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My Couple Therapy Assumptions
- I work on the
well founded clinical assumption that people in long term relationships
always pair up with an emotional equal, so if you believe that you are
either significantly healthier or more dysfunctional than your partner,
be prepared to confront yourself about this.
- The opposite
of dysfunctional is dysfunctional. The cure for being violent or mean
is not to become overly "nice" and passive-aggressive. The cure for
strict, rigid parenting is not to baby children and give them no
limits. Being dependent and clingy is not remedied by becoming
"needless" and over-independent. The cure for boredom is not chaos.
- do not try
to waste your time and money by using our meetings as "complaint
sessions" in which you come in and tattle on your partner and then look
to me to pass judgment on which one of you has been better or worse
since our last session. It is your marriage, and only you can make that
determination. My job is to help you confront yourself.
- While it may
take a number of sessions for this to occur, when both of you make the
all-important shift to asking what your own part is in the problem
instead of how things would be better if your partner would just
change, the therapy work begins to accelerate dramatically.
- By
definition, marriage is a sexual relationship.
- The problems
that we all have in our sex lives have the identical structure to our
financial conflicts, our battles about children, our struggles with
in-laws, and so on. In systems, this is called isomorphism .
- The distance
between an awful and an awesome relationship is often minimal. What
makes change difficult for some people is that they either want a
dramatic, quick fix-there is no such thing-or they are unwilling to
change one small belief about life that will turn their relationship
from a disaster into a blessing.
- Passion does
not leave a relationship after six or ten years. Passion and chemistry
are essential and permanent fixtures in healthy romantic/marital
relationships. If the passion is dead or dying, it is most likely
because the couple is either afraid of conflict, or has engaged in
destructive conflict for so long that they have become more or less
constantly frightened or numb. In either case, learning to have a
clear, strong self and clear, healthy conflict without doing damage is
key to having deep intimacy.
- People need
to learn to both express and also contain their emotions. Doing one
without the other creates big problems in a romantic relationship.
- Rage is
always preceded by one, or some, or all of the following: fear, hurt,
shame, sadness, and loneliness. These "softer emotions" are the keys to
relationship violence, but they are also the keys to the deepest
connections imaginable. It all depends on how you use them.
- Grown-ups
fight about little stuff-being late, leaving socks on the closet floor,
using your partner's favorite pen, etc. If you believe you shouldn't
fight about these things because that's not what grown-ups fight about,
you're wrong. You might ask yourself why you believe that.
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