HOW THERAPY CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR MARITAL HEALT - 08/31/10 12:09 PM
Interesting article - dated to 1999 so many here may have read once before.
Therapy - Hazardous to your marriage
I can picture this scenario - I had one session in my life and was put on the defensive right at the start.
Therapy - Hazardous to your marriage
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You�d be interested to know that, according to a national survey, 80 percent of all private practice therapists in the United States say they do marital therapy. And only 12% of them are in a profession that requires even one course or any supervised experience. Only marriage and family therapy as a profession requires any course work or supervised clinical experience in marital or couples therapy.
I can picture this scenario - I had one session in my life and was put on the defensive right at the start.
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Another thing that incompetent therapists do is to beat up on one of the partners. Although women sometimes get more than their fair of the therapist's negative attention, an under-recognized problem is that men also get seriously disadvantaged in some couples therapy. Men often come to save their marriage, not primarily to seek insight into themselves. The light bulbs have gone on: I could lose this woman, I could lose these children. I gotta shape up. When they come to a therapist who is only used to dealing with individuals, they are in trouble. The therapist begins with "And how do you feel about being here, Joe?" And Joe says "Well, I�m just here to save my marriage." "No, Joe, that�s not a feeling." "Well, I think it�s important that we�" "No, no, that�s a thought, Joe, that�s not a feeling." And so Joe is not a candidate for individual psychotherapy, which to the therapist means "he�s got big time problems." The therapist and the wife decide that both she and he need a lot of individual help. And so you try to trot him off to an individual therapist, her to an individual therapist. He doesn�t go, because he�s there to save his marriage, not to understand his psyche--which proves that he is not serious about change. Another time that therapists turf couples off to individual therapists is when the therapist can�t handle the in-session conflict. The therapist can�t handle the hot conflict, feels overwhelmed by it. This work is not easy. Jay Haley, one of the founders of family therapy, says that marital therapy is the most difficult form of therapy. The pulls, the triangles, the hot conflict that is right in the room makes it very difficult. The problem isn�t that some therapists can�t handle it, the problem is they don�t know they can�t handle it, and they assume that there is a lot of individual pathology going on. So they turf the spouses off to their individual therapists, or keeps one of the spouses in individual therapy and sends the other to a colleagues. I have seen a lot of unnecessary divorces because of this scenario. The wife can lose out in this scenario if she is to say that she has "issues." She�ll say that she�s depressed a lot, that she�s read a lot of self help books and knows she is co-dependent or something worse. So the therapist and the husband become co-therapists to help her with her problems. And it goes nowhere. The first problem in marital therapy, then, is incompetence, and therapists not knowing they�re not competent.