Winner of this week’s Best username/post combo!!!
bows
Any relationship thread on the Dope is going to include the advice “break up!” no matter what the problem actually is. That’s not to say that people who suggest this are always wrong, but you have to remember they only have a small window into your relationship.
Worked for my wife and me.
Or maybe we would have made it anyway, but the counseling definitely helped.
To shorten a very long story: We were nine years into our marriage when things went really bad. Counseling helped us work through the pain and hang in there. The healing began very slowly, and it was several years before we started feeling easy, comfortable happiness again, but things did just keep on getting better.
Last month we celebrated wedding anniversary #41. And as much as I hate the cliché, each of us is still the other’s best friend.
FWIW: it’s hard to assign blame for the near breakup. We both had screwed up badly.
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Back when I was married and before The Unpleasantness, we went to marriage counseling. I think it would have worked out great if 3 out of 3 people involved in the process wanted to work on things. I wanted to work on things, the counselor did too. However, [del]bitchface** the kids’ mom used the opportunity of me saying what hurt my feelings and what pressed my buttons to really start hammering on those buttons. For example, the name calling when she was upset. Her favorite was calling me a child molester. I told her in counseling that upset me. So she whipped that little chestnut out at any opportunity.
So yes, couple’s counseling would work if both of you and the counselor want to work towards reconciliation. Definitely pick one that doesn’t know either one of you.
Hey I know that feeling! I bet it’s kind of like when you are in marriage counseling to get over his affair and he declines to disclose that he is still in contact with her.
Good times.
There’s no way to explain all the details of my experience without getting into a lot of unnecessary detail, so let me just say that I’m glad my then-wife and I went to counseling, even though 6 years later I wound up divorcing her anyway. In between, we did have some of the best times of our marriage, which I wouldn’t trade for anything.
Thanks very much for your input and advice, guys. It seems like as long as we’re both invested in the process, counseling will be a positive thing even if it ultimately doesn’t work out.
And thank you, Omar Little and others; I’m a little over-sensitive about it right now, but thanks for reminding me that this may just be another symptom of his/my/our issues and I’m only delaying the inevitable. It hurts to hear, but it’s a thought I need to keep front and centre.
My husband and I met at age 18 and became engaged at age 22. Shortly after we became engaged, our relationship began to take a nosedive. It was bad enough that our roommates were uncomfortable around us because we were always arguing. It was mostly about money - we were poor, he was overworked, we were trying to scrape together the funds for a wedding and I was at a point where bankruptcy looked like a distinct possibility for my future. Complicating matters was my severe PTSD which made physical intimacy difficult if not impossible. I’m not proud of it, but we imploded.
Couples therapy did two important things for us.:
1.) Helped us take stock of how relationships were handled in our families of origin and how that impacted the way we related to one another in the moment. That was really eye-opening, because he had a lot of issues from his parents’ disastrous marriage that he hadn’t faced. Until then the attention had always been on me and how screwed up my family was, but it gave him an opportunity to really be heard and validated about his own upbringing.
2.) Helped us see one another as allies in the fight against the external forces trying to bring us down. I had felt completely alone and responsible for the PTSD. Couples therapy helped me understand it affected him just as much as it affected me; it brought us together as allies. We learned to share that pain instead of nurse it in private, and that helped so much. Not only for that issue, but for everything we faced… instead of lashing out at one another for life’s external frustrations, we found a way to come together, us against the world.
I think we saw the counselor for 3-6 months before moving on. All it really took for us was a little jumpstart before we were able to start making the magic happen on our own. I remember improvement started within just a couple of weeks because we were both so motivated to restore what had been lost.
It has been six wonderful years since then and I think that experience still impacts us today. Certainly how we approach problems in our marriage has never been the same. If we start to lash out at one another, one of us says, ‘‘Let’s be allies.’’ And then I’ll joke, ‘‘You be France, I’ll be Great Britain.’’ It just changes the nature of the situation, helps us come together and tackle whatever’s ailing us as a team.
My thinking on therapy is usually along the lines of “can’t hurt, might help.”
You may still end up alone, but chances are good that you’ll be better prepared and you’ll have learned better communication skills, etc, to use in your future relationships.
My ex and I were in therapy for two years. We never made a lot of progress, largely because he wasn’t committed to change in our relationship–he really liked the way things were and wanted me to adjust accordingly. But it did help us hold it together a little longer, which was probably a good thing in the long run, and I’m sure it helped me cope after we split (the split being wholly my decision.) I was much more prepared and had finally come to the realization that he was not going to change, ever.