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Welcome to familywisdom.com, a website dedicated to informing and inspiring couples and families. Each week you will find a new article, story or essay about parenting, marriage or life. Suggestions for articles and questions to Ellen Terich are welcome. You can contact her at e.terich1@verizon.net |
MARRIAGE COUNSELING: BENEFITS AND HAZARDS 2004-04-05 Everyone who has been married for longer than 15 minutes knows that marriage is fraught with difficulties. The moment the glow of infatuation begins to wear off you realize you have promised to live for the rest of your life with the peculiarities, opinions, habits, and neuroses of another person. And that is before you even bring another person, a baby, into the mix. Once you make the decision to become a family, not just a couple, you find you have really complicated things. Your marriage definitely goes through an ordeal of adjustment. Throughout marriage, in fact, couples make many adjustments. One or both spouses change jobs, perhaps one leaves a career to stay home with children and then returns to work a few years later. One spouse becomes ill or must have surgery. In-laws create conflict and must be dealt with. Children have illnesses, or learning or behavior problems. Money is scarce or plentiful, leading to the revision of spending habits. One or both spouses go through crises of development, changes of interest or even attraction to another person. The partners get older, suffer losses and adapt to an empty nest. The list of potential problems is endless. The truth is that every marriage goes through rough spots. Many couples are able to successfully navigate these troubles without assistance, but others seek help from friends, clergy, physicians or marriage counselors. None of these advisors, however, is a perfect choice. Even some of the so-called marriage counselors are often only trained to work with individuals. So in order to assist you in finding the best professional help for your marriage, let me first explain why some of these advisors may not be helpful and then offer some suggestions for how to find the ones that are. Many individual spouses turn to friends for support and advice when marital problems arise. Occasionally, a very enlightened friend may be able to normalize the problems, indicate that they themselves and other couples have overcome such problems, and offer encouragement to keep trying and remember the good times. But friends untrained in relationship dynamics can also make things worse. In listening to the complaints you have with your spouse, most friends try to see things your way and may side with you against your spouse. Some even play "ain't it awful" with you by pronouncing that all men or women are impossible to live with. If your friend is divorced and bitter, he or she may even try to convince you that leaving your marriage is the best way to resolve your problems. Misery, after all, does love company. Obviously this kind of friendly advice isn't helpful. Clergy are often the first stop for religious couples who are struggling in their marriages. When priests and ministers are also trained specifically in the newer, proven methods of marriage counseling, they may be quite helpful. But when clergy focus only on scriptural elements and the morality of keeping the commitment, and don't provide tools to promote acceptance and behavior change, there is the risk not only of continuing unhappiness but of adding to it feelings of guilt for the anger and loss of loving feelings that remain. Celibate priests, particularly, may be unhelpful marital counselors as they have no experience in being married. Physicians are sometimes relied upon for marital help, and while the earliest "marriage counselors" were physicians who dispensed advice, today's doctor is liable to do little more than dispense antidepressants. Physicians receive no training in marital therapy and so have very little to offer unhappy spouses. In addition, they are usually overbooked and have little time to discuss personal matters. In an effort to be helpful in ways other than prescribing medication, therefore, a happily married physician might suggest something that worked in his or her marriage. Again, this doesn't do much to assist a couple who are headed for divorce court. Finally, there is the profession of marriage counseling, a relatively new specialty, having grown out of the psychoanalytic as well as family therapy fields around the middle of the last century. The psychoanalysts, for example, noticed that after helping an individual with his or her own problems, the patient's marriage often got worse. They therefore began to suggest that both husband and wife seek individual therapy. The theory (and it was just a theory) was that if you "cured" each partner individually, the marriage would automatically get better. This didn't work, largely because it addressed only individual issues, not the specific dynamics of couple relationships. The family therapy movement was the next influence on marriage counseling. The one positive concept this movement brought to the effort to help couples was the idea that both people in the couple contribute to marital problems. Family therapists who saw couples saw them both together and looked at the marriage as the client, rather than the individual spouses. This offered help to some couples but it still fell short. Family therapists still did not have a body of research and knowledge that specifically focused on the very real stresses and the unique challenges of marriage. Also, family therapists attempted to accomplish some form of behavior change in one or both spouses. The idea was that if there were marital problems, one or both spouses must be behaving in ways that needed changing. As it turns out, this isn't always true. Today, there are very few psychotherapists who have specialized training in marriage counseling. Most have a great deal of training in treating mental illness and working with individuals. Some have had further training in working with families. But the kind of training that is required to really help couples in crisis is not available to all aspiring therapists. Therefore, you are really rolling the dice when you choose a therapist out of the phone book or accept a referral from your doctor. The highly respected psychotherapist you make an appointment to see may know next to nothing about marriage or how to help troubled relationships. And, unfortunately, just because a person is licensed as a "Marital and Family Therapist" doesn't mean they have much training in marriage counseling. What we have learned recently from researchers and therapists like John Gottman, Andrew Christensen, Neil Jacobson, Susan Johnson and Michele Weiner-Davis are things that long-term successfully married couples have known all along: every marriage has conflict; every marriage has a number of unsolvable problems; couples who succeed in marriage learn how to practice tolerance and acceptance of certain issues; healing takes place when couples understand and acknowledge the vulnerable feelings, like hurt, sadness, fear and loneliness, underlying anger; and taking responsibility for your own behavior rather than blaming your partner works best. In spite of the application of these important concepts to the practice of marriage counseling, a large number of marriage counselors still do not practice effectively. Either they are unfamiliar with the findings of these new practitioners and researchers or they are unwilling to change their strategy of helping people find individual happiness rather than working out the compromises that marriage requires. This makes choosing a marriage counselor a risky undertaking for couples in crisis. In order to help couples choose an effective marriage counselor, one who will advocate for the marriage rather than make things worse, I offer the following list of questions to ask any marriage counselor you interview before you hire them. (And you should always interview a therapist or marriage counselor before you sign on to weeks or months of therapy.) What kind of training do you have in marriage counseling? How many courses in marriage counseling did you take as part of your graduate training and have you had any advanced training? (If a counselor has only had one course in graduate school and a minimal amount of postgraduate training, they will probably not be able to help you, unless your problem is very minor.) How long have you been practicing as a marriage counselor and how many couples have you helped? (Unless a counselor has seen many couples over a number of years, or is currently in supervision with an experienced marriage counselor, they may not have the experience to be very helpful.) Have you ever heard of Integrative Couple Counseling, Emotionally Focused Marital Therapy or the research of John Gottman? What do you know about them? (If they know nothing about them, they are not up on the latest research.) Do you see couples together or do you prefer to see the spouses individually? (If they see spouses individually, it will generally not be helpful, with rare exceptions.) What is your idea of what makes a marriage successful? (If their answer includes the concepts of acceptance, tolerance, understanding, patience, giving and unselfishness - providing there is no abuse, violence, chronic infidelity or chemical dependency in the marriage - there might be some hope that they know how to help. If they talk only about love or changing behavior, they probably won't be helpful.) Are you or have you ever been married? (Therapists who have been married for a number of years, or those who were married for a considerable length of time but went through a divorce in which they learned something about relationships will be more helpful than those who have never married. Marriage counseling is the one profession, in my opinion, that requires a practitioner who has been there.) There are also some warning signs that you should heed when you begin marriage counseling. A counselor who asks you in a first or second session if you or your spouse are "still in love" or "still love each other" is someone who is inexperienced. Experienced therapists, and those in successful marriages, generally do not ask that question because they know that love and feelings of love come and go even in the best marriages. There's also no point in asking questions about feelings of love because there's nothing you can do with the answer. Another danger sign is a therapist who continually focuses on problems, lets you talk about them session after session and never works actively towards solutions. A therapist should never begin a session with "So, what problems did you have with each other this week?" Instead, a good therapist is always looking for progress, or positive actions. Likewise, a therapist should not spend a lot of time focusing on the past. While some knowledge of the origins of the problem may be helpful, trying to understand the past, rather than trying to move forward, is usually a waste of time. Another trap which some marriage counselors fall into is the one of giving up too soon. If your therapist ever suggests there is no solution to your problem, when you want to continue working on things, or even recommends divorce, at the very least you should seek a second opinion. Finally, the personal qualities you should seek in a marriage counselor, either an informal one like a friend or a formal one with a degree and license on the wall, include optimism, directness and candor, and a spirit of encouragement combined with the willingness to confront difficult situations. It is true that not all marriages can or should be saved. But when trouble comes, as it does in most marriages, and there is a chance to improve things, it is important to know that some professionals are more helpful than others. When you know what to look for, you have a better chance of receiving the best help available. |