Four Couples Therapists and You're Still Fighting

You have both told the story four times now. To four different people, in four different offices, sitting the same distance apart on four different sofas.

Each of them nodded. Each of them reflected it back. One of them had you take turns holding an object.

And on the drive home you had the argument again, in the car, at a volume you would not use in front of any of them.

What a couple told me

A woman came in with her husband after four therapists and a great deal of money spent, in her words, for nothing.

They felt something change in the first meeting. I am not repeating that to advertise. I am repeating it because whatever changed did so quickly, and it is worth being precise about what it was, since it had nothing to do with insight, or with a technique neither of them had met before.

It was that somebody in the room was willing to have an opinion.

Neutrality is the right instrument for the wrong problem

The training says stay out of it. Do not take sides. Hold the space so the couple can find their own way.

For some couples that is exactly right. Two people who can hear each other, temporarily jammed, mostly need a room and a referee.

But a marriage that has survived four therapists is not jammed. Usually one of two things is true and neither responds to neutrality.

Sometimes one of you is doing something specific and identifiable that is corroding the thing, and everyone in the room can see it, including the person doing it. A neutral facilitator will describe the dynamic you are both caught in. That description is accurate, and it is also cover, because it distributes a weight that does not distribute evenly.

Sometimes you are both scrupulously reasonable in the room and neither of you has said the true sentence yet. The one about the money, or the mother, or the person from four years ago. Neutrality is a poor tool for extracting that, because a neutral therapist has no standing to press.

A referee prevents the fight from getting out of hand. He does not decide anything. If four courses of therapy have made your marriage safer to argue in and no better to live in, you have been extremely well refereed.

What taking a position is not

I want to draw this line carefully, because the version people imagine is a man announcing who the villain is, and that would be useless and cruel in about equal measure.

Taking a position means saying, on a specific question, what I actually think, and being prepared to be wrong out loud.

It means telling a man that his wife’s complaint about the evenings is correct. That I have listened to both accounts and find hers the more accurate. And that no amount of exploring the dynamic will change what he needs to do on Thursday.

And it means saying the same kind of thing to her the following week, because in almost every marriage the ledger is not one sided, and a therapist who only ever finds against one spouse has stopped being useful and become a weapon.

The couple I mentioned described me as not beating around the bush, and as being unafraid to say something they did not want to hear. Both of them said it. That is the test. If only one of you would say it, something has gone wrong.

The part that takes the judgment

Deciding what to say is not the difficult bit. Deciding when, and to whom, and in front of whom, is nearly the whole job.

There are things I will not say with both of them present, because a truth delivered in front of a spouse is not the same truth. It arrives as a verdict awarded to the other side, and it will be quoted back in an argument that evening.

So I hold it. Sometimes for weeks. I want to know first whether the marriage has enough goodwill in it to survive the sentence, and I want to have said enough true things to each of them that neither believes I have chosen a favorite.

Most of what I notice in the first month is never said out loud at all. Restraint is what makes the eventual sentence usable.

How to tell in one session

If you go somewhere new after four attempts, watch for one thing.

Does the person say anything that either of you did not already know, or that either of you resists.

If you both leave a session in complete agreement about how well it went, and nothing has been asked of either of you before next time, you have had a pleasant hour. You have had four of those already.

What the first session looks like

I will want to see you together, and then each of you alone, usually in the first fortnight. What people say alone is different, and pretending otherwise wastes months.

I will ask what you have already tried, and about the last argument in real detail, including who said what and in which order. Specifics, not themes. The themes are where the previous four courses of treatment have been living.

An Invitation

Going through four of them is not evidence that your marriage cannot be helped. Far more often it is evidence that four kind people were unwilling to say the thing.

If you want somebody who will, that is the arrangement here, and it applies to both of you.