Ericksonian Relationship & Couple Counseling
( These pages reflect the views and practice of keith bibby and are not intended to describe
the work of other practitioners )
HOW THINGS GO WRONG -
PATTERNS IN DISRUPTED RELATIONSHIPS
Much work in Psychotherapy is focused around the individual and personal well-being. Couple processes are much more complicated involving both individual and couple system processes.
Some people have a very deficient or distorted understanding of what a couple relationship is - or what it means to be a partner in a relationship. Some have completely unrealistic hopes and expectations. Some have a sense of the challenge they face but hit unexpected difficulties - despite or even because of their best intentions ! Others mistakenly believe that they can continue with the same sense of priorities as they had whilst unattached.
Serious Underlying Problems : -
Before coming to the common run of difficulties, it seems useful to say a few words about more serious problems which are often not mentioned.
( If you wish to skip this passage CLICK BELOW to go directly to
>> The General Run of Problems )
There is general ignorance and perhaps avoidance of the role that personality disorders can play in relationship difficulties. These disorders tend to be rather resistant to change and have problematic effects on others in various ways. They vary enormously in degree and severity.
Most of us register somewhere on the low end of the spectrum for one or more such conditions. At moderately low levels, many of these traits can have adaptive usefulness and help us to be successful in some activities. Medium to high levels may be increasingly destructive to a relationship and quickly veer toward the intolerable.
Though our capacity for hope is something to be treasured and wondered
at, sometimes a partner needs help to recognise and accept such a reality and to take it into account in assessing prospects for their relationship.
At the margins, there are continuing professionals debates about the exact diagnostic profile of the full-blown extreme for some particular conditions. Nonetheless, this does not affect the fact that these criteria do very usefully describe a spectrum of behaviours which help our understanding of the more difficult processes enormously.
They also indicate the capacities required and the kinds of approach and method which are most likely to affect a pattern beneficially - how skilful
or robust these might need to be - and the likelihood of success in a particular partnership.
Maladaptive personality patterns are more widely spread in the population than might be imagined. You may easily be aware of people in your own circle who might be candidates. These situations are not necessarily disastrous but they often need definite understandings and strategies to modify their expression within the relationship and to enable a partner to cope.
Where relationships are very to severely dysfunctional it is frequently the case that both partners manifest such disorders. The more severe the dysfunction, the less likely solutions are within the relationship - nor is any prospect of progress likely in such cases until individuals have made improvement through separate personal therapy.
The General Run of Problems : -
More serious conditions apart, whatever our initial stance, life will certainly generate enough challenges and difficulties to put us and our relationships to the test ! Such difficulties are entirely normal and the need for help, when it arises, is as normal as the need to visit a doctor.
Inevitably, as the novelty and interest of living together becomes more ordinary, important aspects of the relationship can be neglected or taken-for granted. Changes in physical or mental health, employment or careers, not to mention the planning, imminence or actual arrival of children can shift the balance profoundly.
Particular difficulties can arise where one or other partner already has children. Whether they become a part of the shared household, or where there are visiting relationships, non-cooperation may generate great tensions, particularly where the broken partnership has unresolved difficulties.
Couples with children are also destined to undergo other difficulties. One partner may have to be postpone, abandon or substantially change a career with the underlying possibility for resentment or later recrimination. Deep conflicts may also develop over choice of location or schools.
Grandparents will die causing the children upset. Partners also often discover an unexpected demand or need for support at this time and may
not quite know how to handle the complex flux of unresolved emotions
that can erupt around the death of a parent. As with other issues, they may want to come individually or jointly.
Also, for some, there will be the emotional wrench of children going away to school, or the likely hot-house difficulties of puberty and beyond for those at home. Later the nest is empty and deserted and the increased time for each other can be either enriching, conflict-ridden or seem arid and empty, with no emotional mileage left in it.
Retirement from work also brings a whole new set of profound adjustments which had far better been addressed well before they actually arrive.
All these are problems to be addressed and resolved whilst something positive can be done, rather than being left to fester and regretted later as lost opportunities for change.
Some couples start from more complex beginnings. One or other may already have an unstable relationship history and the pair may need considerable help and instruction to get their relationship into a stable balance. Without this they may experience a very wearing and destructive variant of interesting times .
The mixing of culture and language in relationships can lead to mis-reading of signals and significant misunderstanding. Situations can quite easily be concealed which would not have been taken on if known before. Even quite serious personality disorders can remain undetected for years under the cloak of cross-cultural differences. If there are already children around, the need to moderate these influences is a powerful challenge even for the professional, and one which is pretty well impossible for the couple without such help.
Many pairings have not experienced good parenting and thus lack adequate models of how to conduct their relationship and deal with these upcoming difficulties. Often they have resolved never to resort to the patterns of apparent thoughtlessness or over-concern, aggression or passivity, sensitivity or indifference they witnessed when young.
In doing this we often adopt avoidant behaviours which have consequences far from those intended. Quite paradoxically - by damming up the expression of irritations, frustrations or sense of injustice, or by becoming self-denying and over-caring of others, important parts of ourselves become unreachable. This generates hidden imbalances and resentments which break out in other guises - causing difficulty or havoc.
Equally, it can be deeply disturbing if one or other partner does not understand how to communicate or negotiate, who is too busy or blind or dodges the issues - their softer side out of reach or hardened against
any possibility of compromise. Confronted with their partner's desperate remonstrations, or collapse, or by the threat of separation or actual desertion, they often have no clue how it happened or what to do.
Often the writing , large or small, has been on the wall for some time. But having been un-attuned to the signals, and unaware of the many missed opportunities to put things right, people often feel devastated that their relationship has become so unhappy and powerless to affect matters.
So much of what happened is now either so lost or distorted in the recollection that it can be hard to reason it all together or discuss without getting angry and confused.
For many others, the pressures are contained and the unhappiness
suppressed and buried in the business of living, depleting their lives of vitality with recurring low level depression and other ills.
Sometimes a partnership is threatened or broken by one partner undergoing what commonly is described as ‘mid-life crisis’. These are complex and very disturbed processes - to be taken very seriously - where something causes the suppressed parts to break out and disrupt a person’s identity and sense of reality.
It can be very difficult to understand where a partner reveals unknown aspects of themselves, gives strange accounts of past events completely at variance with your own perceptions and sometimes seems to act completely out of character. This is often not helped by the very public nature of what happens and the interventions and comments of friends and acquaintances with a biased and ill-informed perception of events.
Even so, with the right kind of understanding and support, the relationship is not necessarily beyond repair and recovery.
Copyright keith bibby august 2007 >> Return
