We first sought out a couples therapist when our daughter, now 18, was an infant. We were unhappy, our marriage lacked intimacy and we were worried about our prospects. Of course, many parents of newborns are unhappy – they are sleep-deprived, their futures are filled with inherent uncertainty and they have little time to think about anything.
But we knew something deeper was amiss. We were both postgraduates at the time, so we went to counselling services at our university. Our first therapist was a nice guy and he was clearly determined to keep us together. That is not so unusual, or necessarily a bad thing. We didn’t present with the kinds of problems indicating a need to separate right away. There was no physical or verbal abuse, for example. We didn’t hate one another and we were not yet ready to admit that we were not in love.
But when we talked about what was bothering us, our therapist had the habit of reframing our problems as less serious than we perceived them. In so doing, he committed perhaps the cardinal sin for a therapist – trying to talk us out of our feelings. For example, when we talked about not having any sexual attraction for one another, our therapist said, “Lots of people become less interested in sex as they get older.”
We were in our early 30s and had been married for less than two years. We had not lost interest in sex. But we spent more time trying to explain ourselves and then questioning his agenda than we did dealing with the real problem, which was that we weren’t interested in each other.
More at https://shrtcô.de/7Kimys
But we knew something deeper was amiss. We were both postgraduates at the time, so we went to counselling services at our university. Our first therapist was a nice guy and he was clearly determined to keep us together. That is not so unusual, or necessarily a bad thing. We didn’t present with the kinds of problems indicating a need to separate right away. There was no physical or verbal abuse, for example. We didn’t hate one another and we were not yet ready to admit that we were not in love.
But when we talked about what was bothering us, our therapist had the habit of reframing our problems as less serious than we perceived them. In so doing, he committed perhaps the cardinal sin for a therapist – trying to talk us out of our feelings. For example, when we talked about not having any sexual attraction for one another, our therapist said, “Lots of people become less interested in sex as they get older.”
We were in our early 30s and had been married for less than two years. We had not lost interest in sex. But we spent more time trying to explain ourselves and then questioning his agenda than we did dealing with the real problem, which was that we weren’t interested in each other.
More at https://shrtcô.de/7Kimys
