Anyone doing marital therapy is in a position to make a bad situation worse. The following observations may be useful both to those who plan to seek marital counseling and to the counselors themselves.
Even the best therapist, with the most adequate training, is bound to have bad days and is certain to do better with some couples than with others. However well intended, his intervention cannot always be correct, and the mark of the honest counselor is that if a mistake is made, he is willing to pick up the pieces and put them together again. To obtain assurance of this kind of professional responsibility is one reason for paying a professional instead of seeking out free advice.
The counselor must be on guard against foisting his own values upon his clients. One cannot help revealing some personal beliefs during therapy, but as long as they are clearly identified as personal biases and dealt with honestly, their presence can be an essential part of therapy. They help identify the therapist as an individual human being rather than a stone god. It is the imposition of personal values which are not so labeled which can be damaging.
The warnings in this section are not offered to provide justifications for couples who wish to avoid seeking marital therapy, or for those who want to quit therapy because the going is a little rough. It is our belief that good marital counseling can save a sick marriage. And in most cases, matters must be expected to get worse before they get better. For example, as each spouse learns to air his gripes the other is apt to respond with anger and defensiveness. It takes time for spouses to gain the ability to distinguish and differentiate from badness and to recognize a justified complaint without finding it necessary to produce a counter complaint.
Here we would like to list some of the most obvious therapeutic errors, so that the individual seeking help may be on the lookout for them in his own therapy.
Error 1
The therapist takes sides with one or the other spouse, unintentionally, and not as a temporary therapeutic maneuvers. Sometimes this error results when the therapist tries to overcome a natural tendency to identify with the spouse of the same sex by leaning over backward to understand the viewpoint of the spouse of the opposite sex. It usually reflects the therapist’s bias and problems with the opposite sex, and is common among inexperienced therapists who have not yet realized that in marriages there are no «good guys” and “bad guys.” Culpability is evenly divided.
This error may also occur when the counselor-even the experienced counselor-has a set of values in which he earnestly believes (for example, religious tenets), and the attitudes of one of the spouses therefore strike a responsive chord in him not reached by the other. For example, one young psychologist found it easy to understand the plight of a woman who complained of her husband’s handling of their finances. The psychologist was careful with his own income and was eager to save sensibly. After listening to this couple he concluded, from the wife’s story that the husband irresponsibly bought what he wanted when he wanted it. He attempted to get the couple to stay on a budget, overlooking the fact that the husband was proud of his large income and had carefully taken care of the future through sound investments and life insurance. The budget simply functioned as a club wielded by the young wife in her status struggle with her husband. The husband took her messages literally, and his responses added to the problem. This couple finally obtained a divorce.
Only three months after the final decree, the young woman married a merchant seaman whom she had to support during the rare occasions he was at home because he blew his pay the minute he hit port. The psychologist would not have known the outcome of this case except for the fact that the woman wrote him for a letter of reference to a prospective employer. He learned something valuable about himself from the experience.
The overall neutrality of the therapist is essential to successful conjoint marital therapy. Of course, at some point he may take sides with respect to certain particular issues or a specific piece of behavior by one of the spouses. However, in balance he recognizes that the two spouses chose each other in the first place for some reason, and that they both are hurting, even though superficially one or the other may appear to have the better deal, or to be more at fault. A young therapist may remark to his colleagues. “I don’t see how such a nice guy could marry a bitch like that.” His inexperience shows in such a statement.
Error 2
The therapist views his role as a judicial one in which he sifts the evidence presented to him and eventually makes pronouncements.
This approach tends to be extremely damaging because the spouses involved are likely to devote their energy and ingenuity to digging up “evidence” against each other. The result is an escalation of bad feelings and an increasing schism, until the therapy-and the marriage-break down altogether. Even when the judicial therapist attempts to make a pronouncement which does not favor one of the spouses-for example, “From what you both have told me I can see how each of you feels hurt and distressed in the marriage”-it is likely to fall on deaf ears, for warring spouses are in no mood to listen to each other’s side of the story, or be told that each is equally in the right.
To force a shift in the spouses’ behavior, the therapist has to set specific guidelines, some rules of procedure some ways of looking at the marriage that have not yet occurred to either spouse. He can only do this by interfering with their customary pattern of behavior whether it is constant bickering or constant silence.
Error 3
The therapist secretly thinks that the spouses are mismatched and that each would do better with another mate. Instead of referring them to another therapist, he strives to overcome his bias by convincing them that they should try harder to make their marriage work, but since his bias handicaps his being helpful and creative, the spouses are at the same time prodded by the moral cry of “try harder” and blocked by the therapist’s inability to function effectively.
The therapist’s attitude should be: My job is to help these people stay together more compatibly and productively, or to help them separate as amicably as possible. Since this is not my marriage, it is not my place to tell these people which of these two courses to take.
Error 4
The therapist takes the position that one spouse is sicker than the other and sets up a situation in which he and the “well” spouse are treating the one identified as the patient. The therapist may be aware of his value judgment or, as is usually the case, it may be unconscious. In any case, the result is an imbalance in the marital interaction which may never be overcome. One such situation developed when a therapist saw a married couple shortly after the wife had been released from a week’s stay in the mental ward of a private hospital for an impulsive, but not-too serious, suicide attempt. He was concerned about the possibility of her repeating the attempt, and shared this concern with her husband. He put her on drugs to calm her nerves, and it soon became obvious that though ostensibly he was dealing with the marriage problems by seeing the couple together, actually he and the husband were treating the wife as the patient. Further, the husband derived strength from the wife’s weakness. He became more overtly dissatisfied with her “faults,” and as she was threatened by his apparent superiority, her level of performance decreased. The husband began taking out a mutual friend, a recently divorced woman, and one day announced to his stricken wife that he was going to Reno to get a quick divorce so that he could marry the other woman.
The wife continued to see the therapist alone, and they agreed that there was no point in fighting the husband’s divorce. Feeling guilty about what had happened, the therapist encouraged her to be very demanding in the negotiations for a financial settlement. He helped her find an aggressive lawyer, who soon had the husband in a fury, and the process of making the financial arrangements was long and drawn-out. In the meantime, the wife felt terribly inadequate and depressed. Through mutual friends she learned that her husband had remarried and that he and his new wife were busily turning themselves into alcoholics. The ex-husband made no attempt to keep in touch with his wife, nor did he see their two daughters. About a year later he was killed driving home from a party, when his car went off the road and crashed into a tree.
Until after the divorce, it was apparent not at all to the therapist (and only unconsciously to the wife) that the husband was actually quite insecure, and had relied on his wife’s “weakness” to make him look relatively strong. When he married an aggressive and demanding woman, he could not handle her and increasingly tried to reduce his anxiety by drinking.
This story has two morals. First, the identification of who is the strong one and who is the weak one in a marriage is a very tricky proposition. Sometimes a great deal of strength is required to make someone else look stronger, and being in charge at the overt level is not the same as covertly determining the nature of the marital rules.
Second, the therapist who identifies one spouse as “healthy and strong” and the other as “sick and weak” may-as he did in this example-help escalate the marital discord until a runaway develops and the marital system £lies apart.
Insight into the skills and the precautions required in counseling can best be learned from examples.
In the following example, Mr. and Mrs. McIntosh, who wish to improve their marriage, have just seated themselves in the office of an inexperienced and untrained marriage counselor. The counselor, Miss Valet, approaches therapy from a typical battle of-the-sexes point of view.
The example includes the dialogue of everyone present. As the session proceeds, the marital interactions become more and more destructive. This occurs because of the counselor’s incompetence. The detailed explanation of why this happens is given several times during the dialogue. However, later, when a well-trained and experienced marriage counselor takes the place of the well meaning but incompetent Miss Valet, the marital discussion begins to straighten out and indicate some progress.
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