Couples Counseling Needs Less Focus on Problems

Unhappy couples often come to me for counseling weighed down with a sense of failure and on the verge of giving up their marriage. Despite their considerable difficulties, these couples are still hanging on, still clutching a tattered shred of hope that they can turn the relationship around and rebuild their marriage.

They come with problems and grievances seemingly without end. If I give them half a chance, they will recount those grievances to me vividly and passionately right up to the minute that we run out of time, and the session ends.

I can’t blame them: Grievances are largely what is left of the marriage they have shared. Grievances are what they know intimately. Grievances are where passion still lives for them. Also, in me they sense a receptive ear. I won’t take sides. I won’t play judge. But I will listen sympathetically and care about their pain.

These couples assume, like most, that the counseling process is fundamentally about problems – describing, discussing, analyzing, understanding, assigning responsibility for problems – and, when possible, solving them.

When a couple I’ve been working with comes for a session, I often ask them how things have been since I saw them last. “Basically fine,” they tell me, “except for this fight that we had last Tuesday.” Then they proceed to tell me in detail about the fight, as if it is what really matters, and all those days of “basically fine” aren’t worth mentioning.

To be fair, maybe this couple figures that I consider the occasional lapse to be more important than their days of success. I don’t. In fact, I am convinced that for all couples repairing or rebuilding a relationship what needs to be central is not problems but their vision of the healthy, whole relationship that they want.

When problems are the focus of the work, you talk about problems. In the process, they become more prominent – and sometimes more intractable – rather than less prominent and smaller. The “you get more of whatever you notice” rule seems to apply here, as it does in so many areas.

This is not to say that problems don’t get solved. They do, at which point counseling typically ends. Fine – except that the couple with diminished problems isn’t necessarily closer to realizing the relationship’s potential than they were before.

What is needed is a healing method that focuses on developing a positive vision of the desired relationship and working to realize it. I’ll explore that approach in the next post.

Comments

[Carol]

well, dang, this is a good point. all the god times shouldn't be eclipsed by the bad time.

it certainly makes you think a bit. if all our paid jobs were to be focussed only on our fialures at work, we would quit. we should no more focus on our problems as the essence of our relationships than we focus on our fialures at work as the essence of our jobs.

[Geneva]

Carol I told myself that I would not post another comment today. However your response to Dr. Sanford's Building a Positive Marriage inspires me to suggest that we keep a logue of our successes in our "paid work' and also keep a logue(ideally mutual)of our positive thoughts and events which occur in our relationships with our partners. Hum, could change the world for the better, no doubt.

[FreeStoring]

hay!!
good project :)
senks :)

[ali]

hi... good article doc.
it helps me realize couple of my flaws in my realtionship.