An issue of The Psychotherapy Networker, whose readers are mostly mental health professionals, asks “Who’s Afraid of Couples Therapy?” A key article inside the issue is “Why We Avoid Doing Couples Therapy.”
And Elizabeth Weil (NY Times) has stated, “The fact that couples therapy stresses out therapists has long been an open secret.” She interviewed various therapists on this, and the following are some of the factors cited as contributing to making couples therapy feel more challenging as a modality than individual therapy:
- dealing with more anger and volatility
- dealing with secrets between partners
- one partner might think you’re bonding more with him/her
- one partner might think you’re effective; one might not
- increased need to be on top of things in the moment
- interactions need to be more actively structured
- couples often present too late to be helped adequately
- more triggering of therapist’s own couples/family issues
- lack of consensus in the field about what works
Entering couples therapy as clients is similarly daunting for many. Many partners, in fact, stick to addressing relationship issues separately, as in individual therapy. And often that’s okay. Maybe even preferable sometimes.
Even though the following video clip is very brief, it says a ton about what can occur when a couple does go this (separate) route, however. Although the specific topic in the scene is sex, it could be any other relationship issue and still make a certain point.
It’s from the classic film Annie Hall (1977), starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton.
In case you missed it, here’s the transcript:
Alvy Singer’s Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Annie Hall’s Therapist: Do you have sex often?
Alvy Singer: [lamenting] Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Annie Hall: [annoyed] Constantly. I’d say three times a week.
John Jay Osborn has written Listen to the Marriage: A Novel. The only three characters: therapist Sandy and her 30-something clients Steve and Gretchen, a recently separated pair who address their issues, including infidelity, over the course of nine or ten months.
The point of view of Listen to the Marriage? The therapist’s. So, what kind of messages might be gleaned about marriage from reading this novel? Publishers Weekly: “…mostly, it takes dedication, self-reflection, and lots and lots of communication.”
What Osborn told Ari Shapiro, NPR, about lessons learned from his own long-term couples therapy: “So, what happens in really good marriage counseling — the marriage counseling illustrated in this book — is that by the end of the process, when you really begin to get it, when you can actually understand for the first time in your life what your partner is really saying to you, you feel like a new person. It’s as if you’ve shed everything that happened before, right? I mean, so if you’ve had an affair before, it’s as if it happened to a different person. It doesn’t count anymore. You’re new…”
Other points about couples therapy from his NPR interview:
- Things learned in the therapy “you should have learned when you were growing up — maybe by watching your parents, but your parents didn’t have it together.”
- Practice, and lots of it, is required to make adequate change.
- In the book the marriage itself is like “a fourth character.” Sandy wants the couple to view it “as something that they built over time that’s very important, and that’s alive in a way that’s different from each of them.”
