People have many assumptions about couples counseling. What are some of the top assumptions seen by therapists?
1. Therapy is their time to justify how they feel towards their partner.
Instead of justify, how about the word explore? Let’s look at things like the relationship history, norms, and attachment history and maybe make inferences from there. A therapists’ job is not to help you convince your partner they are terrible, but our primary job is to facilitate healing and picking sides contradicts that.
2. Things will “just happen” because we talk about them weekly in therapy
Therapy is one hour per week. That is it. You guys live a great majority of your lives outside of session, so that is where the skills are supposed to be applied. The things discussed in session serve as catalysts for implementing different ways of interacting and responding to each other. If therapy is the only place in which you guys talk about making change, but do not actively practice it in the rest of your life, then yes, therapy will not work.
3. My childhood has nothing to do with my marriage/relationship
If it doesn’t, then where do your patterns or beliefs about relationships come from? I always like to look at relationships a person saw growing up especially their parents or caregivers to look for relevant themes. Why? Because if I can figure out where things started, then I can help you identify what you have been trying to say for so many years and it just won’t come out. More on attachment history here
4. Couples therapy is also to help process one partner’s specific trauma or traumatic event
To a degree, yes, but balancing the emotions of two people in session is already really difficult especially with time constraints. Just imagine if trauma processing for one of the partners while the other is kind of sitting there observing is thrown into the mix. One it sort of breezes over the other observing partner’s feelings and needs that need to be discussed and trauma processing is a tedious process that takes a lot of intentional time. It is just impossible to do. I believe it is always good to go see a private therapist outside of couples therapy so that some of the stuff that may come up can be appropriately processed, but in a way to which is more centered around you
5. The behaviors you and your spouse use towards one another can also be used towards the therapist
Our jobs is to analyze what is going on with the interactions, feelings, etc. then give subjective feedback about patterns we recognize. However, if we are pulled into the problem and experience some of the same emotions that you guys may be using towards one another, then it makes it difficult for the clinician to be subjective. We have to stay on the outside of the problem and that’s how true work gets done.
