Can Therapy Save Your Marriage?

For couples in crisis, January is the crunch month of the year. Relate reports that during the first week after the New Year break, they received a 20 per cent increase in calls and a huge increase in visits to their live chat online facility.
But does counselling actually work? In the U.S., psychologist Jan Lebow of Northwestern University has interpreted various data about the effectiveness of marital therapy and discovered that 70 per cent of couples report being more ­satisfied with their marriages post-­therapy, citing lower levels of conflict and improved communication.
This certainly wasn’t the ­experience, however, for mother-of-three Sally Smith, 39, and her husband Tom.
‘For us, counselling was a huge mistake. However well we might have been getting on the evening before our appointment, I could guarantee that we would drive home either in angry silence or hurling accusations following on from what our counsellor had “helped” us to uncover.’
The relationship failed: But one wonders if things would have been different if she'd tried counselling earlier.
In fact, it had been Sally’s husband Tom, 42, a marketing director, who had suggested counselling after they’d briefly split following a series or arguments about his unwillingness to stand up for her after Sally had a spectacular fall-out with Tom’s sister.
‘For six weeks, we trotted along to this female tharapist's house where she encouraged us to pick over not just our marriage, but also our relationships with our parents and siblings, previous partners, our ­children and also the childhoods we left behind long before we even met.
‘I felt as though my whole life was being picked apart just to find a deep-rooted reason as to why, after ten years of ­marriage, we had hit a rocky patch.’
For Sally, from Birmingham, the whole thing felt formulaic and contrived, constantly harking back to old arguments, long forgotten.
‘My husband bought into the whole thing at first — he’d dredge up occasions when he’d been left feeling hard done by, and it became tit for tat. The final straw was when she asked me if we spent much time chatting in the evenings. When I said: “No, there didn’t seem to be enough time,” she suggested my love of soap operas was getting in the way of quality time with my husband.
‘In fact, it was because he was working away and didn’t get home until late, by which time I was exhausted. I stood up and said I wasn’t buying into the psychobabble any more and went and waited in the car for my husband to come out.’
Things began to improve quickly after that, although Tom continued with the counsellor for another month.
‘I was no longer engaging in the drama of it all,’ says Sally, ‘and I felt better as a result. In the end, I poked fun at him for going off to meet his other woman, and he began to see how ridiculous it was.
‘Away from all that analysis, we ­concluded it was just a rough patch. We had young kids, work was keeping us apart, but we’d get through it. I wouldn’t ­recommend marriage counselling — unless you’re hell-bent on getting divorced!’

As head of practice at Relate, Peter Bell says that if couples don’t wish to delve into their childhoods, explore their sex life, or go into any area which they think is irrelevant, they shouldn’t be forced into doing so.
‘But they do have to engage with the therapeutic process if it’s going to be useful,’ he adds. ‘A moment when counselling is going really well is often when one of the couple begins to cry and says: “Why on earth didn’t we talk about this ten years ago?” ’

Under strain: Many arguing couples could work through their problems better with therapy Susanna Abse, director of the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships in London, says, ‘Most important is to go to someone who is qualified to work with couples, rather than someone who is an individual therapist who dabbles with couples work.
‘A couples counsellor will take the view that the relationship is the client, not Jack or Jill as individuals. Whatever the problems are, they are shared. An individual counsellor might find it hard to bridge the gap between the couple without taking sides.’

For Deborah Cooper, 52, who runs a yoga retreat in Devon with her husband, Bob, 60, the counselling experience was the antithesis of Sally’s.
‘The counsellor didn’t take sides, but he did make my husband listen. Right from the beginning I found it healing. The main problem for us at the time was that Bob hadn’t really made the adjustment to married life and being a father of three young children.
‘He was still behaving like he was single — going to the pub with his mates, disappearing off on fishing weekends. I wasn’t getting the commitment I needed and felt deeply unhappy.’
Some 93 per cent of people who got help from Relate said there was a significant improvement in their sex life. Although counselling was instigated by Deborah, she was surprised how willing Bob was to go along with it, as he’d previously denied there were problems.
‘At last I was properly able to air my grievances. For the first time he was forced to listen rather deny anything was the matter.
‘In the past, if I asked if he really wanted to be with me, he’d have said of course he did — and then leave for the pub. But with the help of the counsellor, he was slowly drawn out, and I was moved and impressed when Bob said he had chosen to be with me and really wanted to make it work.
With the counsellor’s help, he found a way to express the things I hoped so much he felt about me. We went weekly for about three months, and things just got better and better between us.’
Nearly 20 years down the line, and with their three children now grown up, Deborah says: ‘We’ve not had a major crisis between us since, even though two of our children have had severe health problems and there was a time when, financially, things were dire.
‘But if we were to face another bad patch, would I go back to counselling? Definitely.’
Modern relationship counsellors make it clear that they are in the business of providing what their clients want — to try to help them stay together if that’s what is required, or to help them part with less rancour if that is what the ­couple are seeking.
But without openness and honesty from both partners in the relationship, it’s not going to work.
It’s clear that couples counselling is neither a quick fix nor a guaranteed one. But compared to the emotional — not to mention the financial — cost of divorce, it has to be a gamble worth the price.
‘I think we fell properly in love long after our marriage,’ she says. ‘I would even go so far as to say that it was the counselling that made it possible.’


Dr Niaf Al Mutawa
The Soor Center for Cognitive Behavioral Psychotherapy, Salhiya.
Tel: +965-2290-1677
E-mail:info@soorcenter.com
Website http://www.soorcenter.com/

Dr Vinceza Tiberia
Al-Razi Counseling Center, Al-Jawhara Towers, Baghdad Street, First Floor, Salmiya.
Phone: mobile (965) 9765-6522 or 9981-6522 office 2571-1411, 2573-7773
Email: drtiberia@hotmail.com

For a look at the doctor's credentials check here [link]


LWDLIK- Personally, I think therapy can be very useful in helping one cope, understand and enable a person to deal with situations differently and change the outcome.