What Couples Therapists Believe About Relationships
What Couples Therapists Believe
About Relationships
(or at least they should)
When your relationship isn’t going as it should be, it’s easy to rack your brain with all sorts of interpretations of what is going on, predictions about the future and what will happen, what needs to happen, etc. All of this can be very confusing, leading you to question the relationship itself.
There is a fundamental belief that every couples therapist should have about your relationship.
This is a belief that we share, and it is something that we try to help you cultivate. The belief is that you have a bond. It’s there. You are not fighting because you hate or don’t care about each other, no matter how infuriating each other’s behavior could be, or how distant you feel. If there were no bond, you wouldn’t be working so hard to get through to each other that there’s something threatening this bond.
“But wait, no one is working on this!”
“All we do is fight, how can you say that?”
“I feel ignored. There is no bond.”
This is something that can go against everything your mind says to you when you are fed up, exhausted, angry, sick of it, feeling hopeless, etc. Your bond may be buried under all the things that are going wrong. Your bond may be in danger of being broken if these things don’t get fixed. But, the bottom line is this: You wouldn’t be able to get to each other if there weren’t a bond. No one would get upset about anything. No one would shut down and freeze up in the face of an argument. No one would be bothered by a lack of closeness if there has been a growing distance.
A good couples therapist knows this, and will use this to help you revive your bond. Because it very well could die if it’s not attended to.
If you are having issues in your relationship and there is any notion that you both don’t like what’s going on, then there’s a bond there. You don’t have to wonder about that. You have to believe that it’s there and fight to save it. Don’t waste your energy analyzing whether your partner really loves you, really wants to be with you. That’s like sitting in a sinking ship and debating whether it would have gotten a hole if it were a good ship, without doing anything to fix the hole.
But, my partner had an affair, what do you think about that?
Bonds can be injured, and if your partner is saying to you that they are done and want to pursue a new relationship, you may be in trouble. However, the occurrence of an affair doesn’t mean that your relationship is meaningless and can’t be fixed. We’ve helped couples take a hard look at what was going on and how their relationship became vulnerable to an affair. Couples can heal after a husband or wife has cheated. We do believe that this is much more likely to happen in therapy, and with a therapist who has the firm belief that there is a bond there, it just needs desperate help.
What Does This Mean?
It means you aren’t going to marriage counseling to see if you have it in you to work things out. You are going so you can see why it’s so hard to try.
You aren’t going to see why you seem to hate each other. You are going so you can find other ways to let your partner know that you aren’t OK with things that threaten your bond.
It means that there is hope, even if you question that.
It also means that you need to find a marriage counselor that actually believes this. If they aren’t sure that people sitting in front of them really have a bond, they won’t be as likely to have confidence in their own treatment. This is a problem, so seek a couples counselor with real training in couples and marriage therapy. Seriously.
My husband and I have been having a lot of the same fights lately and I am really worried for our marriage. A friend of ours suggested looking into couples counseling and I think that it would be a great this for us to explore. We have a really hard time just sitting down and talking through our problems so it would be nice to have someone there to mediate the whole thing. Thank you for sharing these tips, I will have to keep them in mind.
Glad you find this helpful!
I’m glad that you pointed out how my husband and I can move past an affair in our relationship. He came clean to me about his affair the other day, so I was wondering about what this means about our relationship. You’re right about we can use this as an opportunity to take a close look at what’s going on in our marriage to get over what happened. He said that he still wants to stay together rather than pursue a new relationship with the woman he had an affair with, so examining what we need to do to improve our bond as a couple could help save our marriage. It seems like a marriage counselor would know what we need to do to move past an affair, so I’ll bring that up to him so that we can get help. Thanks for the advice!
Hello Dee,
Thanks so much for commenting here, I’m so glad that in some way these posts can help people regain hope and find a path toward reclaiming their marriages! If you like my approach I’d suggest visiting http://www.iceeft.com/index.php/find-a-therapist to find an Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist in your area. Best of luck to you!!!!!
Is it ever possible to save a marriage if you don’t love your spouse anymore? I’m fairly certain he doesn’t love me either, but seems to prefer staying married, even though we’re basically roommates with kids.
Couples often come into counseling to figure that out. Sometimes it isn’t that you aren’t in love, but that negative feelings and burnout are over riding things. Couples counseling can often help you both figure out if there is anything to save and how that would look. Good luck and thanks for dropping by!
Can’t afford counseling please !please ! If you could give some advice.Im having a bad bad fight or fight reaction after my wife’s affair I have a lot of obsessive thoughts and anxiety of giving up but I want to stay we don’t argue anymore and take time to listen to each other better I’m not very worried about another affair.. its been about a year will fight the flight thinking ever go away I love her so much I’m going to get meds tomorrow for anxiety just need some light at the end of the tunnel…I hurt her first a lot it’s a wonder this didn’t happen before hand I understand now how to treat her ..Please help please!
I’m so sorry that you are going through this. While I can’t personally help you online due to ethics concerns, here is a website that offers crisis help online. I do encourage you to find an individual therapist to help you through this difficult time! https://www.contact-usa.org/chat.html
My husband and I are really struggling in our marriage. Thank you for pointing out that the fact that we are working at the marriage means we have a bond. This is really reassuring to me and I’ll have to keep this in mind as I search for the best marriage therapist for us. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a great one in my area.
Have you been arguing with your partner a tad bit more lately? Is both of your love for each other constantly suffering from setbacks? If yes, undertaking a couples therapy seems viable. Now in the above article, the writer has stated how most successful couples therapists perceive relationships. It is worth reading, so, go through it now
That is interesting to think that no matter what a couple is going through, the bond is still there. My sister and her husband are starting to have issues where they feel like they have grown apart. I will have to show this article to them, I think it would help them start to repair things.