Isn’t it nice to go to someone who really listens? I mean after trying and trying to get through to your spouse – for years – to finally have the therapist sit there calmly and patiently listening, isn’t that wonderful?
And then they get it. They understand. OMG that is more valuable than gold.
Years of being alone, so alone, feeling crushingly invalidated by the deaf ears followed by showing up in a counselor’s office and feeling heard. Finally. You break down in tears. Man or woman, who-ever you are, you break down in tears. The beauty and magnificence of another person hearing, getting, understanding is more precious than you can bear. After all these years.
The is more than a breath of fresh air; it’s life itself.
And it is. Research shows that being heard, feeling part-of, is a powerful need that is hard-wired into our brains. So no wonder the wonderful therapist makes us feel alive again, especially after that no-good miserable spouse wasn’t there for us all these years.
Uh-oh.
Danger.
Research consistently shows that people in miserable marriages who go to individual therapy – especially with a kind, sensitive, good-listening therapist have a higher rate of divorce.
Why is that?
Because when you compare a therapist – who is trained to be a good listener – with a spouse who isn’t, you can see where that comparison goes.
I became friendly with a therapist who works that way because he had been seeing the husband and I, the wife. (The husband refused to see me since he decided I must be biased in favor of his wife.)
This therapist was probably a Freudian or psychodynamic therapist. I was going to make up a plan just to accommodate this husband. The plan was that I would chat with the therapist for a few minutes once a week explaining what the wife had told me about her husband’s verbal abuse. He, in turn, would confront the husband.
“I can’t do that, Deb,” he told me.
Why not?
“I’ve known him for years. He’s fragile. If I confront him, I may never see him again and then he will get no help.”
“So what do you do when you meet with him?” I asked.
“I listen. I’m there for him,” my therapist friend replied.
And I believe that by being there for him, the edge got taken off his pain but it made things a lot worse for his wife. He could go home feeling understood and validated. And continue to abuse her.
The logic should have been that if he was feeling better he wouldn’t want to abuse his wife. But it never works that way. Feeling better in the office doesn’t translate to feeling better when you see your wife at home and imagine she is hostile to you.
If you’re like this man, you have a very low tolerance for anybody’s bad mood. If his wife is still unhappy from the last time he got angry at her, then she may very well grimace at him instead of smiling when he walks in the door. And in a minute, it will undo the work of an hour of therapy with a great listener.
You can get hooked on a great-listener therapist. Woody Allen’s character who saw a therapist for 25 years was no exaggeration. I’ve spoken to people who do exactly that.
Listen, I get it. We all need to be listened to, validated, understood, respected. We need all of the above.
But it’s far better to get all that from the person you’re married to. That’s why when they are not listening you need to compel them to get the right help.
How come they feel a need to tune you out? Perhaps they need to learn how to do some soul-searching so that they will understand that their inattention may be the biggest mistake of their lives.
That’s your job. Perhaps your only job: Get them to talk to me so I can get them looking at themselves – and listening to you. They need to become your listener, not the therapist.
Tell them about my 9-week intensive group and private therapy/coaching hybrid called Love Yourself. Here are the Pillars of it, what you come out with at the end:
*Inner Authority. This is the foundation on which everything else is built: Knowing who you are. Knowing your feelings, your wants, your needs, and what causes those feelings to change. It’s knowing yourself.
*Emotional Agility. One of the things you need to know in order to heal is what triggers you. We all get disturbed by certain things. We can hide it, even from ourselves – but it is doomed to come out somehow anyway. So this part of the program is to get clear on it. And to take the next step – conquer it. We can’t go through life having hurt feelings or exploding, or being depressed because something triggered all that. We need to have tools to make those feelings sweetly dissipate. Without sweeping the dust under the rug.
*Intentional Self-Adoration. We suffer from limiting beliefs. We know who we are but don’t like who we are. That’s got to change. The road to change is intentional. We learn to disarm harmful messages buried within ourselves. We intentionally replace those with the self-love and even adoration that is rightfully ours. Developing this self-compassion readies us for the next step.
*Compassionate Honesty. The strong framework of the above three pillars of the program gets us past resentment and bitterness. We now can clearly, honestly, and openly communicate in an assertive way what we think, want, need, feel, and offer. But it is filtered through a heart of compassion. This is key for a relationship and it deepens the connection between you. This is how you get the marriage you want out of first developing Self Love.
How do you do all that? With daily written, verbal, and thinking exercises, as well as exercises to change your body’s state (for Emotional Agility). By the time you get to Compassionate Honesty, you’ve laid the foundation to have a good conversation, one of depth and kindness – and truth. Those three together: depth, kindness, and truth, are the foundation of intimacy. And we make sure you do all the work, too, with the Accountability System that I have in place!
When you book a call with me, you will learn what no one else has told you about yourself: the real causes of the breakdown in your marriage. Then we will map out a strategy for correcting it. Simple? https://drdeb.com/book.
When you’ve booked, be sure to fill out the application that is on another page you will be taken to. That info will help us in our meeting and it probably saves 20 min of talk time.