A few weeks ago, I said here that I had made the decision to start a clinical program for couples therapy. Well, there are 3 levels and I have just completed level 1 ,the easiest and least time consuming level to be sure. The certification process will take the better part of a year and in addition, it. is. not. cheap. But nothing worth anything really is, now is it? I am so much smarter already.
Since I got my Masters in Social Work in l993, I have been primarily focused on grief work and spent 14 years in pediatric oncology. That consisted of crisis intervention (it is a bitch to be told your kid has cancer y’all), grief therapy, child and adolescent counseling, family counseling at times, doctor counseling often (as in, get your ass back in that room and give them that information again, better this time) and occasionally couples therapy, but all in the confines of the hospital and cancer experience. When my kids just kept coming, I finally gave it up in 2007. It was too hard emotionally, too hard on my kids who had to deal with me having to leave abruptly (I was on call for death), too hard, too hard… Since then, I have done mental health work with actual mentally ill people. It is boring actually because it is mostly treated by medication; no one ever cured a schizophrenic with talk therapy. No one.
Since my divorce, my own couples therapy (a total failure) and all of the reading and writing I have done about divorce, I’ve gotten really interested in CT and I think it will give me something clinically interesting to focus on going forward. A Bored Cuckoo Momma is not good.
Couples therapy gets a really, really bad rap.
There are actually blog posts and articles here on DivorcedMoms by people saying how absolutely useless CT is. One of them, written by our own Deja Vow, was carried on Huffington Post, ‘Marriage Counseling Made My Marriage Worse’ and came in with a whopping 163 comments (most agreeing with her) and had 831 shares on FB.
I hated it. I hated to read how terrible her therapist was (really, really terrible from the things she wrote) and I hated to see how many other people had also had dismal experiences.
But then again, I had one of those dismal experiences myself.
Stanley and I went, finally. I had been begging him for several years. By the time he agreed to go, I was mostly done. I thought that he would like the therapist, she was a fellow Brit, and I thought that maybe he wouldn’t feel ganged up on since I was about a billion miles ahead of the game, both in terms of my profession and my ability to process emotion verbally while he is like a cave man that pounds on rocks to get his point across.
I don’t know. Maybe she sensed my ambivalence and didn’t try hard, but it did absolutely no good; she would assign homework and he wouldn’t do it, just like I expected he wouldn’t. I would sit there on the sofa, me on one end, him on the other, both turned away from each other, and cry when she asked if he had done his homework.
I think a large part of the failure of CT is because it is predestined to fail. First, people wait way too long to go. Actually, research shows that couples report on average they have been having problems in their relationship for 6 years before they go to counseling.
6 years people.
(Stanley and I were Exhibit A on the poster titled
COUPLES WHO WAITED TOO LONG TO GO TO COUNSELING)
Most of the time, by the time both partners are agreeable to going to CT, one of the partners has already emotionally checked out of the marriage and is only going to have a safe place to tell their partner that they want a divorce.
(Stanley and I were Exhibit B)
CT can only work if both partners are still emotionally invested in the marriage and will commit to doing the work. Otherwise, it becomes the place where you say the words, “I want a divorce” and decide how to tell the children and split assets, which is fine, there is a place for that too.
I’m studying The Gottman Method of Couples Therapy. John and Julie Gottman are very well known and respected in the field, they do research based work and their theory makes sense to me.
I will tell you that my CT, did none of what they teach.
If she had, we might have done better.
For example:
Gottman teaches that you spend 3 sessions assessing the relationship. In that time, you have the first meeting as a joint session, ‘explain to me your perception of the problem’ and ‘what did you like about each other in the first place’ sort of thing. At the end of the session, you have each fill out questionnaires that evaluate their commitment to the relationship, their level of marital satisfaction, etc. In session 2, you meet with each of them alone, 45 min for one partner, then 45 min for the other, going over their questionnaires and getting their story and individual goals for therapy. In Session 3, you give them your impressions and help them make a plan for therapy. There are no secrets allowed, the therapist will not keep secrets.
If our therapist had done this we might not have spent 10 sessions walking around the elephant in the living room which was, “He won’t even bother doing his homework and I am done.”
BTW, Al reports that their experience was no better, he was already done and it was a complete waste of time. But again, that isn’t the fault of couples therapy.
Anyway, I’m sure I will be laying some little snippets on you from time to time whether you want them or not. So get ready.
I actually attended couples therapy with my ex BEFORE we got married. I realize now that the CT knew that we were doomed to fail. Not her fault at all. Great article CM! Congrats on your new career path!
(And Stanley’s a Brit? Really?)
I actually attended couples therapy with my ex BEFORE we got married. I realize now that the CT knew that we were doomed to fail. Not her fault at all. Great article CM! Congrats on your new career path!
(And Stanley’s a Brit? Really?)
Yes, girl, he is. Thanks!
Yes, girl, he is. Thanks!
My SIL and her DH just went to a Gottman weekend retreat. She is feeling very optimistic, and your take on the method makes me feel better, too.
Good for them, Nancy! I’m really impressed so far. I looked into all of the different programs and ‘theories’ re: couples therapy and chose Gottman. It makes a lot of clinical sense and I can see in hindsight that it could have helped us.
Good for them, Nancy! I’m really impressed so far. I looked into all of the different programs and ‘theories’ re: couples therapy and chose Gottman. It makes a lot of clinical sense and I can see in hindsight that it could have helped us.
Good for them, Nancy! I’m really impressed so far. I looked into all of the different programs and ‘theories’ re: couples therapy and chose Gottman. It makes a lot of clinical sense and I can see in hindsight that it could have helped us.
Good for them, Nancy! I’m really impressed so far. I looked into all of the different programs and ‘theories’ re: couples therapy and chose Gottman. It makes a lot of clinical sense and I can see in hindsight that it could have helped us.
My first experience with couples therepy was great at first, but ultimately not good at all. I had a laundry list of complaints, she sided with me on everything, and my poor husband just sat there a took it. He went off and did his homework, but I still wasn’t happy. Next session was a repeat of the first. Third session, he refused to go. Said we could pick a different counselor, but was never going back to that one. I’m still not happy, so I picked a new one and we went. It was a much different session. She listened to me, asked him if that was true or how he really felt or why he did what he did, and then moved on to the next issue and so on. At the end of the session, she told us that there was no point in couples therepy until I worked on my issues. My issues, but!!! I continued with her on my own for a while and got to the root of my issues and could see that I had a good husband that I wasn’t in love with. I started dating him when I was 15 and going through a traumatic time with my parents. His mother became my surogeatte mother and he was a safe place to be that I simply had out grown. I was more worried about loosing him as a friend and his family than I was about feeding a starving husband. We then met as a couple and it was all about getting along better. I’ll say that it worked. We got along great – still do. But it didn’t save my marriage. We tried one of those couple retreats to try to reignite my libido. We tried hard, but by the end of the week he told me that he would let me go if that is what I needed. It took a while to actually separate because the other bonus from the retreat was our third child.
Sometimes I wonder if the first counselor was really so bad. Maybe she saw that I wasn’t in love and was trying to get all of the issues that I had built up out of the way. I was hiding behind them. Or, she just wasn’t that good at her job.
I think you will make an outstanding couples’ therapist. Not only because you are studying Gottman, who actually backs up his methods with statistical data and clinical results, but because you’ve been on the side of the couple.
Keep us posted on what you’re learning. 🙂
I made a stupid marriage ending mistake, compounded by a series of stupid mistakes dealing with it. My husband responded in typical male fashion with a nuclear strike. I went from thinking I had survived a dangerous swim, swearing I would never again be so foolish, to being chained to a cement block at the bottom of a cold dark lake.
He point blank told me that the marriage was over and he was uninterested in marriage counseling. We have children and I managed to cajole him into at least trying. Man was that painful. I expected deal with my mistakes, but I wasn’t prepared to find out just unhappy my husband was with me and our marrige. Except for my mistake, I thought we were basically OK. It was an hour of very respectfully beating the cr*p out of Lumen. At the end, she gave us some things to work on before the next session. My husband reiterated that he was only interested in things that would lead to us being able to peacefully coparent our kids, but he was willing to give her another chance.
We continued and things between us got a lot better. He took most of her advice and changed a lot. I tried to do the same. I had a lot of work to do on me, but in the end, it didn’t save our marriage. He had been done for quite a while, I just was too wrapped up in my own deal to see it. He had his “get out of marriage free card” and wasn’t going to give it up. I’ve changed alot and aplogized for my part and to some extent, he’s owned his stuff too.
Today, I can honestly say we are friends. You can invite both of us to your party and we might even ride together. We comfortably work together raising our kids, and I know he’s got my back. I travel a lot for work and I can commit to a trip on my parenting time and know that he’ll cover for me without checking first (but I always do check first). If I miss a play, I know that I’ll have a video of it in my inbox an hour after they get home.
All in all, even though it didn’t save our marriage, the counceling was a life saver for all of us. My only regret was that my ex didn’t force me to see how unhappy he was at a point early enough that the counceling would have saved our marriage. I know that our marriage could have been saved, unfortunately we didn’t try until he no longer wanted it.
I’ve read your blog, and I think you will make a great counselor. You seem to have a genuine interest in both sides of the story. To often, councelors take one side or the other. Just be careful to not let the beatings go on too long when things are one sided.
I also love that you tried bird nesting. A lot of people go on and on about putting the kids first, but they usually mean that the other parent should do something or give up something. If I had it to do all over again, I would have tried it. I moved out, thinking it would be temporary and confident that a little space would make us both see what we had to lose. Unfortunately, what actually happened is that it put me at severe disadvantage in our divorce. For the kids, it meant dealing with a tumultuous transition with a lot of uncertainty. It would have been better to bird nest during the separation phase and then transition to permanent plan when we actually got divorced.
Lumen