Helping News                                        November, 2020   Issue 148

The marital paradox
Part 2
By Guillermo Cancio-Bello and Jim Rudes July 14, 2020

Focusing on the ‘other’ as the problem

All marriages have tensions and difficulties because any two-person relationship has instabilities built into it. People want to be together with others, but they also want to maintain their autonomy. When things are working well in a relationship, people feel connected but also free to be themselves. When people feel too close or too distant, it causes a disruption in the individual and, ultimately, in the relationship.

We want attention from our partners, but we can become allergic to too much of it, pushing the other away or distancing ourselves emotionally from them. And when we get the space we think we want, we can feel unappreciated and look for affection and validation to make us feel connected and secure. In this emotional seesaw, each person becomes sensitive to the other and what they do or say and can begin to focus on them as the problem: If only my partner would give me more attention. If only my partner would step up and do their part. If only they would listen to me. If only, if only, if only …

The reality is that both parties contribute to any relationship difficulty. That is the nature of reciprocity, but it is a fact that we all have trouble seeing when we are in the midst of relationship tensions and the emotions and anxiety they produce.

The more that tension and anxiety build, the more reactive people get, and the more they unwittingly contribute to the reciprocity, or mutually influenced pattern, that maintains the “problem.” When people get anxious and reactive, they tend to focus on what is wrong in or with the other rather than looking at what they are doing, how they are contributing to the maintenance of the “problem,” and what their options for changing their own thinking and behavior might be.

Especially in intimate relationships, people can get bogged down in the tensions of feeling misunderstood, neglected or mistreated in one way or another. It can be difficult for individuals in a relationship to see beyond the dust cloud of an argument, a history of small misunderstandings, the minute experiences of neglect that one feels toward the other but has never vocalized, and so on. These histories build because people want stability and harmony in the moment and are willing to sacrifice some autonomy for that without realizing they are contributing to a process that will later result in an eruption.

In our experience, many initial sessions with couples begin with an attempt by both parties to pull the counselor into a he said, she said tug of war. Both want the comfort of togetherness with their counselor, albeit at the expense of their relationship with each other. We believe it is the counselor’s responsibility to stay out of it. The minute that clinicians start seeing one partner or the other as an angel or demon, they have lost their objective footing.
The two overarching and interlocking steps counselors can take to guide people through the process of working on themselves in their relationships are:

1) Help each person increase their perspective of how they relate to their partner.

2) Help each person work on themselves in the present.

As with any idea, the simpler it seems, the more difficult it is.

Increasing perspective: Seeing the reciprocity

Helping people increase perspective begins with the counselor’s ability to maintain a larger perspective. Rather than seeing sides of the relationship, the goal is to focus on the processes and patterns to which both parties contribute, much like a coach looking over the field from above and watching what each player does. If the counselor is able to keep perspective, they can be useful to their clients by helping them gain a larger view of what is going on in their relationship.

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