Many people go into couples therapy with a simple objective. Change my partner!! Please!

Usually they aren’t looking for a younger model, with fewer wrinkles and a smaller waist-line. They just want their couples counselor to deliver them back the same old partner with some tweaks. Then everything would be great!

Now let’s put aside for a moment the idea that the goal of going to see a couples therapist is to change your partner. Imago couples counseling takes a different perspecitve on that which I can talk about in other posts. Today, I just want to talk in general about the idea of changing anyone, or even changing their opinion.

You wouldn’t fight with your marriage counselor would you? It turns out that actually most of us do just that.  It’s a subtle and unconscious fight.  Couples therapists call it resistance.  It’s actually a natural and unavoidable part of the marriage counseling process.  I go and see a stranger, and the plan is to tell [...]

In a time when marriages are experiencing increased stress from financial worries, many divorce firms are reporting that couples are waiting to move forwards with their divorces, because they can’t afford to separate. It used to be that financing a divorce was easy, selling property to free up surplus equity. Now couples might find that one partner is unemployed, their house difficult to sell, and even if they could, they don’t have the funds to establish two homes.

That’s when my good friend Rod Kochtitzky asked me if I ever looked at a map before I went on a long journey. “You can think of couples therapy as the road” he said. “But the Imago couples retreat shows you where you are going.”

The reason this jumped out of me was because after an exciting two days of tracking a few leading blogs about couples counseling and relationships, and even reading Oprah magazine, I came to the conclusion that an awful lot is being written about very little. Remember I’m over 50 now, so I’m permitted to crustily announce to anyone within earshot, or cyber-shot, that the world is becoming depressingly shallow. And if studying 79 students is enough evidence to pronounce that depth is the traveling companion of bliss, then misery loves company as long as it doesn’t challenge its brain cells too much.

This seems to be the point in my blogging career when I need to admit that I live in the same world as one Jerry Seinfeld, formerly knife sharp observer of human foibles, who has now turned the spectacle of marital conflict into public entertainment which reminds me of the moral murkiness of spending saturday afternoon watching gladiators kill each other in the Colliseum. Seinfeld is fairly clear about the entertainment value of his TV show The Marriage Ref. “This is not a therapy show, it’s a comedy show. After nine years of marriage, I have discovered that the comedic potential of this subject is quite rich.” Couples counseling as comedy. At least they walk away physically unharmed.

Scott Stanley pointed out that much of the research published recently appears to be reaching completely different conclusions. Just last week I wrote a blog post “Is Marriage bad for Couples Therapists” about British survey that showed how cohabitation with the arch-enemy of long-term relationships, and pointing out the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) didn’t necessarily agree. Then just yesterday the CDC released a report picked by USA today: “Cohabiting has little effect on couple’s success in marriage”.

That’s why the workshop/therapy combination can work quickly (two-days for a big change), be lower-cost (you would need a lot of therapy sessions to cover the workshop material), and more effective (the therapy helps re-inforce the workshop).

My wife follows my blog, and asked me the other day if I felt we needed relationship help. “It sure sounds it from the way you write your posts” she said. “Is everything OK?”

Imago Dialogue for couples is something quite specific and quite structured. At least, its best for it to be structured when you are just learning it, and whenever the subject is hard. Oh! We’re talking about the field of intimate relationships- the subject has a tendency to be quite tricky, don’t you find?!

Weiner travelled to the world’s happiest places and told WorldHum that “Many countries around the world seem to grasp this notion that happiness is relational—that we derive much of our joy from our connections to other people