– Understanding Unhealthy Conversations in Marriage Counseling

Last Updated on December 15, 2013 by Chris Roberts

CAN MARRIAGE THERAPY IN NASHVILLE, TN HELP WITH UNHEALTHY CONVERSATIONS IN YOUR MARRIAGE?

There are many contexts for understanding unhealthy conversations in marriages.  One of marriage counseling’s first objectives is determining what these unhealthy conversations are about.  At our practice at Two Trees Counseling Nashville, marriage counseling is about listening to how couple’s interact and where their unhealthy conversations might be stemming from.  Each spouse usually has their own ideas where these unhealthy conversations are coming from, and it is up to the marriage therapist to start to put tangible tags on each person’s perspective and help each partner understand better what is going on.

Marriage therapy is never an easy endeavor, for either spouse.  Usually one spouse is more frustrated or angry, and usually one spouse is less interested in the process of marriage counseling or why there is such intensity on the other’s side.  Determining which party is which is oftentimes an immediate goal in the marriage counseling journey.  This disparity in interest is by no means a hindrance to the process, but it is vital in gaining essential ground into how these two people interact with each other.

The simple answer as to whether marriage counseling in Nashville can help with these unhealthy conversations is: Yes!  In a previous article about marriage counseling, we discussed how repeated patterns of conversations in your head can lead to seasons of getting “stuck” in unproductive ruts in your life and your relationships.  These repeating conversations in your head typically start in early childhood, sometimes before a person has articulate language.  As we grow and develop and learn, these repeating conversation in our head aren’t typically addressed, and so they stay the same for years on end.  This same type of process can happen from the moment you meet your future spouse.  Of course, how we behave and respond to our partner doesn’t start with our first encounter of them.  We have learned and practiced how to engage with them through watching our parents, other authority figures, and have been acted out since we first began dating.

Marriage counseling helps a couple to slow down to replay these “conversations in our head” out loud and with our spouse, so that everyone in the room can be privy to these important and often over-looked conversations.  For instance, every time a partner comes in the house after work, the partner’s first question to their spouse is, “Is dinner ready yet?”  This is such a simple question.  In many ways, it is fair to say this is an innocuous questions.  This question really has no connotation, until people begin to react to it.  Perhaps, the partner at home responds with a sarcastic tone, “I don’t know, did you make it?”  Now, we are embroiled an intense situation whether each partner is aware of it.  Why did the partner at home respond this way?  What did the partner coming home expect the answer to their question of dinner to be?  Was the partner coming home hoping dinner would be ready?  Or, was the partner coming home hoping dinner was a few hours away, so that they would have some time to relax and play with the kids?  There are so many lovely and difficult questions that must be answered in order for this question and its responses to make sense.

Marriage counseling exists for the purpose of helping each spouse know the other spouse better.  Of course, the best way to know your spouse better is to have effective and helpful conversations out loud with them.  But we all have busy and hectic lives, and so it becomes easy to “guess” what the other person is thinking or assuming.  These “guesses” then become the basis for entrenched conversatiosn in our heads in which we forget to have equitable discussions out loud about what is really happening.

At Two Trees Counseling in Nashville, my goal through marriage therapy is to help couples unveil these hidden conversations and bring life back to a marriage that may have gone stagnant.