The Website of Dr. Mark Goulston

Words respond to words
Actions do not respond to words,
actions respond to counteractions.
An ounce of commitment backed by actions,
is worth a pound of empathy backed by nothing.

Every day we either hear about or read about someone whose marriage is in trouble. The standard reply is that they need to get into marriage counseling (which is one of the least regulated and least consistent professional practices other than most therapists/counselors sincerely wanting to help). The trick is not getting into therapy or counseling; it’s having the therapy or counseling get into the couples.

After thirty years of experience including writing, The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall in Love Again…and Stay There (Perigee) and in the interest of saving time (both the couples’ and mine) and saving bickering couples money I have developed a no nonsense approach to short circuit the endless and usually non-productive cycle of he said/she said, he obsessing/she obsessing that needlessly delays the inevitable. After the first meeting I tell a couple, “Either both of you come back willing to cooperate towards solutions, compromise, and take responsibility for your share of the problems through actions vs. words or else separate and deal with the fact that you are heading for divorce and only have a short amount of time before the separation turns into one.”

Marital counseling then proceeds to help cement that cooperation, compromise and taking personal responsibility into the marriage. Marital therapy too often enables dysfunction to continue all in the name of empathy and mutual understanding.

If words do not change actions, then the next and usually only approach is to offer a counteraction, what is referred to in psychology as “setting boundaries”. The key is to set a boundary that is neither too much (which you will have to take back) or too little (which will be laughingly disregarded).

Bickering, blaming, excuse making and not taking responsibility for one’s behavior are not words; they are actions. The unwillingness to stop all of these is an action that should be countered by immediate separation and that taste of the beginning of the divorce process to see if each partner is willing to wake up and see what they are in store for.

Any partner who will not agree to this would rather be right than make things better and is a narcissist in the context of the marriage (they may or may not be one elsewhere).

If that is the case with either or both partners, either that one or both need to go to individual counseling (again not therapy) to learn what they need to do differently if they are to ever have a successful, lasting relationship before they return to marital counseling.

(c) 2008 Mark Goulston

See review and distillation of The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationships - Love Bugs

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 7:37 am and is filed under Usable Insights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.