WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A MARRIED PSYCHOTHERAPY?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Most married couples face a wide range of tensions and challenges throughout their married life. There are no married couples who could completely avoid scandals, discontent and crises in their lives.

In some cases, a married couple turns to a psychotherapist with the hope and desire to change their relationship, in others, one of the partners has already lost faith that their relationship can be rehabilitated and agrees to visit a psychologist to finally make sure of this. As one of my clients said when negotiating a consultation with me: “Promise that you will not put on a make-up show. This man agreed with his wife to visit a therapist only to demonstrate to his wife and daughter that he had tried everything he could. About a month later, this man sent me a jubilant text in Viber, in which he announced his divorce and asked him to congratulate him on this. Naturally, with such a mood of one of the spouses, there is no question of maintaining the relationship.

It must be said that psychotherapy for married couples does not necessarily aim to reconcile the spouses. In some cases, it's really better for people to stop torturing each other, break up and get a chance for a new relationship.

More often than not, people do not know what to expect from a visit to a therapist. Often, couples are filled with unrealistic expectations, for example, they believe that the therapist will act as a judge and make a verdict who is right and who is wrong, or that the psychotherapist's knowledge will allow him to offer the couple a way to solve their problem and some "magic tips" that will help to arrange everything in places. However, this is not often the case.

Some of my clients later confessed to me that when we first met, both of them had the same thought: “Why doesn't she advise anything? She has nothing to say? Or is our situation so unusual? " Their surprise at the therapist's behavior united them on the way back home, and they had to think together: “Is it worth it? And can she help us? " Well, it happens. The main thing is that we have united!

What can you expect from marital psychotherapy? How does it work? How much effort will it take for spouses to undergo psychotherapy? You can try to answer these questions by defining the goals to which the therapist strives. We can also say that this is the very magic advice, following which could change the relationship in a married couple.

Stop blaming

When a married couple first crosses the threshold of a psychotherapist's office, after they meet, the spouses most often start mutual accusations. In some rare cases, spouses retain the ability to listen to their partner with interest and respect, but more often they show anger, mutually irritating and interrupting each other.

When a conflict flares up, the rational will not give an automatic answer, not allow negative feelings and thoughts to completely take over consciousness. Since a scandal requires two, and the behavior of one partner triggers the behavior of the other, keeping oneself from anger prevents the escalation of the conflict. One of the most effective strategies you can use to stop a scandal that has begun is to refuse to have the final say.

Examine the scenario of your conflicts

In any relationship, there are moments of misunderstanding; unwittingly, each of us can involuntarily offend and hurt loved ones. All married couples fight and let off steam from time to time. This is not abnormal. Swearing, which ends in admitting one's mistakes and mutual concessions, as a rule, is more likely to be forgotten and leads to a more complete understanding of one's partner.

The growth of dissatisfaction with a partner, too frequent reproaches for his mistakes and unsuccessful attempts to influence him, as a result, result in angry reactions. When criticism is not expressed in a benevolent manner, this behavior of the partner is even more perceived as an attack. Further deterioration of this situation is manifested in neglect of the partner in the form of sarcastic remarks, sarcasm, offensive nicknames. As a result, more and more, the behavior of the spouses begins to resemble instinctive defensive reactions to a threat - flight, freezing, or struggle. Typical forms of self-defense are fighting to convince a partner that they should change, or avoidance and distance.

The most typical roles that spouses end up in are those of the persecutor and the aloof. Persecutors seek a closer bond, so their partners feel constant pressure from them. Those who withdraw, in turn, are not able to endure such a force of emotional intensity and react in a way characteristic of them - distancing. The persecutors are more often women, and the withdrawing ones are men, although it happens the other way around. Over time, this forms a vicious circle: each of the spouses causes the other's reactions, most often without realizing how this is happening. This vicious circle of inflexible reactions begins to take on a life of its own; he reproduces and reinforces himself. Understanding that you have become a victim of a self-reproducing, obsessive negative cycle, that your common trouble has a scenario that you are playing out is the first, but very important step in interrupting it.

Focus on yourself, not changing your partner

The conviction that the whole problem is centered in the partner and that it is he who must change is the fuel on which the fire of conflict burns. Instead of looking honestly at their inner problems, many are under the illusion of finding solutions to problems outside themselves.

In fact, the only person you can definitely change is none other than yourself. If both spouses accept this, the change in their relationship becomes more real. Of course, changing oneself and accepting a spouse works when it is mutual. In cases where only one is ready to change, this can turn into unnecessary self-sacrifice.

Learn to listen

At the beginning of a relationship, partners are usually attentive and patient with each other, and if a misunderstanding arises, they are ready to talk peacefully, listen to and acknowledge the feelings and legitimacy of the other's arguments. When scandals become an integral part of the life of spouses, and negative emotional reactions can appear almost instantly in response to an attack by one of the parties, then it takes some effort and time to restore the ability to listen and hear each other.

Listening is a kind of art that requires openness and recognition of each other's uniqueness. When our words and the feelings behind them are listened to kindly, we feel understood, we feel liberated and close to our partner. On the contrary, when our words are ignored, ridiculed, or simply not given the opportunity to speak out, it annoys, offends and alienates people from each other.

Experience shows that most often both spouses are right in some way and wrong in some way. The struggle to assert one's innocence and angry reactions can, like a spiral, unwind more and more intensely, leading to serious consequences. The uncontrolled outburst of negative emotions that occurs during a scandal is detrimental to the relationship, because it does not provide an opportunity to think rationally. If the scandal is not restrained by the efforts of both spouses at first, if the partners are unable to cool down and peacefully proceed to "debriefing", recognizing their mutual contribution to the conflict, then things are really bad and the help of a specialist is required.

Explore family stories

Everyone has their own experience of close relationships in the parental family. Those who are bestowed by the parental family with the experience of a reliable relationship and an example of a satisfying relationship between a man and a woman have a working model of close family relationships within themselves. These experiences have a profound effect on the creation and maintenance of satisfying marital relationships. People absorb family culture by identifying with typical characteristics and parental responses. In short, each of us enters into an intimate relationship with our own baggage of family stories. Someone enters adulthood, trying with all their might not to be like their parents, trying to arrange everything in their own family differently. But in the end, at some point, he realizes that it is very difficult to implement this, and old, familiar, long-learned patterns, against the will of the person himself, begin to manifest themselves in a relationship with a partner.

People enter into relationships with their desires and dreams, as well as with their long-standing grievances, pain and fears. When entering into a relationship, a person may unconsciously expect that the partner will repeat the positive aspects of his own parents and compensate for the negative ones.

Family history, individual psychological characteristics of parents and family conflicts, witnesses or participants of which were spouses in childhood, have a significant impact on the nature of tension and conflicts that arise in their relationship. To understand how the past affects the present, to delve into the interweaving of two human destinies, two family configurations, it takes time, courage to reveal their family stories, fears and hopes.

Accept the differences between you and your partner's imperfections

All human beings are not perfect. All people have weaknesses and weaknesses. More often than not, during the courtship phase, people don't tend to be oblivious to whether they forgive, accept, or romanticize differences. However, in the future, the two people begin to angrily take different positions in relation to the existing differences.

One of the great illusions is that for the sake of love for us, a partner will change his nature given to him to such an extent that he will fully adapt to us. The alternative to living with your partner's shortcomings is to understand that you need to learn to perceive each other's shortcomings and oddities as funny parts of his character. It is not easy, but it seems that this is exactly what those couples who remain in a happy marriage for many years do.

A benevolent attitude, patience and tact are more capable of contributing to a change in a partner than threats and demands. The partner's demand to become what he wants can be experienced as an attempt on identity and cause violent resistance. There is no honor in suppressing the will of another. Those who succeed are often proud of it.

A benevolent attitude, patience and tact are more capable of contributing to a change in a partner than threats and demands. The partner's demand to become what he wants can be experienced as an attempt on identity and cause violent resistance. There is no honor in suppressing the will of another. Those who succeed are often proud of it.

These are by no means all the goals of marital therapy, however, they form its core. This is a challenge to the maturity of both spouses and it can take a lifetime to accomplish what can be initiated in the course of therapy.

Many of those couples who have sought therapy and made every effort to investigate the root cause of a difficult relationship, understand their partner, and ultimately restore a good relationship are grateful for the experience of psychotherapy. At the same time, some people, despite the undeniably spreading psychological culture, remain to death one on one with the impending catastrophe with the relationship. Many women continue to rely on various magical ways to improve relations with their spouse, casting spells, performing all kinds of rituals and love spells.

Not so long ago, an old friend of mine called me, who asked me to advise her on a psychologist who could be contacted with her husband. Conflicts with him reached the point that he began to live on the balcony, and on the eve of my friend's call he arranged a binge with a neighbor suffering from alcoholism in his "home", which had never happened before. I have recommended several colleagues to whom my acquaintance with her spouse could turn. After spending about 25 minutes on the conversation, during which I explained, explained, warned about some of the nuances of psychotherapeutic work, at the end of our conversation I heard a question that literally stunned me: "Listen, maybe it's still better to go to my grandmother?" But then I had no one to recommend.