Couple Support

Different Couples — Different Goals in Couples Counseling

Some people come to couples counseling seeking symptom relief; they just want the pain to go away. Other people want to go beyond symptom relief and learn how to succeed together. Couples in a third, smaller group want to build a growth relationship, meaning a relationship that prospers and grows and both of them growing right along with it. Let's look at each possibility.

Symptom relief. Imagine a couple that fights a lot. During these battles they say awful things to each other. They are in real pain and go into counseling to make the pain go away. Each is deeply relieved to discover in counseling that the other wants the marriage to continue and wishes to stop fighting.

Their shared sense of relief carries them into the "honeymoon" phase of counseling; the fighting diminishes, and the pain begins to go away. Unfortunately, the honeymoon is brief. Mistaking symptom relief for genuine change, the couple quits counseling after a few sessions. Soon the fighting resumes and with it the old pain, because the couple didn't work together long enough to figure out what real change would involve.

The people who come to counseling to learn how to succeed together generally do better than the symptom-relief folks. Those who succeed come to understand the dysfunctional behavior that caused their relationship to flounder. They develop ways of doing better and eventually end counseling knowing, more than before, how to succeed at their relationship.

Success doesn't necessarily mean a dynamic, expanding relationship, however, nor does it necessarily mean that partners grow, individually or together. Much depends on how "success" is defined. For example, a couple might say, "We have a successful marriage. I live my life, he lives his life, and we don't bother each other." Success on their terms - but not personal or relationship growth.

The richer your sense of what constitutes a good relationship, the greater the skill and discipline you must bring to achieving it. Based on my experience working with couples, I see nine different areas of skill, attitude and commitment that are involved. I'll begin to describe those areas in my next blog post. Meanwhile -

Please comment: What do you think it takes to build a growing relationship?

You Want Interest? Don't Just Observe - Participate!

Life that you engage with is inherently more interesting than life that you merely observe. This realization came to me during the time that I was involved in therapeutic and personal growth groups. Group members who sat on the sidelines and observed what was going on tended to be critical of the group and to find it boring until they abandoned the observer role and began to participate.

When people got involved - sharing their own experience and engaging with other people's experience - their attitudes changed. The group had become their group.

What you invest yourself in acquires a much different meaning from what it had when you were the uninvolved observer. It is a fact that when you participate in something, it becomes interesting to you partly because now it has you in it.

The generalization holds for the community you live in, for your garden, your kids' activities - and for your marriage. It also holds true for this blog. CoupleSupport.com will be a much more interesting, dynamic and useful blog when you and other people contribute to it.

As a couples counselor and coach, I am glad to write a piece each week about couple relationships (based usually on my work with couples and sometimes on my own marriage also).

I strive to write material that will be useful to you and to others. However, CoupleSupport.com becomes something much richer than a "The Doctor Says..." monologue when you use the Comments section to add your experience, your observations, your agreements and disagreements and your questions and other people come along and add their comments to yours.

You have your own lived wisdom to share. Get involved. Basically, you can do so anonymously if anonymity matters to you. You can contribute first-name only, and the email address you include won't appear with your comments.

I hope you will join us.

Do You Like the Role(s) You Play in Your Marriage or Relationship?

You are not going to do well in your marriage or relationship if you don't like your part. It's like the predicament of an actor in a play who can't get into the role that s/he plays and therefore doesn't play it well. Odd then that many of us who don't really don't like ourselves in the marital role that we are playing, do nothing but complain about it and then like ourselves even less.

There are any number of reasons why people don't like themselves in their marriage or relationship role: They are submissive when they don't want to be, nagging when they hate nagging, long suffering in silence, when what they want is a strong, take-charge role.

They are cautious and careful when they want to be spontaneous and take chances. They are slaves to work when they desperately want to play and cold and distant when their impulse - and the role they want to play - is warm and affectionate.

When people don't like themselves in their roles, not only do they do them poorly, but if things don't improve, they almost certainly leave the relationship. They don't necessarily pack up and move out. But they almost certainly withdraw in favor of roles where they like themselves much better. They pour their energy into friendships with friends who like them and encourage them to be themselves. If they are good mothers and fathers then, failing at the marriage, they strive to become even better parents. If they do well at their trade or profession, they stay at work as many hours as possible.

If "I don't like myself in this relationship" is your problem as well, there are steps you can take. You can literally resign from the play (get divorced). You can do what you may already be doing: play your distasteful role as lightly and minimally as possible, while investing yourself wholeheartedly elsewhere.

And a more creative option: You can approach your partner to see if your partner also doesn't like the role that s/he plays in this marriage or relationship. A tip: Don't go to your partner full of blame. Remember: You don't like yourself in the blaming role. Besides, it isn't your partner's fault that you play the role you do. You could quit, you know.

Tell your partner without blame that you simply don't like yourself in the role or roles that you play in the relationship. (E.g., "I hate that I am distant and cold with you, when what I want is to be close and affectionate.") Then find out if - surprise - your partner also doesn't like the roles in which s/he finds herself and see if together you can make changes so that both of you can get to like yourselves more - and succeed better as partners.

Please comment: Describe a role that you sometimes (often?) play in your relationship that you don't like. What role would you like instead?

The Sweetness of Feeling Fond of Your Partner

Do you ever catch yourself in a moment of special fondness for your partner? Maybe at a party you see your wife talking animatedly with a friend and feel a rush of fondness for her. Or as you watch your husband working in the garden, you suddenly feel really fond of him.

Fondness is one of the special rewards of a genuinely warm and caring relationship. Obviously, I'm not talking about the "nothing special" form of fondness that people have in mind when they say things like, "I'm fond of him, but I certainly don't love him."

The fondness that I'm speaking about is a gentle, quiet emotion, not passionate or intense but heartfelt - something that is likely to endure. The experience of fondness has little or nothing to do with thinking or attitude. It is instead an act of seeing, in which you catch your partner doing something endearing.

Fondness is a gentle mix of friendliness, affection and affinity. It is the sort of thing you might say about a good friend. To be able to say it about your partner is a special treat. Fondness is often the mellow experience of a well-burnished relationship that has endured for some time.

How do you get to experience fondness toward your partner, if you don't already? You have to like that person; the relationship has to be free enough of conflict for the sun to shine through, so to speak.

You have to experience your partner in order to feel fondness toward her/him. This sounds self-evident, but some people seldom have a simple experience of the other person; instead they are full of ideas, concepts and conclusions, and thinking about those is what passes for experience.

You must have stayed together and worked at the relationship long enough to come to an acceptance of the other person as s/he is. Fondness often is what you feel toward your partner after the tempest, when you have made piece with the relationship as it is. You get to experience fondness after you have stopped trying to change your partner.

Please comment: When do you feel fond of your partner?