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?

I Just Want Her to Be Happy

"What are you looking for?" the counselor asks the couple at their first session. The wife has a list of changes that she wants. The husband says, "I just want her to be happy." Why the difference between what she wants and he wants? More specifically, why does the husband apparently want so little?

Speaking cynically, "I just want her to be happy" could mean "I want her out of my hair with her misery. Doctor, doctor just make her stop."  If that were the case - and sometimes it is - we could assume that the husband wants little or nothing from the marriage, except for his wife's noisy unhappiness to stop - because he isn't really in the relationship. His concern is limited to securing peace and quiet for himself.

Another possibility: The husband long ago ceded the marriage to his wife. She can talk about feelings. She understands relationship. He is too relationship ignorant and incapable, he thinks, to have any legitimate wants or needs of his own. She is the important person here. He wouldn't think of trespassing on her domain; hence "I just want her to be happy."

And another possibility: Past experience with his wife has shown the husband  that it is simply not safe for him to have real needs of his own with her. He used to complain, he used to object - and got nowhere. His complaints were not legitimate. His needs were unfair or insulting to his wife. He was wrong - every time. So the husband stopped expressing his needs and, in fact, did his best not to have any.

The counselor working with this couple would need to support the husband in having needs of his own in the relationship and in expressing them. He would need to support the wife in respecting her husband's needs. He would need to honor the loneliness that they both had suffered. He would need to work with both spouses in finding common positive goals for their relationship - and in working together to realize them.

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.