Archive for June, 2006

As we have seen the marriage counselor as such is mainly concerned with offering help in the disturbed relationship between the partners rather than in the inner personality dynamics of either of them. This intra-personal area is much more the province of the psychotherapist, and the marriage counselor as such is not trained to do psychotherapy in this sense.

But it is generally impossible to draw any sharp line between the “relationship” and the “intra-personal” areas in the majority of marital problems that come for help, and if every intra-personal disturbance discovered by the marriage counselor were referred to a psychiatrist there would soon be an oversaturation of the available time and energy of all the psychiatrists in any country.

It is therefore part of the training of marriage counselors, and indeed of social workers, to keep predominantly within their own fields, the marriage counselor within the relationship field and the social worker within the environmental field; but to be able to deal with the less intense and complex elements of their clients’ problems which may encroach to some extent into the associated fields. In any such extension they are under an obligation to recognize their limitations and to seek appropriate referral whenever it seems at all advisable or in any case of doubt. In fact many social workers find that their knowledge and experience enable them to use the rapport they gain with clients to help them greatly in their relationships and in their inner personality disorders. In some clinics this is done with the full approval of the psychiatrist in charge. The same spread into related fields cannot altogether be avoided by the marriage counselor.

In an earlier chapter we have considered some of the most common intra-personal factors which can contribute to marital disorder under four headings, ignorance or misinformation, immaturity, illness, physical and mental, and irreligion; and some account has been given of the main indications of these factors and of their possible effects on the marital relationship. We may now consider how the counselor sets out to elicit and to clarify his clients’ attitudes and feelings in this area.

Many of the more obvious indications of intra-personal disorders will come out spontaneously in the progress of the counseling, especially as the counselor looks with clients at their role perceptions, their habitual attitudes and responses, their uncritical assumptions and emotional needs, their background “conditioning” and their personality types. By the kind of “creative question” already discussed, asked at the most appropriate point in the discussion to follow out the clients’ trains of thought the clarification can continue.

As we saw in the previous section on “further clarification in the relationship area,” many intra-personal disorders and distortions will come up so closely interrelated with the relationships that they cannot be separated from them, even if that were desirable. But if the counselor has some kind of orderly arrangement in his own mind he can save himself from confusion of thought and help the client to more ordered thinking too. All of these classifications are mainly for that purpose, and to some extent to assist in orderly description.

Keywords: Marriage, Marriage Counseling, Marital Relationship, Marital Disorder, Marital Conflict

What goal is being aimed at in marriage counseling? This question is worthy of some consideration because marriage is not a fixed or uniform kind of relationship. There are many kinds of successful marriages, and any counselor who, consciously or unconsciously, seeks to make his own concept of marriage the goal of his counseling will often find himself in difficulties. The very essence of counseling is that the clients are helped to work toward the kind of marital relationship that they find mutually satisfactory, which may be quite different from what the counselor would regard as a good marital relationship.

In emphasizing this it must also be recalled that certain kinds of marital relationship are less stable or more vulnerable than others, and it may be appropriate for the counselor to help any couple to some realization of the possible dangers, so that they can recognize any early indications of trouble and seek any necessary help. A case in point has already been suggested, the maternally minded girl giving a lot of “mothering” to an already “over-mothered” husband, and each of them finding the relationship quite satisfactory. This is of course a very vulnerable kind of marriage if any children are expected in the future, and it would help the partners to prepare for the readjustment if they have some idea of the dangers.

With this kind of reservation it is important for the counselor to keep in his mind the essential fact that his function is to help his clients to better insight into their own and their partners’ attitudes and actions so that they can work out with each other the kind of marital relationship that they find most mutually acceptable.

Some idea of the different kinds of successful marriage can be obtained by thinking of them from the points of view of certain specific categories. For example using domination as a criterion we can see many apparently successful marriages in which the husband is the dominant partner, others in which the wife is dominant, and all grades between the two with varying degrees of domination and cooperation in the different areas of the lives of the partners. As long as the relationship is mutually acceptable these different patterns of marriage can be quite successful.

Another category, which may well overlap with the first, is the manner in which the partners attempt to settle their main differences. Here again we have all variations between the quiet peaceful home and that in which the partners seem to revel in brawls and quarrels, even to the point of shouting and screaming at each other, and yet seem to get on very well together and to form a strongly united front in the face of any external threat or difficulty. Another group of partners find that they can discuss many of their differences openly, but that some of them are “walled off” and kept out of the way in order to preserve peace. This may be vulnerable, but many couples manage to get on well in this way.

A third category, again overlapping with the others, is what may be called the pivot on which the partnership revolves. There are marriages which are mainly governed by the welfare of the children, and the parents seem to delight in submerging themselves for their children’s benefit. At the other end of this scale there are marriages in which the children are largely left to look after their own welfare, and the partners put their own affairs first, or possibly they even regard some community activities as of sufficient importance to override everything else. Again any of these marriages can be successful as long as the policy is one of mutual acceptance.

A fourth category is that of general administration, and here there are great variations between the couples who do most things together and have almost all their interests in common and those at the other end of the scale who largely delight in going their separate ways and find great interest in each other’s activities. The necessary common interest in such cases is in each other’s separate doings, and as long as they agree in this way of administering their partnership it can work well. A still less definite kind of structure which can work very well within its limitations is the “de facto” partnership, in which for some unalterable reason the partners are unable to go through the official form of marriage but find a mutual delight and mutual benefit in the unconventional partnership.

A final category to be mentioned here is that of the varying roles in marriage, from the conventional one of a husband as breadwinner and his wife looking after the home and family, through various kinds of situation in which husband and wife both work and the children are managed largely by a grandmother or a housekeeper, to the occasional situation in which the conventional roles are completely reversed. In this latter case the husband may, for example, have been crippled by poliomyelitis or some other ailment or injury, and may keep an eye on the domestic scene while his wife acts as the breadwinner. Here again each of these patterns can work very well if they are accepted by mutual consent.

There are probably many other categories by which differing patterns of successful marriage can be assessed, even to an occasionally successful “triangular situation.” But enough has been suggested to make it clear that marriage is largely what the partners want it to be, and not a rigid or constant pattern imposed by anyone else, especially not by any good counselor.

Keywords: Marriage, Marriage Counseling, Marital Relationship, Marital Disorder, Marital Conflict

The social relationships. This is a fairly wide field, which may cover such matters as friends, sports and hobbies, business and professional associates, necessities of work (such as travelling or “working back” or “entertaining”), and involvement with church work or other kinds of voluntary social service. Any of these may be brought up in counseling as elements in the trouble, and as in previous cases there are many deeper but more influential factors in most of these problems than are immediately obvious.

In some cases the trouble has been felt from the beginning and then may stem from the fact that one or both of the partners have failed to adapt themselves from a comfortable individualism to the responsibility of marriage. Their “I” has failed to become in any real sense “We.” This is a kind of immaturity, often the product of “spoiling” by overindulgent parents in childhood, and such people may enter marriage with the naive idea that they will go on being coddled. They have never been able to develop a sense of responsibility to any but compulsory tasks, and not always even to them. This situation may involve considerable patience on the part of both partners and also of the counselor, because growth of any kind is always slow. The counselor’s task, having helped the partners to understand the realities of the situation, is to try to help them hold the marital relationship while the growth and the learning can have sufficient time to produce results.

Sometimes the undue preoccupation of a partner with many old friends of the same sex is a result of latent or even actual homosexuality, and in such cases there will almost always be quite obvious disturbances of the sexual relationship between the partners as well. When there is any indication of the possibility of this kind of trouble a referral is advisable.

Probably most of the social difficulties which are not the result of unavoidable duties are really symptoms of a deeper conflict between husband and wife, a slowly corroding indifference which has gradually made home less attractive and desirable. Many husbands who spend hours “with the boys” on the way home each evening, to the growing resentment of their wives, would come home much more readily if the atmosphere were more attractive. When the wife objects, which she feels quite justified in doing, it only tends to make the husband feel less anxious to come home, and the children suffer from both the absence of their father and the increasing peevishness of their mother.

In such cases it is essential to open up the deeper elements before any worthwhile healing of the marital situation can be expected. To tell such a husband that he ought to take more interest in his wife and his home, and to tell the wife that she ought to make the home more welcoming, will generally leave each of them quite unmoved. They will have had much of this kind of advice from interested relatives, and it will most likely have added to their feelings of despair. When the deeper elements are brought to the surface and many old “festering sores” are faced and dealt with the way may become open for a restoration of the deeper emotional communication and the recovery of mutual affection and confidence, and a new era may well dawn in the marriage. Unless the marriage and the home can be given a high priority in the feelings of each partner the situation will be in danger of such deterioration as we have been considering.

Keywords: Marriage, Marriage Counseling, Marital Relationship, Marital Disorder, Marital Conflict

At the other extreme a young couple for various reasons may delay parenthood for an unduly long period, and become so well adapted to each other and to a childless marriage that they either give up the idea of parenthood altogether, or find the child or children a hindrance to their previously settled life. This delay or denial of motherhood, either by her own desire or still more by some kind of pressure from her husband, may have quite considerable effects on the wife’s emotional attitudes, in ways not obviously connected with the particular frustration. Many doctors have seen a nervous, irritable, restless wife come to a dramatic recovery with the arrival of her own or even an adopted child, even when she was not at all happy about an unexpected pregnancy.

Disagreements about the question of adoption when desires for children of their own have been unfulfilled sometimes appear to be quite a large element in a marital disorder, especially when the wife has a strong maternal instinct and the husband a rooted objection to adoption. The parents of each partner may well have their strong opinions and have no hesitation in expressing them. Counseling which seeks to find any deep underlying factors in such attitudes may help them to find a way through the situation which does no great violence to any of the personal feelings concerned. Many people have vague or distorted ideas about adoption and open discussion in the accepting atmosphere of counseling will often bring more sense of realism to the situation. Husbands don’t always realize the depth of the frustration of the maternal instinct in their wives in such cases. In any case of apparent infertility it is of course understood that the partners will have been referred for special medical investigation of the situation.

A common element in marital disorder is the effect on the husband of the arrival of the first or any other child with the consequent change in the balance of the family. There may be deep unconscious vulnerabilities in the husband which are suddenly brought to the surface when a child arrives, and their manifestations appear quite irrational until the deeper elements are realized. The well known situation of the husband who finds mothering in a “maternally minded” wife and feels rejected and jealous when she becomes involved with more natural objects for mothering was described at the beginning of this book. A deeper vulnerability which may occur in a husband is that which stems from his childhood jealousy of a little brother or sister which was punished or belittled by his parents and therefore repressed. In such cases he may have quite “unreasonable” hostility to his new baby, and deep jealousy of any attention his wife gives to perfectly natural mothering of the child. This will be helped greatly when it is brought out in the counseling.

Another kind of conflict affecting the mutual task of parenthood is in the general type of care and discipline of children. This of course is best worked out between the partners either during the engagement period or at least before the arrival of their children, but many couples fail to do this adequately and find themselves in quite serious quarrels about the handling of children. Here again many attitudes of husband and wife come less from “reason” than from deep habitual attitudes which have “carried over” from their own childhood. In counseling their differing rationalizations may well give place to more compatible realistic ideas when each of them is given the chance to relate present feelings to the background experience. Sometimes a referral to a child guidance clinic may be helpful.

Keywords: Marriage, Marriage Counseling, Marital Relationship, Marital Disorder, Marital Conflict