Counseling for Couples

Though joining lives can be richly rewarding, it is in reality no easy task to live alongside another person, balancing our own desires, expectations and ideas about life with true respect for our partner’s distinctly personal approach to the same. Where “co-operating” is the key, we often find ourselves competing instead.

What’s more, we often bring our unresolved personal issues to the relationship, believing at some level that the sense of worthiness, security, or belonging that has evaded us in the past will be found at last in our partner’s love and attention. While popular culture assures us this is so, it sets us up to burden our relationships with impossible expectations and eventually with disappointment, resentment, and even despair. Understandably, hurt and disenchantment often distract us from the task of becoming, ourselves, the loving partner we long for in another…

In reality, the most successful intimate relationships occur between two healthy people endeavoring to be their best selves, actively supporting one another in meeting the many demands of life. Such relationships are underscored with mutual respect, goodwill and the welcome understanding that how they live their lives deeply impacts the life of their beloved.

Mired down in hurt or frustration, perhaps stuck in an endless cycle of conflict, you may be wondering how to get there from here. Read on about Couples Counseling and how it may help.

Sometimes one or both partners in a stressed relationship are feeling desperate to be heard and reassured that their complaints are valid. They may enter counseling expecting, at last, the refereed opportunity to establish who is “right” and who is “clearly wrong”. There may even be a secret hope that the one ‘broken’ or ill-behaved party can be exposed and “fixed”.

In fact, relationships are rarely that simple.

Here are a few of the important tasks we often tackle in couples’ work:

Gaining Clarity

A truly therapeutic process, one with the possibility of creating lasting change, must concern itself with habitual ways of relating that just aren’t working anymore. We can look past the day-to-day content of the issue and see through to the ideas and attitudes, the stored-up disappointments and resentments that may now be expressed in shorthand, through distance, for example, or perhaps through problems with sexual intimacy, infidelity or dishonesty. We can clear away the cluttered and confusing debris of past conflict and together clarify the true dilemma of the relationship.

Finding A New Perspective

Relationship wounds take time and patience to heal. And people do need to be heard and validated in their pain. But coming to see what has transpired through the eyes of your partner can help give the past a new meaning. It can also be powerful to truly appreciate that the meanings we place on events are not universal givens. When we embrace that our understandings are greatly determined by the unique filter through which we see the world, we can free ourselves to be expressive instead of defensive. We can free ourselves to listen better and see our partners more clearly. This and more is the work of couples counseling.

Becoming Our Best Selves

Another important task in couples therapy, as in individual therapy, is developing clarity around our own convictions and developing the personal courage to live up to them.

Often we justify our own ‘bad’ behavior with the ‘worse’ behavior of our partner – afraid that in refusing to be reactive, we will be taken advantage of. We may believe that if we choose instead to act according to our own convictions about loving behavior, to pursue developing our ‘best selves’, our partner will forever get away with their less than kind or respectful behavior and we will be stuck with our frustration and disappointment. It’s an “I won’t if he (or she) won’t” mentality. Can you see the problem?

If nothing changes, nothing changes.

Resolving Personal Issues

Without question, modern life and its many stressors can strain relationships just as it does individuals. Often, under stress, areas of unexplored personal vulnerability emerge and partners seem more like bitter enemies than trusted helpmates. Being our best self can seem secondary to just getting through the day. In couples counseling, we can sort out the personal issues that are at play and come to understand how each party, perhaps without awareness, is helping maintain the troubling dynamic in the couple.

Unburdening the Relationship

From a place of greater courage and clarity of conviction, of enhanced self- and mutual awareness, a couple can find themselves freer to simply co-operate and collaborate in life. Indeed with nothing to prove, get even for or protect oneself against, we can let the challenges of life be just that, challenges, and trust the power of goodwill, open hearts, and two creative minds to navigate them together.

The Adlerian Depth approach to couples counseling is unique in many ways: After establishing the goal of therapy with the couple, I initially work with each partner individually in order to understand each person and their way of seeing the world. It is in coming to understand each individual’s outlook on life that we can begin to understand how the couple’s joint world view has fallen into disharmony. Over time, the course of therapy will evolve to be a mixture of individual and well-focused joint sessions as the couples’ unique situation dictates.

This approach, based on Adlerian principles, has been found to be effective across a wide spectrum of couples’ issues – from newly formed couples getting to know one another well, for making major job or life-related decisions, and for serious marital disruptions. It has been reassuring for couples to know that partner-relationships can be repaired with willingness to do the hard work of deep assessment and restructuring.

Even couples that have decided to separate or divorce can benefit from this approach to counseling. These couples can mobilize the same principles to go forward with more understanding and less hostility, and when applicable, better prepared to co-parent in a way that most benefits their children.

I do believe couples can develop open, honest and caring ways of interacting that lead to a renewed sense of acceptance, good will and equal dignity between the partners who have joined as a couple. Within this mutually respectful relationship can be found the strength to support one another in the common tasks set before them – such as raising children, facing a daunting work situation or working together to improve the world we share.