Two recent experiences revealed the value and importance of “marriage counseling.” At least with a well-trained, competent and experienced “marriage counselor.” As if, after nearly forty years of such training and experience, I wouldn’t appreciate such value and importance.
In the first instance, a colleague of mine asked if I would pinch-hit for her by meeting her class in her absence. We both teach in Charleston’s Webster University graduate program in clinical counseling/marriage and family therapy.
The course she was teaching is called “Conjoint Counseling.” And my task was to merely listen to assorted students report to the class on various assigned books they had read.
One of the students reported on Gary Chapman’s 2010 best-seller, Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts (Northfield Press).
If you haven’t read the book, the “Five Love Languages” are 1) “Words of Affirmation”; 2) “Quality Time”; 3) “Receiving Gifts”; 4) “Acts of Service”; and 5) “Physical Touch.”
Chapman’s point being that partners in a marriage may differ on which, or what combination of these “love languages” they may value more or less. And that learning and practicing the “love language(s)” most meaningful to one’s partner is the “secret” to being successfully married.
If one might imagine what each of these “love languages” might mean, the young man presenting his report on the book gave various examples of the author’s “meaning” in using such terms.
Not long after this substitute-teaching-experience, a client/patient (patient/client) of mine was describing to me her concern over a relationship between her son and a woman; in fact, a relationship that seemed to not be going so well. Adding that she had advised her son to practice, as she termed them, “the two most important things to practice in any such situation: communication and conflict management.”
The implication being–as in Dr. Chapman’s book–that being married is not all that different from playing golf. Or for that matter, any other sport. There are some fundamentals that need to be applied, and if one practices such fundamentals–either in a marriage or in playing whatever the particular sport–success is likely to be the outcome.
And in one sense, such an observation is true. Since there is surely more “right,” and absolutely nothing “wrong” about the “fundamentals” being suggested by either my client/patient (patient/client) or the Five Love Languages book.
Unfortunately, however, for anyone who has ever tried to be married; or, comparably, tried to play golf (or almost any other sport)–even if one knows “what to do” (and that is hardly a universal assumption)–it is the “doing it” (much less, consistently) that can be so difficult.
For instance, the son of my client/patient (patient/client)–as she has described him and his circumstances–after two failed marriages, one might likely suspect that this young man has hardly “mastered the fundamentals” of being successfully married in any mutually fulfilling way.
Not to mention, as his mother described her, the young woman he has apparently not been “communicating” with very effectively, much less practicing successful “conflict management.” The woman herself being described as apparently having also failed in at least more than one previous attempt at being married.
Enter the effective, competent “marriage counselor”–at least for those “smart” enough, or “sincere/committed” enough–or is it “humble” and “courageous” enough?–to seek such “help.” For does not “learning,” much less “learning how” to “do” anything important involve at least some “humility” and some “courage”? The assumption being that few, if any of us “know it all“–much less, can “do it well“–when it comes to most important things.
In my long career as a “marriage counselor,” I have observed at least three notable “patterns” among couples who have sought my “help” as–how I term it–a marital “referee and coach.” I “call the fouls,” and I “coach” couples in developing certain “marital fundamentals” not all that different from those suggested by either Gary Chapman or my advice-giving-to-her-son client/patient (patient/client).
Even though the “language” I use is typically different–involving principles and concepts I consider more insightful and constructive, if not so obvious to the less-trained and experienced–than the “language” of the concerned mother or the Five Love Languages book.
[If you’re interested in what I consider “most important” with respect to being married, cf. my discussion of “marriage” (pp. 67-73) in the chapter, “Balanced Families,” in my book, Balanced Living: Don’t Let Your Strength Become Your Weakness (Wipf and Stock, 2009).]
Here are the three “patterns” I have observed on the part of couples who have sought my “help” as a “marriage counselor.” Remembering, of course, that the calls I receive for my services aren’t usually from folk wanting to tell me “how well” things are working in their personal or professional lives.
1. “I/we don’t know anything different, any other or better way.”
Most people are married the way they have “learned how” to be married, in terms of what they have “observed” and/or “experienced.” There are various contributing factors in this respect, not the least being one’s own “family of origin,” even across multiple generations.
If this can present as the easiest of marital circumstances to “re-construct” toward a more successful and mutually fulfilling marital outcome, it is not uncommon, as well, to experience “resistance” on the part of persons/couples invested (and just as well-defended) in an “I’ve/we’ve never done it that way before” marriage. Despite whatever symptoms of dysfunction may be apparent.
2. “Who’s bringing who’s emotional/social/spiritual baggage to this marriage?”
This is where competence on the part of a “marriage counselor” is so essential. Because often persons are married without realizing what they have “brought” (from their past and total life experience) to one another; and subsequently, what they are “asking” or “needing” from the other. That such an “unspoken agreement” may (and usually does) exist in a marriage should not be unexpected. Since just as often one is just as “unaware” of such “issues” in his/her own life. Or s/he may be trying to “run from” something difficult, even painful to face in one’s self.
If my extensive training and experience has taught me anything, it is that most marital conflict involves married partners “projecting” on to one another what they consider most unacceptable and/or threatening in themselves.
It is generally accepted, in the “pairing” and “partnering” enterprise of living, that “opposites tend to attract,” an unconscious attempt to “complete ourselves.” And just as often, what may, at first, seem so “attractive” can become just as “unsettling.” Indeed, it is here that constructive “marriage counseling” can be most “therapeutic” in helping people learn how to negotiate their “differences” in less re-active, more con-structive than de-structive ways.
3. “One or both of us are suffering from a definable mental illness or character disorder.”
This is the most glaring example of where even the best of marital platitudes–such as the mother’s “communicate/manage conflict” advice, or Gary Chapman’s “love languages”–are like comparing the applying of a band-aid or taking an aspirin to a surgical procedure.
This is not to say that persons with such debilitating mental or social illness can’t be satisfactorily married. But such circumstances make marital success as difficult as it is demanding, and likely requiring optimal therapeutic insight and support.
For example, what’s it like to be married to someone afflicted with paranoid schizophrenia or bi-polar illness, or even chronic clinical depression? What’s it like to be married to an “addicted” person; or perhaps even more subtly, to be married to a sociopath or someone with a borderline personality disorder? And where the latter is concerned, is there something about me, for whatever reason (pathologically or otherwise), that “needs” to be married to such a person? What’s that about?
Al-A-Non, for instance, is a vital form of lay-therapy for those related to persons suffering from the insidious disease of alcoholism. And if the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) is a political advocate for those suffering from such illness, local chapters across this nation also provide important support and forms of family therapy for related family members.
[Note: my weekly blog is going on a few weeks of late summer vacation, and will return renewed and refreshed in September, following the celebration of Labor Day. Since, where I grew up, among coal miners, Labor Day was a big deal, comparable to Christmas, Easter and the 4th of July all rolled into one!]
