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 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 the pain each of the members of this couple was in, the man, and his wife. He could go home feeling understood and validated. And continue to abuse his wife.
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. https://drdeb.com/book.