My thoughts on the counseling -- there is a LOT of anger over the swinging and that is what opened her to talking to the guy. I think the counseling MIGHT help her let go of some of the anger while I'm attacking this from the Marriage Builders plan of action. It will also give her an excuse to keep going -- because she knows we have counseling ahead of us. We did marriage counseling in year 2 of our marriage (faith based) and it actually worked. we went for about 3 months and everything has been fine for years after that.
"One of the reasons I'm not so keen on dredging up the past as a part of therapy is that it brings up memories that carry resentment along with them. If I'm not careful, a single counseling session can open up such a can of worms that the presenting problem gets lost in a flood of new and painful memories. If the goal of therapy is to "resolve" every past issue, that seems to me to be a good way to keep people coming for therapy for the rest of their lives. That's because it's an insurmountable goal. We simply cannot resolve everything that's ever bothered us."
"As a clinical psychologist who has been in direct therapy with 50,000 individuals and supervised over 600 counselors, I have not found that resolving issues of the past does much to help people deal with issues of the present. In most cases I've witnessed, it makes matters worse because it drags the most unpleasant experiences of the past into the present. I know that my perspective is in conflict with many therapists who are trained to treat the past before they can treat the present, but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that this approach is more effective than letting the past stay in the past. My personal experience is that dredging up the past actually increases the risk of suicide and other dangerous symptoms of mental disorders.
Another important reason that I am opposed to bringing up issues of the past is that it wastes time. When you could be forming an effective plan and putting the plan into motion to resolve an issue of the present, you spend months, and even years focused on the past while the problems of the present keep building up, eventually burying the client."
"My experience as a Clinical Psychologist has proven to me that dredging up unpleasant experiences of the past merely brings the unhappiness of the past into the present. The problems of the present are difficult enough to solve without spending time and energy trying to resolve issues of the past, which are essentially unresolvable. You can make your future happy, but you can't do a thing about bad experiences of the past, except think and talk about them -- and that makes the bad experiences of the past, bad experiences of the present."
In other words, going to counseling to talk about the bad experiences of the past will make her more angry, not less. As long as you continue bringing it up, she will continue being angry and will have perpetual justification of her affair.
We did marriage counseling in year 2 of our marriage (faith based) and it actually worked. we went for about 3 months and everything has been fine for years after that.
And yet here you are...
