Another article by Carol Hadlock, MFT from Process Therapy Institute, reprinted here with Carol’s permission. This one introduces the process of couples counseling.
Building and maintaining a healthy human relationship is difficult at best. In couples-counseling, I will guide you away from a good-guy, bad-guy perspective and invite you instead to begin to:
- Learn to introspect.
- Become more aware of what you Really Hope For, right now – right here in this moment.
- Acknowledge and own your experiences, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, illusions, wants, needs, ulterior motives, and behaviors.
- Pay more attention to your own part in the relationship than you do to your partner’s part.
- Use language that takes responsibility.
- Tell the truth. (No, not the truth about your partner! The truth about yourself!)
- Listen for understanding.
- Actively look for the other person’s positive intent.
- Detach from expectations.
- Explore the concept of “boundaries” and practice ways to stay “separate.”
- Find ways Not to personalize.
- Tolerate differences.
- View the relationship as a partnership rather than as an alliance of adversaries.
- Choose each other from a position of individuation.
- Learn the art of “propose-counterpropose.”
- Focus on the long term goal of having a good relationship rather than on the short term goal of winning-in-the-moment.
- Learn how to reach out instead of withdraw when your partner is under stress. Move closer rather than farther away when your partner retreats.
- Begin to define intimacy in terms other than sexual. Consider one definition of intimacy to be: sharing the truth about yourself in this moment, as the truth is happening.
How to support your couple’s-counseling experience
Since one can be only as intimate with Other as one is intimate with Self, consider getting into individual therapy for a time. Among other things, you might use that time to explore:
- How often your behavior reflects an underlying fear.
- How to stand up for yourself in non-abusive ways.
- How you re-enact the unfinished business from your childhood within your relationships.
- How you play both the bully and the placater within a relationship. Bullying means insisting on pleasing yourself at the other person’s expense. Placating means insisting on pleasing the other-guy at your own expense.
Carol Nichols Hadlock 1996