get Beyond It.

It is a sad predicament when a couple fights over who is “right” and this becomes more important than anything else.

Sometimes this happens when the couple have given up on ever being close to their partner, but they are still needy of the other. These people stay together trying to salvage what is left of their wounded egos by having fights about power: who is more right, who is on top.

It can be helpful to have this pointed out, because often the couple is aware of being unhappy but not fully aware of what they are doing. It can be a hard pattern to break, worse when one person is better at self awareness than the other. What is needed is both people to become aware first is when the power fights get started, and second what is underneath their jabbing at the other – what is motivating the criticism and put downs.  Most often it is feeling hurt, and not feeling safe enough to admit it.

In therapy session, if the therapist can demonstrate that safety will be provided, the couple can more likely begin to discover the underlying pain and hurts.  Family of origin habits of relating often show up here. For example: if they learned in their families of origin that no one is interested in their feelings, they are naturally reluctant to say how they feel. They have a whole world of expressing emotion to learn about. Healing individual hurts from childhood are often a part of couple therapy. This can be done quite successfully with the couple therapist in the presence of the partner when there is enough trust in the relationship.  Often seeing your partner working on themselves brings up compassion and understanding; with other couples it may be necessary for each person to see a therapist separately to do their own work safely.

Power fighting sometimes happens at the end of a relationship, and yet alternatively, coming in to a professional can make this unhappy situation the beginning of learning to be truly intimate.

 

 

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Couples: How to Heal after an Affair

People have affairs for all kinds of reasons, depending on who they are and what’s going on in their lives. The important thing to remember is – it’s not true that their insufficient partner caused them to go to another for love, etc. It’s not  their partner’s fault. Being dissatisfied with one’s partner is a legitimate experience, and being unfaithful is one option, but it often turns out badly for all concerned.

If you want to heal your marriage, the unfaithful partner has to deeply understand the amount of damage that has been done to trust, and they have  to know what  being betrayed by your life partner really feels like. Saying your sorry, even terribly, terribly sorry, and that you won’t ever do this again,  isn’t enough. Once lied to, your partner has every reason to question what you are saying now. You have to demonstrate how sorry you really are, you have to show your partner how you have changed in tangible ways so that there is reason to believe what you are saying now. You have to hear what your partner needs from you in order to ever trust you again. Listening to what your betrayed partner wants from you and being very willing to do what ever you are asked is a demonstration of your truly being sorry.

There’s another piece to this problem – if someone has hurt you and you want to trust they won’t do it again,   hurt-er  the other has to understand why they did it. If they don’t fully understand why they acted this way, what’s to keep them from (having the same reasons and) doing it again?  The unfaithful person needs to learn what motivated them to be unfaithful and make whatever changes are needed so they won’t want, or be motivated, to do this again.

This is a complicated process and takes courage on the part of both couples. The hurt-er has to be able to say what they were feeling, and have the courage to take the risk of saying it.   Many people have affairs to escape  the way they feel around their partner, Where they may feel: inferior, not loveable, criticized, or just tolerated. They need to feel the opposite of this and go to someone else to receive positive regard.

The hurt-ee has to have the courage to hear this truth and not collapse. They have to be willing now to work on the marriage and realize they have some changing to do as well as the hurt-er, but not collapse into feeling they caused  the affair.  They can not be put into a one-down position. Both people need to meet each other honestly and realize they both have work to do to turn their relationship around. Sometimes the hurt is over powering and the marriage ends.  Sometimes the affair slips into the past as a wake up call to re-make the relationship into something better than it has ever been.

 

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A Useful Tool for Every Couple: Minding The Store

Here is a very helpful tool to learn for a couple when  disagreements come. I  call it “Minding The Store”, as in, “Is anybody minding the store?”

“Minding the Store” is what is happening when one or the other person remembers to watch the process of what is going on between the two of you, and bring it to the other’s attention. That could sound like “” OH, we’re doing it again -we both need nurturing at the same time so neither of us is in a place to give it, and we are both getting piss-y.” Then, “Do you see it?”

If the couple has agreed to stop the conversation and step back together to look at their interaction at this point, without blaming, the results can be so helpful.  The task at hand is to own up to your needing nurturing, and maybe not asking for same very clearly, or whatever else you see about your contribution. And the other person also does this. Often this can bring on wry, cocked eyebrows or a light laughter, which is always helpful.

Suppose some one of you says  “Maybe we should take turns?” and  the other replies “I feel like a kindergartner, this is too silly.” “But I still want you to listen to me” “OK, lets take turns listening to each other.”  And so you do.

Problems magnify when no one is minding the store, and  that is perfectly understandable. This is your major support person, your life partner, and emotions run high.  Learning the techniques of watching your interaction, seeing it for what it is, and bringing it to the other’s attention is a very useful tool for couples.