Couples Counseling

My favorite photograph of my parents, taken not long after they eloped, shows two pretty young people dressed in style, who most likely had no idea of the moral courage their marriage would require of them. They were still vain children—Mom's showing off her great legs, Dad his rascal grin—but they soon found that matrimony would plunge them headlong into the strenuous process of redemption, in which even the worst things may eventually work to the good.

Kathleen Norris
The Cloister Walk

It's difficult to quantify the effects a troubled or stressed marriage can have on the entirety of one's life. But if you have ever struggled, or are now struggling, in a marriage that is hurting, you know how profound its impact can be. Your family life is affected whether your children are small or grown. Your outlook on the future, your sense of optimism, your energy level, and your overall sense of health and well-being can all be compromised when your marriage is in trouble. Whether you are newly married and finding it difficult to adjust, in the strenuous middle years of raising children and maintaining careers, have discovered infidelity in your spouse, or your nest has suddenly been emptied and you don't recognize the "us" you used to be, it is never too early or too late to seek the help you need. The statistics of troubled and/or failed marriages is staggering. But today, more than ever, there is help to be found as we come to understand and address how deeply our pasts impact our marriages. As couples, we can also learn to effectively resolve conflict and restore powerful connection in our day to day present. And it is indeed possible to build—and rebuild—trust, friendship, and intimacy for a shared future.

Marriage and Dealing with the Past

If each of us came to marriage with a slate wiped clean of past hurts, past fears, and past damage inflicted upon us, we might have an easier time relating to our spouses. But that's not how it works. No matter how old or young we are when we marry, we all come equipped with histories of harm, unresolved pain, and deeply ingrained relational survival skills. If it is true, as Harville Hendrix says, that marriage is where we complete the unfinished business of childhood, then one can only imagine how complex the joining of two distinct pasts into one marital unit can be. Our pasts profoundly impact our married present. Attachment theory offers a significant way to understand and address the ways in which our marriages are often hijacked by our pasts. Attachment theory focuses on the bonds and relationships between people, particularly the long-term relationships of parents and children, and that of romantic lovers. In his or her earliest years, a child is deeply imprinted by the level of security, care, and connectedness s/he receives from parents and/or caregivers. This imprinting results in a formed attachment style that the child carries into adulthood and, of course, into marriage. Our styles of attachment determine how we communicate, whether or not—and how—we engage in or avoid conflict, what particular triggers launch our defense strategies, and how much connection we seek from the marriage relationship. A skilled therapist can help you and your spouse discover your individual attachment styles as well as guide you through the perfect storm that is created time and time again when these styles collide. A working knowledge of attachment theory can help you develop understanding, compassion, and respect for each other as you continue to resolve conflict, find healing from each of your pasts, and build further intimacy.

Marriage and Navigating the Present

On any given day, a happily married couple may be required to navigate the confusing details of a busy household, engage in a complicated interchange of emotion and expectation, resolve a conflict that may have begun with a mere simple misunderstanding, and attempt to maintain some semblance of friendship and intimacy that once seemed effortless. Not to mention paying the bills, mowing the lawn, raising the children, and getting to work on time. And if the marriage is struggling or stressed—perhaps rocked by recent infidelity, stuck in old unresolved conflict, or mired in contempt and disdain—just getting through a typical day takes all the energy we can muster. "How we spend our days," says the writer Annie Dillard, "is how we spend our lives." And too often the days of our marriages are bereft of the ability to communicate, much less successfully resolve conflict. We find ourselves unable to maintain any kind of compassion for our spouse, much less to forgive ungrudgingly. But there is much hope. A skilled therapist offers couples a variety of skills, tools, and methods that can significantly improve the level of satisfaction in and quality of marriage. For example, conflict resolution is a skill that keeps layers of anger and unresolved conflict from building up between spouses, thus allowing intimacy to thrive. Speaker-listener is a method of sharing and communicating that allows each person to be heard and validated by the other. John Gottman's (Ph.D) work regarding emotional bids gives couples tools to respond to each other in ways that build emotional trust and wealth. Another tool, his work regarding the fear dance, looks specifically at what happens when two people interact, and how their particular dance—motivated by fear—can be changed and made healthy. These and many other methods and skills can profoundly improve your marriage and encourage you as a couple in the day to day challenges and joys of matrimony.

Marriage and Looking to the Future

How often do husbands and wives cringe at the thought of the fight just around the corner, much less wonder what shape the marriage will be in twenty years from now? How we perceive and hope for our future impacts our present. How we act and live in the present impacts our future. Pursuing good communication, resolving conflict, and pursuing intimacy now helps us plan for a brighter future together—whether that future is tomorrow's conversation, next month's getaway, or how we will be relating to and loving each other ten, twenty or thirty years from now. We frequently predict the future based on the often reliable present. And this is one of the bases for the work of John Gottman, Ph.D, regarding what he names "the four horseman of the apocalypse": criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. Gottman believes that the presence of and degree to which these four traits infiltrate our marriages is a reliable indicator as to how our marriages will fare in the long haul. A skilled therapist can help you recognize and change these damaging patterns of interaction. It is never too late! And in the wake of their departure you and your spouse can create and experience a marital culture of appreciation, honesty, teamwork, openness, vulnerability, connecting, respect, and affection. Now that is a bright future! Stressed and struggling marriages cause so much pain and sadness not only to the partners in the marriage, but also to the children, family, and friends that encircle it. The good news is that a helped, strengthened, and restored marriage is just as powerfully influential toward the positive for everyone it touches. A husband and wife can find new hope and purpose in a marriage they once thought lost or beyond help.