O'Grady Psychology Associates

Psychotherapy, Marriage Counseling, Neuropsychological Assessment

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Seeing How Childhood Patterns Affect Marriage

 

Couples Therapy and Family of Origin
Learning about Relationships by Watching Parents

When Mark and Judy came to see me for couples therapy, Judy felt frustrated by her husband’s constant angry mood. They rarely talked anymore, and she felt that any time she brought up a stress, the conversation quickly became a quid pro quo—who had the hardest day? Mark felt low-level irritability and frustration about his life as a parent, provider, and worker. He didn’t feel in control over his life, but rather, at its mercy. ”When do you relax? What do you do?” I asked. He answered, “I veg.”

“How do you veg?” I asked.

“I turn my back on my wife and small kids and look at my laptop, surfing the web, reading this or that,” he replied. Turning his back was Mark’s signal to his family not to bother him, his way of carving some space for himself in his small house. But did it work?

“It works for moments, maybe; they leave me alone, at least.”

But in turning away, Mark was missing the opportunity to turn toward anything enriching. The web gives ample opportunity to veg, plenty of material to inspire reverie, but the end result is not Whitman’s loafing that invites the soul. It is diffuse and at the end of the evening, empty. A one-click purchase was often the only way my client felt like he actually got something for himself.

 Spillover Stress: How it Damages a Relationship

And the next day would be just like the one before, full of stress and angry feelings. The psychological term “spillover” describes how stress can bleed into other aspects of life, especially in relationships. When someone is stressed because of the demands of daily life, they will carry that stress home, like a heavy briefcase they can’t put down. If someone is disconnected from himself or herself because the demands of life feel so heavy, they lose connection to their inner self, the soul.

Using Reverie and Daydreams as an Alternative to Surfing the Web

Returning to my client, I invited him to consider the benefits of reverie. To daydream, to muse with no clear focus, to allow the mind to wander with its spirals and twists—that can be a wonderful thing. “Loaf and invite the soul,” wrote Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass. We need moments in the day with no one—not even ourselves—looking over our shoulders and monitoring our productivity. We need time where we can let ourselves slip into that pleasant, non-productive time with nothing to do but allowing thoughts, feelings, and images to freely enter and leave our minds.

So why not put the briefcase down, take the weight and the ache away? In Mark’s case, as we explored his feelings more deeply, he revealed guilt: Guilt about taking time for himself. Guilt about not being 100 percent there for his wife and kids. In therapy, we explored some reasons for this.

 Going Deeper Within the Context of Couples Therapy

Through his boyhood and teenage years, Mark was what therapists call a “parentified child.” His mother suffered from a degenerative disease. His father worked to support the family on a meager budget, despite working two jobs. Mark had to care for his mother, feed her, and stay home while the other kids were out playing.

He got the message that taking anything for himself when his poor mother had nothing—no mobility, no joy, and no friends—was selfish. He carried this guilt into adulthood without realizing that now, as a parent himself, he was recreating his childhood pattern and taking care of everyone but himself.

While at first glance Mark and his wife Judy’s marriage looked like that of a typically bickering couple, it wasn’t that simple. Just teach them some communication skills, give some homework, and let them go on their merry way? NO. Unless the two understood Mark’s guilt and the reasons behind it, no real, lasting change could be made in their marriage. They would fall back into old patterns six months or less after completing couples therapy.

In Mark’s case, Judy listened quietly at first then interjected, “But I do give you space—I tell you go see your friends one evening after work, go the gym…” Mark had heard her say this countless times since their daughters were born. The conversation was an old one and never changed. When people have the same fight over and over, they become bitter and hopeless. Thoughts of divorce enter along with feelings of self-pity. “Another partner would not treat me this way,” each might think.

 Stepping Out of Gridlock Takes Patience and Time

To step out of a gridlocked conflict such as this one takes patience and time. Couples counseling creates a space for partners to explore some of the not-so-obvious dynamics of their relationship with empathy, putting grudges aside long enough to really see your spouse in a different light. It provides an opportunity to see patterns on many levels: communication with your partner, your relationship to your parents, and how those layers interact with each other to create difficulties in loving.

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How Couples Counseling Can Guide a Divorce That’s Better for the Kids

Staying Together for the Kids: Why This Isn’t a Good Idea

In my work as a counselor, I approach every couple with the intention of helping them heal what isn’t working in their marriages. I know that even the most challenging issues are often repairable. But occasionally, it is in everyone’s best interest to separate.

Parents considering divorce often find the very idea of being without their kids part of each week is unthinkable. The reason so many people stay in unhappy marriages is to avoid losing their children and to spare the kids the pain of not having both parents always present.

Research by Dr. John Gottman has shown that couples wait an average of seven years after becoming aware of problems in their marriage to seek counseling. This period of time can be subtly or obviously harmful to your child’s mental health. During those years when your relationship is not working, your kids are being affected—despite your best intentions to protect them.

While statistics often cite the harm divorce causes children, many studies fail to factor in the harm caused by a bad relationship. When your marriage has deteriorated into loss of intimacy (loving gestures, emotional closeness) this may be internalized by children and can affect their ability to love and be loved in their adult relationships. Likewise, when parents are obviously hostile and negative toward each other, kids may show signs of distress such as anxiety or depression with symptoms of guilt, worry, and low self-esteem.

When is it time to leave an unhappy marriage? Some reasons to leave an unhappy relationship are obvious: verbal, physical, or sexual abuse; ongoing substance abuse; broken trust through unaddressed lying and cheating; and a myriad of other extreme reasons. But sometimes the reasons are less obvious: sexual desire discrepancy, loss of respect and love, and unresolvable communication problems.

Divorce and Good Communication

Children are harmed when they are used as pawns by hostile parents: for revenge, for example, or to increase support payments. If the primary wage-earner in the family is resentful of having to pay spousal support, and seeks to reduce payments by asking for more physical custody of the children, when it is not in their best interests –this battle once activated drains emotional and financial resources—creating tension for everyone.

Kids pick up the negativity, so how you show your respect and love for their parent is important. If you are showing verbal or non-verbal signs of irritation and disrespect when talking about or to your ex, you child will be harmed. Then there are more blatant reasons, such as use of child pornography, repeated DUIs, and other criminal behaviors.

Sure You’re Getting Divorced? Couples Counseling Can Still Help

Couples counseling can be useful in learning what went wrong, not to assign blame or fix resentments, but from a perspective of taking appropriate responsibility. Doing a post-mortem of your marriage serves several important functions.

1. It helps you help your children to cope with the changes brought about by divorce. When children of divorce see their parents bickering about money, possessions, or time with the kids, they feel bad. It’s common for kids to feel guilty or responsible for the breakup. Being able to talk with your partner, calmly and respectfully, models good communication. Children pick up behaviors from their parents. Little ones are like sponges, picking up not only the crumbs but the bacteria as well.
2. If you leave a marriage without understanding what lead to its demise, you are likely to make the same mistake in your next serious relationship. In the many years I have done couples’ therapy, I have often heard this refrain: “I married someone so much like my previous partner—why didn’t I just stay?” We can’t run away from a bad marriage and assume it will be perfect with someone else. Spending time with your spouse trying to understand the complex dynamic you wove will save you from making similar mistakes in the future. Plus, couples often will decide to stay together once they realize and repair what got them to the point of divorce in the first place.
3. And, lastly, you will be co-parenting for the rest of your life. Learning better communication will help you as you raise your children in separate households. There will be many times you will have to consult each other about issues, school, friends, and problems that come up over the years. You will both need to be present at graduations, weddings, or grandchildren’s birthdays. It is a lot better to be friends working together to provide the best post-divorce environment for your kids possible.

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How Anger Hurts Relationships

Getting angry…is easy and everyone can do it; but doing it . . . in the right amount, at the right time, and for the right end, and in the right way is no longer easy, nor can everyone do it. —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (II.9, 1109a2

Managing Conflict Rather than Eliminating Conflict

Conflict is inevitable in any long-term relationship. In the Gottman approach to couples counseling, we help clients understand that conflict is normal. Rather than eliminating conflict, we help them learn to manage it. Why can’t all conflicts be resolved? Because backgrounds and personalities don’t match exactly. Couples will always have some areas of disagreement: neat/tidy, disorganized/scheduled, emotionally expressive/keeps feelings inside, to name a few. Even two tidy people may disagree on who does more work around the house or, perhaps, what cleaning routine to follow.

By the time couples come to counseling, they have often been having the same argument in different forms for many years. The issue has become gridlocked—and just as drivers stuck in traffic feel angry and frustrated, partners who can’t move beyond an issue start having negative feelings about each other and the relationship.

Learning to Listen Without Anger

Anger is often the result of feeling misunderstood. When one partner feels like they are not being heard on a particular issue, and they likewise have trouble listening to their partner’s point of view, anger simmers, sometimes for years—finally coming to a roaring boil.

Jim and Joan came to counseling because she felt he stopped participating in the family years ago. Meanwhile, Jim felt disenfranchised. His views and opinions on how they were raising the kids were ignored and he felt he was “just a paycheck.” Joan felt he had checked out and was uninterested in her, the kids, or their home. They were both angry; they both felt the other was wrong. When they tried to discuss this problem it always escalated to screaming and yelling, often within earshot of the kids.

When they started couples counseling, they had had this same fight many, many times. Jim would withdraw; Joan would become more focused on her friends and the women in the neighborhood, whom she confided in and got support from. Joan and Jim were emotionally estranged. Not surprisingly, intimacy, both emotional and physical, had come to a grinding halt.

Gridlocked Problems: Begining to Compromise

When I listened to them discussing a variation of this gridlocked problem, I saw that each became angry quickly, and the result was they stopped listening to the other. Joan would lecture and Jim would face the other way, clamming up. People have many ways of expressing anger: he was seething inside quietly, and she was ranting loudly, but both were angry.

I stopped them when this happened and had them take just a few minutes to calm themselves. To go from anger to calm by learning to self-soothe is an important skill in all relationships, but especially in marriage. It can take just a few minutes to do this. This isn’t about swallowing or denying anger; the trick is to then re-engage in the conflict discussion with a more receptive and less defensive tone.

Staying angry is much easier, but “doing it in the right amount, at the right time, and for the right end, and in the right way” (as Aristotle said) produces quite different results when dealing with a perpetual problem. It is okay to be angry. But understanding why you are angry, and learning to express your feelings in a way that is clear and void of the four horsemen will lead to a very different conversation with a different outcome. Once Joan and Jim learned to talk about their conflicts without getting flooded, they listened to each other with deeper respect for the other’s feelings. This is the first step in learning to compromise.

Practicing self-soothing is something you can do at any age, and at just about any time. Listen to this simple three-minute ”breathing space” to feel the difference in your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations when you take just a few minutes out of a difficult situation. For it is not just the repeated, unmanaged fights that damage the relationship, but the skewed and distorted perceptions that keep you stuck in gridlock, stewing, for years—over the same issue.

Try this brief relaxation exercise:  Three Minute Mindfulness

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Do Opposites Attract? How what once attracted us can begin to repel

We Seek Wholeness in Ourselves When we Choose our Mate

The adage “opposites attract” is often true before marriage and well into the first few years of a relationship. However, as I have seen in many years of providing marriage counseling, the powerful attraction that once drew you to your mate can fade over time. If personality differences are misunderstood, then the initial attraction will turn to ”opposites repel,” leading to negative feelings for the person you were deeply drawn to when dating.

 Using the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory in Couples Counseling

I sometimes have my couple clients take a True-False test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), a questionnaire based on the work of Carl Jung that assesses different psychological types according to four pairs of preferences: extraversion vs. introversion, sensing vs. intuition, thinking vs. feeling, and judging vs. perception. We all use all four functions, but some are more dominant than others.

The MBTI is used by, for example, vocational counselors to help people select occupations that best suit their temperaments. It has also been widely used by employers and managers to appreciate differences in workers with the aim of functioning better in teams, thus avoiding misunderstanding and increasing efficiency by reducing personality conflicts.

Decision making in marriage can be challenging when partners are opposite on some personality traits. When I was ready to buy my new car I decided what I wanted, test drove it and did some quick online research to see what the inventory was, and at what price. I went to our local dealership and was quoted a price that seemed fair. I was prepared to purchase the car then and there, but since we believe that big purchases should always be discussed and agreed on, I took my decision to my partner for the final green light. He immediately jumped into the decision-making by polling every dealer within 100 miles of us and reading every consumer report written on the car.

My psychological preference is Feeling and my husband is Thinking. Both approaches have to do with decision making, and each is valid. Feeling types seek harmony with people. Thinking types seek objective clarity. Because I felt that the car salesman was honest and nice, I trusted his price quote. I didn’t want there to be discomfort or tension.

When all was said and done, he came to me with the exact price I was quoted, saying it was a good price, giving his approval. Because we respected each other’s differences, we came to an agreement.

When Jeff and Lynn came to marriage therapy they were stuck in gridlock about how to spend time in their retirement. Jeff wanted to spend time at home, tinkering with projects in the garage and watching old home movies—something he wasn’t able to do when he worked six days a week. Jeff is a typical Introvert, someone who needs alone time to recharge his batteries and who is drained by too much socializing. Lynn, in contrast, was bored with staying home and wanted to travel and see the many sights that they hadn’t had time or money for before retirement. Lynn is an Extrovert, someone who gains energy from social contact and feels drained without it. These differences made even smaller decisions difficult for Lynn and Jeff. For instance, Lynn wanted to entertain friends and loved putting on big dinner parties, but that made Jeff uncomfortable. He much preferred to have one couple over and play Pictionary. Lynn was furious at Jeff for what she considered to be thwarting her dreams. Jeff felt overwhelmed and withdrew from her when their discussions turned to these issues.

We seek what we want to complete us when we choose a mate. This is largely unconscious. When Jeff first met Lynn he was mesmerized by her vitality and adventurous spirit. He loved how she could talk to anyone. He was invigorated by her constant energy. Lynn was in love with Jeff’s calm and his ability to love the simple things in life. They were attracted to the very traits that were undeveloped in themselves.

Life transitions such as retirement often bring out differences in how a couple will make decisions. When life is routine, these personality difference can be dealt with, even masked. But with challenges such as the birth of a child or a move, the traits that you loved in your partner become the very things that drive you crazy.

The MBTI is a valuable test to help couples understand why they sometimes fight about the same things over and over again. I like it because unlike many psychological tests, the MBTI is non-pathologizing. There are no good or bad traits. Every one of the sixteen types indicates a difference in how one gathers information, organizes their life, how they like to spend their time, and how they think (or feel) through the various decisions that confront them.

After giving Jeff and Lynn the MBTI I was able to help them understand Jeff’s introversion and Lynn’s extroversion. Neither of them was wrong; they just needed to understand and appreciate their differences. We worked with ways they could get their individual needs met, and still find things to do together in retirement. They began to keep a list of activities they each wanted to do and then found ways to compromise about how to going about doing them together, honoring each other’s interests and dreams. This was immensely reassuring. Once you realize that your partner is not wrong, or odd, you can start talking compromise.

Despite my husband and I having opposite types for Feeling and Thinking, we can come to the exact same decision, as with buying the car, but we do it differently. Understanding each other saves a lot of time in the long run!

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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Shortcutting Criticism

In the biblical Book of Revelations, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse signal the end of the world through conquest, war, famine, and death. The Four Horsemen that Dr. John Gottman’s research has identified as signaling the end of a relationship are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling—communication styles that threaten a marriage’s health and longevity.

When I first see a couple for relationship counseling, I assess their communication behaviors by using a set of questionnaires developed from the research of Dr. Gottman. To evaluate criticism, for example, each client answers yes or no to statements such as “I feel attacked or criticized when we talk about our disagreements” or “My partner uses phrases like ’you always’ or ’you never’ when complaining.”

Defensiveness is seen in statements like “Many of our issues are just not my problem” or “I have to defend myself because the charges against me are so unfair.” Statements such as “I try to point out the flaws in my partner’s personality that need improvement” or “I feel disgusted by some of my partner’s attitudes” assess contempt. Stonewalling is when one partner just tunes out and ignores the other, usually after a barrage of criticism. Putting up a wall of silence is an attempt to protect the stonewaller from getting flooded by physical and emotional over- reactivity. Of all the Horsemen, Dr. Gottman says this is the most likely to end a relationship.

The good news is that each of these Horsemen has an antidote. The first step is recognizing these interactions when they occur. Often when couples are stuck in a cycle of negative communication, each person is unable to see his or her own part in the problem. But with gentle coaching, clients learn to notice when they are criticizing, being contemptuous, on the defensive, or stonewalling.

Next, I show couples alternative ways to expressing themselves by using a specific antidote to each Horseman. Today, let’s talk about the antidote to criticism.

Learning to complain without blame is key to short-circuiting criticism. Any relationship may give rise to legitimate complaints. But the key to avoiding defensiveness in your partner is to complain in a way that does not place blame.

The formula is pretty simple: “When _________ happens, it makes me feel____________. What I would like from you is_________________.” For instance, when Judy says to Mark, “You’re always putting your parents’ needs before mine. You’re such an inconsiderate jerk,” the likely response from Mark might be, “I do not! And if I do, it’s because you don’t take any time to connect with them, so I have to do it all!” Placing blame just engenders defensiveness, continuing the cycle of criticism.

Helping Judy to find a different way to express her feelings might sound something like this: “Mark, I miss feeling connected to you when we are with your family. Do you think that this weekend when we see them, we can stay close? It would help me if you’d check in with me every once in a while.”  In this version, Judy takes responsibility for her feelings and then asks directly for what she wants without making Mark out to be the bad guy. Mark, in turn, can listen to Judy’s request without feeling he has to justify and defend.

Antidotes to the other three Horsemen will be taken up in another post. But understanding how these concepts affect communication in marriage goes a long way to helping couples manage conflict.