Reboot our marriage! Tell us all about how we need therapy!

November 4, 2015 12:01 PM

Spouse and I are struggling. We're busy, we're cranky, we're over extended, we are both feeling unappreciated and unheard. We have some of the stereotypical gender based dysfunctional interactions. We are having the same damn fights. Though more frequently because of life. There's no big drama, but we aren't being as nice to each other as we should be. We aren't supporting each other the way we should.

We have two young children, but this isn't just a "get a sitter and schedule some date nights" problem. We have some issues which we need to work on. We agree we need couples therapy, and we're going to figure that out. We need that, but honestly right now it sounds like a long, slow, slog. I feel like something a little more dramatic to jump start the process or give us hope would be really good.

Ideas I've had:

1. Go on a couples intensive retreat. This look expensive $3k + and I'm not sure when we could pay it off.
2. Find a local therapist and see if they'll do a couple of longer sessions to get us started, followed by appointments every one or two weeks.
3. Do our own mini-vacation retreat with some rest, some relaxation and some reading working through some relationship book or self-help tool.
4. Just take a short mini-vacation without the self-help focus.
5. Something else…
6. Some combination of the above.

So MetaFilter, tell me, what should we do? What 'treatment modalities' can really help a floundering marriage the most? What should we do?

Specific therapy "restrictions" - not religious - except Buddhist is probably okay, not too woo and not a group retreat where you have to talk about your marital problems in front of other clients.

posted by The Shoodoonoof to Human Relations (19 answers total)

Best answer: Actually, couples therapy might not be the slog you think it will be. I could have written this question a year ago, and we did 3 or 4 1-hour sessions and things improved dramatically. The counselor gave us some ideas of ways to fight more fairly and productively, and it also just helped us to have a neutral third party to tell about our feelings, they somehow got heard by the other spouse in a way that just talking on our own didn't. We learned pretty quickly how to be more gentle with each other. Finding a good therapist would be an excellent place to start. And if you have an EAP program at either partner's workplace, use that! Free counseling!
posted by rabbitrabbit at 12:07 PM on November 4, 2015 [10 favorites]

Best answer: Therapy helped me and Mr. Thumbscrew within several sessions, too. One thing I cannot recommend hard enough is for both of you to purchase, read, and implement the exercises in Dr. Sue Johnson's "Hold Me Tight". I'm not a huge fan of the self-help genre, and I'm all about evidence-based therapy methodologies. This book is devoid of woo, intelligently written, and grounded in clinical experience. Reading it was goddamned amazing, and legitimately improved my life and relationship.
posted by julthumbscrew at 12:13 PM on November 4, 2015 [15 favorites]

Seconding "Hold Me Tight". Was also told to look into "An Emotionally Focused Workbook for Couples: The Two of Us". Also, you may want to check out Metafilter's Emotional Labor Checklist.
posted by KathyK at 12:26 PM on November 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

Agree with regular old couples therapy. Things can improve dramatically and quickly.

You seem remarkably self aware of the problems. There's no harm in making an effort to be as nice as you should be until couples therapy starts :)
posted by teg4rvn at 12:26 PM on November 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Gottman will invariably show up in this thread. We started by both getting a Gottman book and we'd read the same chapter/do the same exercise and then talk about it. That just reinforced how much we loved each other. Then we found a therapist that knew the Gottman "stuff" and thus we all spoke the same language. I think we had just 4 sessions of 60-90 minutes with some "homework" in between and it did absolute wonders. We found it to be such a positive experience coming from such a negative place that we aren't shy about telling our friends about it.
posted by adorap0621 at 12:31 PM on November 4, 2015

Best answer: As long as you treat your counselor as a trainer and not a hostage negotiator, it really shouldn't be a slog, and anything more than an hour can be sort of painful because you need to take on a few skills at a time and go practice it for a week - if you try to bootcamp a bunch of new skills at once, they won't stick.

Even with a workbook, which can also be very productive, don't try to shoehorn it into a day. It's fine if you want to make your own retreat just to get some breathing space - as long as you declare a Super-Niceness Treaty for the weekend - but I'd say limit workbook work to one section a week.

From experience: if either of you feels that your participation in the bad habits is rooted in anxiety, you really need to get that on a management plan first or the discomfort of trying to fix things will blow up in your face.
posted by Lyn Never at 12:38 PM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Couples therapy. It took surprisingly few sessions to help give my husband and I tools to start working through our problems. Then a couple of maintenance sessions a few months apart after that. We were both actively wanting to find a solution & willing to work hard to find it which I think helped. Couples therapy tends to be very practical, with exercises to work on between session, make sure to do your "homework" even if it seems silly.

With absolutely no expertise to back up my idea, might I suggest some of the money being spent on trying to find one big cure, be spent on trying to decrease how over extended you both are. All the therapy in the world won't fix that problem. Be it something as simple as a regular house cleaner, better or a different child care arrangement. I'm not talking a few date nights, I'm talking a regular sustained reduction in over extension for both parties.

But seriously, there is probably nothing that will jumpstart your couples therapy so much as just deciding to go & get help. Once my husband & I realized we were serious enough about saving our marriage to get help, it motivated both of us to do the work needed to keep it going.
posted by wwax at 12:43 PM on November 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

Nthing that couples therapy can have a quick and dramatic effect. When you share goals and values, so much of the time the problem is just that you don't have the right tools to work with. Once you get the right tools, the two of you can make progress together RIDICULOUSLY quickly. It's like if someone came along when you were trying to build a bookshelf and said "hey, I can't help but notice that you're trying to hammer those nails in with a screwdriver, would you like this hammer instead?"
posted by KathrynT at 12:49 PM on November 4, 2015

Best answer: Don't go on a couples-intensive retreat. Money is a huge stressor in marriages and this is an expensive option that may end up causing more strain!

I would suggest couples therapy - it can be intensely productive in short time, especially if you have and do homework.

I would also suggest saving up some money and going to a cabin together for a weekend. While you are there, read through the book "How to be an adult in relationships" and discuss it together. This is a little woo but mostly a very good book. The woo parts might be fun to joke about together, even.

Take care.
posted by sockermom at 12:50 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

My husband and I started couples therapy about four years ago. In our case, there was a precipitating issue, and therapy was a condition for continuing our marriage. So while the early sessions were focused on that particular issue, as time went on, we were able to dig into a lot of the things that you included in your question, and it has made a HUGE difference. We were going pretty solidly once a week for three years, and then we've been tapering off over the last year or so.

It sounds like you're being really much more proactive than we were, and I suspect wading into these things now, instead of being in a sink-or-swim position like we were, means a shorter course of therapy and a quicker effect. We had to quit digging the hole we were in AND figure out how to work together before we could work on getting out of it - your hole probably isn't as deep and it probably won't take as much for you to put your team back together and get back on solid ground.

I would advise against "longer sessions" to get started. A standard 50-minute session, if you're both really working at it, can be intense and exhausting. I'd often need to zone out or even nap for a bit after every session when we started. Once you find a therapist, ask him or her what their standard course of treatment is - they've likely seen it all already, and have a better idea of what will make the process a positive and productive one for you.

Also, good for you and your spouse for recognizing that things can be better, and being willing to do the work necessary to get there. With a good therapist and a mutual desire to improve your relationship, I wish you all the luck. Couples therapy helped us save our marriage and our family, and made us stronger individually and as a couple. I hope the same for you.
posted by Lulu's Pink Converse at 1:01 PM on November 4, 2015

A hugely important part of therapy for couples is learning how to talk and listen to each other. Once you know and trust those skills, you start to feel confident that "there has to be a way that works for both of us." You've heard about it already... using "I messages," talking about feelings rather than who's right and who's wrong, explaining things in terms of what you want and need instead of what ought to be. You probably already have read somewhere about reflecting/paraphrasing what your partner has said, and about drawing them out so they get to say everything.

My husband had I heard about all those things and we thought they were crap. It was all we could do to stop ourselves from rolling our eyes when the therapist got started with the jargon. But then when we actually used the methods and the phrasing to discuss something that was important to us, we started to get it. It works if both people are willing to be generous and fair.

The brief counseling 25 years ago changed our marriage enormously. We've now been married 30 years, and get along really well. We have disagreements, but the aim is always to find a solution. I don't think we'd have made it to our 10th anniversary if we hadn't gone to those few sessions.
posted by wryly at 1:02 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

do two sessions of therapy then look back at this, because I nth the advice above.
posted by treehorn+bunny at 1:22 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nthing couples therapy--as someone who has done therapy with couples, I've seen it work wonders in only a few sessions. In addition, you might look into the principles of nonviolent communication, which offers a non-judgmental way to communicate about needs and feelings.
posted by chicainthecity at 1:26 PM on November 4, 2015

I believe the statistic is that most couple wait seven years from when a problem starts until they seek therapy for it -- which tends to explain why most couples' therapy is a slog, because the therapist is trying to help the clients undue seven+ years of anger and resentment that the clients think will magically be resolved in a month or two.

However, many issues can be resolved in a few months, if the couple gets help early. And sometimes super-intense "jumpstart" things (for any problem, individual or relationship) can just bring up a bunch of issues without providing a lot of tools to fix them. Going more slowly can build up trust in the process and each other.
posted by jaguar at 1:47 PM on November 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

My wife and I did six "free" counseling sessions through my work's benefits program. That was enough to engage us and get us working together on improving our marriage. Two years later, things are good.
posted by tacodave at 2:12 PM on November 4, 2015

Best answer: I'm yet another person who has seen pretty quick results in my marriage from a few sessions of couples therapy. Things that contributed to this:

• We went in with a specific problem we wanted to work on first. It wasn't our only problem, just the most pressing one. But when we started getting that one problem sorted out, it gave us a lot of optimism and confidence and that itself was a big boost to our relationship.
• We both spent a lot of time outside therapy thinking privately about what had happened in therapy the week before, and what we wanted to talk about next time.
• Often, we continued the conversations we'd started in therapy throughout the week. (It was a big help here that things between us hadn't degenerated to the point where we couldn't talk respectfully.) Some of those continued conversations turned into small fights or frustrating miscommunications, and then we'd put the issue on hold and come back to it in therapy. But some of them went really well.

I think my advice, given y'all's situation, would be to start doing regular couples therapy as soon as you can — and then if you're feeling like throwing some extra money at the problem, spending that money on a babysitter, or on someone to come and clean the house occasionally, or on a mini-vacation after you've already been doing the couples therapy for a few weeks, or on whatever else you'd need to free up some time for you two to be thinking and talking outside therapy.
posted by nebulawindphone at 3:40 PM on November 4, 2015

A Hold Me Tight workshop (based on Sue Johnson's work) cost more like $500 for the weekend (plus travel and lodging) so that might be much more affordable if there is one near you. There is a list here.
posted by metahawk at 5:45 PM on November 4, 2015

Dear Abby says that if your spouse is unwilling to go to therapy, you start going yourself. You wouldn't believe all the things that another person can see and the power you actually have.

I could never get my husband to couples therapy, but I can do that myself and I can also read every single self-help book on the subject. These are really helpful. Our issue is my in-laws--so I bought a couple books on the problem, read them, and it REALLY HELPED. They gave me a vocabulary to start talking about stuff that seemed hopeless.

Figure out the problems. There are the 5 horsemen of the apocalypse that every couple fights about: money, sex, time, children, and family? These are mundane, garden-variety stuff that others have tackled before. Google every problem you have: someone else will have had it.

Stop fighting. If you find yourself getting into the same argument again and again, just say, "Okay. Stop. Here we go again."

Enlist your friends as much as you can. "Jerry and I are really having a problem with X. Can you think of a solution?" And you'll probably keep hearing the same solution over and over. And it's probably the best solution--even though it's hard!!!
posted by Piedmont_Americana at 4:07 AM on November 5, 2015

Response by poster: Thank you all! I appreciate all of the answers. And so many voices saying that couples therapy might show results quickly is really encouraging. In case folks are interested the other things that seemed really helpful for me personally are: the specific book recommendations, the advice that an intensive might be too intense and thus not as productive because it doesn't give you time to process and implement, the idea that unmanaged anxiety could undermine the best intended efforts, the recommendation to start therapy and then get away for a couple of days, and the reminder to keep trying to find ways to make the day to day easier rather than splurging on a vacation.

Admittedly a small part of me was hoping that MeFi would tell me that I had to go to Hawaii for the sake of my marriage and children's future ;)
posted by The Shoodoonoof at 9:37 AM on November 5, 2015 [2 favorites]