For Better or For Worse:

How Couples Counseling Can Help Your Relationship

A person calling me for couples counseling almost always says, "We are having trouble communicating." Usually the person assigns the blame to their partner: He won't listen; she's so busy. The person on the phone doesn't realize that both partners are engaged in repetitive patterns, which are usually holdovers from childhood behaviors and learning. These patterns of communication interlock, so each person says the same thing over and over.

I'll describe why these communication painful dynamics occur and how couples counseling can address them. When I say patterns, I'm including almost all painful communication conflicts which couples repeat: blaming, accusing, withdrawing, avoiding, pursuing, ignoring, yelling, dismissing, et. al.

Let's start with a classic interchange from my practice as an example.

A Pursuer Avoider Couple

Jim is a forty year old computer programmer. In counseling he says, "I come home from work. I have talked to computers and people on the phone all day. I want some human contact."

His wife Carmen, a dark haired realtor, feels pressured. She responds with a firm tone, "I've worked all day too. And when I come home, I want a bath. I want to work in my garden. Having space is okay."

This is their standard conversation. I ask Jim, "What happens when you actually come home?"

"Well, for one thing," he says, and he relaxes a little in his chair. "I'm so tired. It's exhausting -driving, flourescent lights, computers, phones all day. And then I'm thinking about Carmen, and how much I love her, while I'm driving home."

"How are you feeling right now, telling the story?"

"I'm feeling warm, and my heart is open." Carmen now is leaning towards Jim. She likes to hear how he loves her. "And when I come into the driveway, I start feeling anxious," Jim continues, and he touches his stomach. "Like I'm going to mess it up and make Carmen mad at me."

I ask Jim , "So you feel this anxiety in your stomach when you come home. What does that tension remind you of? When might you have felt that at other times."

Jim is silent for a few moments. Then he says, "I don't know...but my mother drank a lot when I was a kid. When I came home from school, I was always afraid of her rages. I didn't like coming home."

"So somehow, this feeling of coming home to Carmen reminds you of this old anxiety," I say.

"Well. I never thought of it like that, but yeah."

I turn to Carmen, "What do you notice while Jim tells this story?"

She leans forward, and brushes back her thick black hair. "Well when he just browbeats me into talking to him, I get really annoyed. But like right now, I understand he feels all this anxiety. I have met his parents, and they can really get loaded and fight. I feel some sympathy for him."

She pauses for a moment, and says, "I also had a memory, that my mother was sick a lot when I was a kid, and I had three younger sisters. I usually cooked for them, and I grew up really independent. I used to go out with boys in college who were so distant, and I never could connect with them. At least Jim wants to talk with me."

Jim smiles at her and he says, "This is all I want, Carmen. Just some sense of really talking and really listening. It's a relief that you aren't pushing me away right now." She smiles back.

I'm summarizing several conversations here, but I think you get the point. When partners share their own role in these painful patterns or defenses, then they can connect, they can actually learn from each other. When they just blame the other or withdraw, then distance and disappointment are the natural consequences.

Painful Communication Patterns: Observations

1. The communication patterns that concern couples who seek counseling are repetitive. Some one gets blamed, judged, or ignored, and he reacts, using almost the identical language every time it happens. (I tell couples they should just write down their dialogue and give it to the other person; it would save time.)
2. Couples want to change these patterns, but they don't know how.
3. Typically, each person in the pattern thinks that the pattern will change if their partner changes. (You can see where this theory goes-each waits for the other to get some brilliant insight into how they are wrong.)
4. These patterns reflect something in each person that needs to be healed, or changed, or loved. Each partner is bringing to the conflict an old belief or defense or communication pattern, which they learned as a child.

In Jim's case, when he was a child, he expected to feel anxious when he went home, and later, the same thing happens to him when he is an adult. He thinks it's Carmen's independence which is causing the problem. And Carmen keeps playing out a sad psychodrama. She accuses Jim of smothering her, because she was wrestling with her independence. It's not until each person reveals their own wounded heart, or misplaced beliefs, or errant communication strategies, that there can be a healing, or a change.

The step of self-responsibility is crucial. Once we get curious, once we ask ourselves, "How am I helping to create this familiar situation?" then we can change. We can actually heal the unconscious old suffering that is driving our behavior.

One of the tragedies of the human condition is our tendency to repeat old hurts, often unconsciously. One of the miracles, though, is the love and awareness can help us heal these hurts and change our behaviors.

What Couples Counseling Can Do

Good couples counseling will expose these patterns, and it will teach the couple concrete skills they can use. Those skills are:

1. Self-inquiry. Couples need to learn what they are actually feeling. As we go into a reactive pattern, we need to sense our own bodies and feelings. Sensing and studying our bodies are skills which we should have learned in grade school but didn't. Self-inquiry allows us to take responsibility, to understand our own behaviors and reactions a little better.
2. Self-disclosure, Most of us have very little practice in saying how we feel and what our needs are. We either shut up or blame. Couples counseling is an ideal place for each person to practice more vulnerable communication. When we learn to be more truthful about our own experience and needs, we develop deeper feelings of connection and cooperation.

In couples counseling which is based on skill-building, lengthy relationship histories usually are not necessary. As the partners tell stories about their current issues, they start to interrupt, they sit forward or back, and they subtly demonstrate the very issues that they want to heal. An active therapist can intervene directly in those moments, and teach the couple how to communicate about their issues, in a very different way, using the skills I have just outlined.

When couples learn to talk to each other openly, the patterns begin to change dramatically. It's no longer World War III when someone is asked to take out the garbage.

In successful couples counseling, partners eventually tell me stories about how they are now talking about the same issues in different, more self-revealing ways. Their reports tell us the good news about intimacy. You can learn how to create it, by using vulnerable, self- revealing language. You can learn how to speak to your partner in a way that brings them closer to you, and that gives you the feeling of warmth and connection that you want.

George Taylor, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist #31219, has worked with couples for fifteen years.

Email: geotaylor@earthlink.net. Phone: 415-258-9516