When Tom and Sue came to see me, they’d been together for several years. Their relationship was in deep trouble. Sue had recently moved out of Tom’s place, and they were once again living apart.
Being an educator, Sue had a background in psychology. She felt that Tom should seek personal therapy to address his own issues and urged him to do so. At the same time, they would work to address their issues as a couple. As it turned out, this later backfired.
I accepted Tom and Sue for Couple Coaching and met with them weekly. Concurrently, Tom was seeing his therapist once or twice a week.
Through Couple Coaching, Tom and Sue quickly saw improvements. After a handful of sessions, Sue moved back in. Things were looking up. They started making plans for the future and even put a down payment on a house.
Then things took a turn for the worse. Tom would come to our sessions filled with resentment. During the week, he would talk to his therapist and formulate certain perspectives on his past trauma, his life, and his relationship with Sue. Those perspectives were not helpful to the relationship as they were one sided and detached from present-time reality.
Was it because his therapist was bad? No. The therapist was simply uninformed, because he or she was in the unfortunate position of talking only to Tom rather than hearing both parties.
I did, because I had both people in front of me. And I always insisted on hearing both people’s perspectives about any issue they brought up. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. When one deals with two good people, it is rare to find a one-sided issue: most of the time, both people are responsible for it.
Tom’s therapist did not have that luxury. All he knew was what Tom was telling him. Additionally, therapy focuses on the past and past trauma and could wind a person up in a victim mentality. That’s what happened to Tom. He became convinced that he had been victimized not only by his childhood trauma but by Sue as well.
In one of our last sessions, he got irate and threatened to storm out of the room. Next thing I knew, there was a breakup and cancellation of escrow.
Tom and Sue are not an isolated incident. I have seen this happen many times before, as with another couple I worked with briefly, where each had their individual therapist. They wound up getting divorced.
Just the other day I spoke to a young man whose wife of ten years wanted a divorce. They have a three-year-old daughter. There has been no cheating, just miscommunication. And she has been seeing four therapists for her own “mental health.” None of them have ever met or spoken to the husband.
In summary, if you want to fix your marriage or relationship, work at it exclusively. Don’t mix it with personal therapy.
