Its Not Your Fault: When Couples Counseling and Coaching Doesn't Work
Improving Intimacy Relationships, Sustainably, Long Lasting Friendship
You’re not a failure, and it’s not your fault. Even if you and your partner have consulted the best relationship coaches and marriage therapists, it’s not your fault that intimacy didn’t improve or faded over time. It’s tempting to point fingers or take the blame, but the reality is that more often than not, couples “give up” or fail to see sustainable improvement for a few reasons:
Focusing too much on mechanics, such as tools, skills, and techniques
No or a lack of role models
A focus on measuring failures rather than successes
In my Improving Intimacy online course, we delve deep into these patterns to help couples understand and overcome these obstacles.
Early in my work with couples, I noticed a pattern in marital issues that completely changed the way I approached couples' work, resulting in quicker changes and long-term sustainability. As I first addressed in my article, “Marital Myth of Communication: It’s never about communication.”, couples weren’t failing because they lacked marital communication skills. Instead, too much focus on the mechanics of communication, skill, and techniques could easily slide into weaponized forms of communication I call "Book Speak" in my course. This phenomenon occurs when individuals or couples embrace a new book, expert, or modality and essentially replace their current language with new vocabulary or phrases.
"Daniel, we have spent thousands on individual and couples counseling and nearly a decade fighting to save our marriage. We learned every marriage skill and communication tool out there, it would seem to work for a while but eventually the effectiveness of those tools would wear off. It was a vicious cycle of highs and lows. The tools never seemed to created lasting, sustainable improvement. But in just a few weeks you have changed that cycle in our marriage. For the first time in our marriage we feel safe, we feel loved and we have moved from managing our relationship to connecting and healing." C.M. & M.M.
Many of the couples I’ve worked with had already consulted multiple relationship experts, therapists, and coaches. They spent thousands of dollars and claimed it was life-changing, but they still found themselves facing the same issues. In a study published in January 2020, researchers found that negative communication between spouses can be difficult to change, and changing it does not necessarily lead to more satisfying relationships. Furthermore, it doesn't always predict distress in the first place.
…contrary to predictions of behavioral models of marriage, negative communication between spouses can be difficult to change, does not necessarily lead to more satisfying relationships when it is changed, and does not always predict distress in the first place.
In my experience and according to current research, the greatest predictor of divorce or marital success is correlated to the couple’s established friendship prior to marriage. Marriage is a complex and challenging relationship. We enter into serious, lifelong commitments with little to no training, often in our most immature adult years, and expect a level of success that few, even relationship experts, experience.
You did not fail, you did not give up; you were never taught. While mechanics in marital communication can help, what creates long-lasting sustainability is relationship awareness, fostering adoration, and embracing the best. As pointed out in the same study, relationships can improve without overt improvements in communication.
Perhaps the most basic assumption underlying research on marital interaction is that specific behaviors, and specific patterns of interaction, reliably predict relationship distress and dissolution for most couples (e.g., Jacobson & Margolin, 1979). Early success at differentiating satisfied from distressed couples cross-sectionally held out promise that a distinct behavioral profile might characterize at-risk couples, as evidenced by distressed couples’ higher rates of negative behaviors, heightened reactivity to and reciprocation of negative behaviors, and sustained cycles of negativity (e.g., Margolin & Wampold, 1981; see Woodin, 2011 for a review), particularly during problem-solving conversations. In longitudinal studies, however, these same behavioral patterns have not emerged consistently as predictors of declines in relationship satisfaction (for a review, see Bradbury & Lavner, 2012). One possible explanation for the inconsistent findings is that the behavioral differences identified in cross-sectional studies may be a consequence rather than a cause of relationship distress. Another possibility is that the behaviors displayed by clinically distressed couples provide a misleading starting point for understanding how well-functioning relationships are maintained and how they change.
Furthermore, this study casts light onto a phenomenon I also discovered when focusing on mechanics within couples’ work, an emotional double bind where you see both successes and decrease satisfaction;
When distressed couples participate in empirically-supported forms of therapy, and thus are presumably motivated to grapple with and repair interpersonal deficits, a different understanding of couple communication emerges: from pre-treatment to two years following completion of treatment, observed rates of negativity and withdrawal decline by nearly half, but rates of unilateral positivity decline as well, to levels below those observed prior to the start of treatment (Baucom, Sevier, Eldridge, Doss, & Christensen, 2011).
It’s not your fault, but you can change the pattern now and set an example for future generations. My wife and I have learned these lessons and have modeled them for our children, who are now married. We created the Improving Intimacy online course to provide an in-depth look into how we did it and what really creates long-term sustainability in thriving relationships.
