Latest / How To Love Yourself No Matter What / S2 E4. Why Couples Counseling Isn’t Helping Your Marriage (and It’s Not Your Fault)

Transcript

S2 E4. Why Couples Counseling Isn’t Helping Your Marriage (and It’s Not Your Fault) · How To Love Yourself No Matter What

• 0:00
  Hey, I'm Amanda Hess.
• 0:02
  I'm a certified life coach.
• 0:03
  But what you need to know is I'm a sensitive woman just like you, and I'm going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it.
• 0:16
  Let's go.
• 0:16
  Why couples counseling isn't helping your marriage, and it's not your fault.
• 0:20
  I have wanted to record this podcast episode for a while.
• 0:24
  I have had so many conversations with clients about couples counseling.
• 0:32
  Now, here's the thing.
• 0:33
  If you go to couples counseling and it is working great for you, amazing.
• 0:39
  But this is for the person that is going to couples counseling, that has gone to couples counseling, that is afraid of couples counseling.
• 0:47
  And these may be the reasons why.
• 0:51
  Ultimately, I see a version of this where a person will come to me and say, she has gone to counseling to fix things, and she sat on the couch, she did the homework, and she's maybe done it for
• 1:06
  years.
• 1:07
  And what she's discovering is that now she feels worse.
• 1:11
  And in doing so, moreover, she gets more and more convinced that she is the problem.
• 1:21
  This is ultimately an experience where we go to get help, and we start focusing on the problem.
• 1:30
  And the problem is that the marriage is not working, that the couple is not working.
• 1:37
  And so what I find is that you do this because you want to feel better.
• 1:45
  Both of you engage in couples counseling because the genuine desire is to feel better.
• 1:53
  In fact, you do it as a lot of times, a last hurrah.
• 1:57
  Like, we will try this before we decide to give up on the relationship.
• 2:02
  Because there's something in the relationship that you still want.
• 2:07
  There's something there that you still want to address.
• 2:10
  There is a desire to get it to work.
• 2:15
  And somewhere along the way, when you engage in couples counseling, it gets broken even worse.
• 2:25
  And here, you know, is going to be my thoughts about why.
• 2:30
  It's based on the coaching that I've done with so many different humans that have either been in the middle of couples counseling or have come out of couples counseling.
• 2:43
  This, actually, I even see happening in counseling for individuals.
• 2:47
  But today, we're just gonna talk about why it doesn't work in this scenario.
• 2:51
  So problem number one with couples counseling, the traditional couples counseling that many people engage in, is that the whole focus is on blaming.
• 3:04
  It's all about judgment.
• 3:06
  When we walk into that room and we sit down and we look at this person, this is now our opportunity to talk about what the other person did to us and how when they did that, how it made
• 3:21
  us feel.
• 3:22
  And so what that does is it puts it in this very punitive place where it's, you did this and you did that.
• 3:32
  Ultimately, if you think about how it even starts, how a session starts, you go in and you complain about what you don't like about the other person, and that person is sitting right there listening to those unfiltered thoughts.
• 3:50
  And so you will start with saying, my partner needs to change.
• 3:55
  And then they will start with saying that you need to change.
• 4:00
  And then ultimately, you will argue about it in front of an expert, and the expert gets to be the referee that gets to say, oh, you're right.
• 4:11
  Oh, no, you're right.
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  Oh, this is wrong.
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  Oh, no, that is wrong.
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  Oh, you're, you know, doing this to this person, or vice versa.
• 4:19
  And it becomes this experience where at the outset, it's really, really difficult to sit through.
• 4:26
  It's really, really difficult to sit through.
• 4:29
  You basically walk in to that room agreeing that there's something wrong that needs fixing.
• 4:37
  And so then every session really reinforces it, because we don't start with what's right.
• 4:44
  We start with what's wrong.
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  And so what we do is we really, really focus on what the weeds are.
• 4:54
  We are just pulling weeds.
• 4:56
  Okay, I've given this garden analogy when I've talked about therapy in the past, but ultimately, we go into a garden where we're like, we're not growing any flowers, and we look around and go, oh, my God, I hate
• 5:09
  this garden.
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  It's just full of weeds.
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  It's so ugly.
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  It's so hideous.
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  And so we start pulling weeds.
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  And it's a big garden.
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  And in fact, if you think about being married for 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, longer.
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  And I've spoken to a lot of you that are in these longer relationships.
• 5:28
  We go in and we're pulling all of these weeds, but the garden is huge.
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  Like, there's not enough time in one day to pull all the weeds.
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  So we pull and pull and pull and pull and pull.
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  And then we look around and we're like, oh, my God, all I see is weeds.
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  And here's the thing that I believe is really being missed.
• 5:49
  It ultimately doesn't give us a chance to plant any flowers.
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  If you want a flower garden, you must plant flowers.
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  If you want a vegetable garden, you must plant vegetables.
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  And what we think is, I'll get to planting the flowers and the vegetables when I fix everything that's wrong.
• 6:07
  And in fact, I also just honestly believe, to an extent that we just believe that the flowers and the plants should plant themselves.
• 6:16
  And so when we believe that, then the way that we address the relationship is by just trying to constantly pull the weeds.
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  And it just doesn't work.
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  Not if you want this flourishing, beautiful flower garden.
• 6:31
  What I like to say is think about somebody who has a beautiful garden full of perennial flowers.
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  Okay?
• 6:40
  So I live in Canada, where we experience, you know, cold winter, and so all of our flowers die in the wintertime or they go dormant, and you can plant a garden full of perennials.
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  I have a neighbor who is a landscaper by trade.
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  She runs the landscaping department in our city, and her gardens are a work of art.
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  And the reason why is because of how she's planted them.
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  So when you have a garden that you filled properly with perennial flowers at the beginning of the season, you clean out all the dead stuff.
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  You clean out all the weeds.
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  At the beginning, there's just soil and these.
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  These plants that are growing, but as they grow in, what's really cool about growing the good stuff is that you actually don't need to weed nearly as often because the garden is full of flowers.
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  There isn't as many opportunities for the weeds to grow.
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  So, in fact, we can spend time cultivating and taking care of the flowers and not have to spend all this time weeding and not having any flowers growing.
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  Right?
• 7:44
  And I really do believe that this is ultimately how we need to look at ourselves and how we need to look at relationships and how we need to look at helping people in general.
• 7:55
  When we walk into a couple's counseling scenario where we are focusing on what's wrong, blaming the other person, doing thought downloads about what we don't like about somebody in front of them week after week after week, is that,
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  first of all, it gives no credence to what might be good and right between you.
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  And the fact of the matter is, is that you've been so focused on what's wrong for so long, you can't see it anyways.
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  It also keeps you both very defensive.
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  And I think that it was Teddy Roosevelt that said that defense is the first act of offense.
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  And it's worthwhile noting that this goes on in our relationships.
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  So we are immediately defensive.
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  A lot of times when we're in that experience, it is wounding instead of connecting.
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  We are hurting each other instead of connecting with each other in that environment.
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  And the truth is, is that most times you leave very depleted.
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  Because if all you do is complain and complain about what is wrong, of course you want to stop going.
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  Of course you want to stop going.
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  It sucks.
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  And I've seen this happen again and again with clients who have done couples counseling because there's no way to fix a relationship from depletion.
• 9:19
  There just is no way to do that.
• 9:23
  What's truly missing in that environment is really looking at what is the result that I want to create, right?
• 9:33
  What do we both want to achieve from this counseling?
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  And I find that a lot of times when we engage in counseling, we don't really have that approach.
• 9:44
  It is one of the big differences between counseling and coaching, because in coaching, I am always looking at the results that we want to create.
• 9:55
  We need to understand what do I need to create here?
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  What do I want to create here?
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  And so what I find is that we have to actually back up several steps before we start this process.
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  And what I'm going to tell you is it doesn't matter if you're in counseling or not.
• 10:17
  If you're in a relationship that you don't like the results that are being created.
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  If you're in a relationship where you feel unseen, unheard, unsupported.
• 10:25
  If you're in a relationship where you have lost your spark, you've lost your way, you've lost your connection, you've lost your desire to be around that person.
• 10:36
  But you want to be able to know, first of all, do I want to stay or do I want to go?
• 10:42
  And second of all, maybe I do want to explore staying, and I want to see, like, is there a way to make this work?
• 10:48
  If you want to think about, like, what is your last hurrah?
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  I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to do that.
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  And number one, the first thing you need to do is you need to get regulated first.
• 11:00
  You cannot ask for what you want when you are dysregulated.
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  Because when we're dysregulated, when our nervous system is in fight, flight, freeze, fawn, all the time, then what happens is we address the relationship from a place of panic.
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  When we address a relationship from a place of panic, we are using a lot of black and white thinking, we're using a lot of judgment, and we are ultimately in survival mode.
• 11:23
  And when we're in survival mode, we're just looking for what's wrong, trying to fix things in the immediate, you know, time period.
• 11:30
  And we also want to make the other person responsible for how we feel.
• 11:34
  And it's really tempting to do that.
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  And there's a lot of help out there that says the other person is responsible for that.
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  I am not going to tell you that CO regulation Isn't something that you want in a relationship, because it is.
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  But when a relationship is in this state, we actually need to pull back and we need to look at how do I get my nervous system regulated?
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  How do I grow my emotional capacity so that I have the ability to be more measured in my approach when it comes to changing the results that I create here.
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  If we're just dysregulated all the time, our emotions are always leading the show.
• 12:10
  We are just going to default to our patterns.
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  And when we default to our patterns, we just create the same result again and again.
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  You know, when you hear that quote, like, the definition of insanity is.
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  Is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
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  This is a real reenactment of that.
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  Right?
• 12:28
  We are essentially experiencing this, and then we are blaming the other person for it.
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  And then the fight ensues or the shutdown ENS.
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  Ensues.
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  And then it repeats itself, and then we blame the other person.
• 12:43
  And what we actually really need to do is, is we need to be able to figure out, what can I do to change this?
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  What can I do to make this different?
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  Not from the standpoint of, like, oh, I'm going to take responsibility for everything.
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  Okay.
• 12:55
  But we do need to be able to create some balance, create some emotional capacity so that we have the ability to deal with the feelings that are coming up for us.
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  There are just feelings that come up in relationships that are so big.
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  Feelings of loneliness, feelings of sadness, feelings of disappointment that really just get in the way of our ability to move forward.
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  And we become ultimately a little hurt puppy inside of our relationship.
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  And what I mean by that is, like, if you think about dealing with an abused puppy, if you come up to an abused puppy and you try to pet it, it's going to try to bite you, more than
• 13:47
  likely because it's going to feel unsafe.
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  And so we do the same thing.
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  We're the hurt puppy.
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  So if our husband says something a little sideways, gives us a little eye roll, does whatever they do, then we might just be ferocious in the way that we respond.
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  At the very least, we might be defensive, which they might take as an attack.
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  And it just creates this explosion, either outward or inward, that doesn't work for the relationship.
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  And so we just really need to learn how to deal with our own emotions.
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  We need to learn how to get through a feeling without somebody else needing to solve it for us.
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  And the reason why you want to do that is it's like, if I take responsibility for my Own loneliness, sadness, disappointment, depletion.
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  If I take responsibility for that and I learn how to be with that and not need to get rid of it and let the feeling move all the way through, then I can be very clear about what I
• 14:44
  want to do next.
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  And to me, this is just the most important question that we always want to be asking ourselves is, what am I going to do moving forward?
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  Our brain wants to go back and fix going back backwards.
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  How do I fix this person and make them treat me differently and have this show up differently and make different choices, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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  It just is the way that our brain works when we're experiencing pain.
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  So when I say to you, you need to learn to deal with your own emotions, what I'm really saying is we need to decrease the amount of emotional pain you're experiencing.
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  So when you're more regulated, you experience less emotional pain.
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  When you are able to deal with your emotions, you're going to experience less emotional pain.
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  When that happen, then we can move forward.
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  Before that happens, we can't.
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  And so I'm always going to make the invitation that having a discovery call with me is a great step forward because we can really walk through what that would look like for you, because everybody really and genuinely is
• 15:47
  different.
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  Now.
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  Once we have that emotional pain dialed down, then we can start looking at what do I need to do Inside of this relationship, there's a couple things that we need to really know.
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  Number one, we need to accept that no one person can meet all our needs.
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  And this is something that hasn't been taught to us.
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  We have been taught, or at least I was taught, that you find your person.
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  And I've really put that in air quotes like you find your person and that person meets all your needs.
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  That is a lie.
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  One person can't meet all your needs.
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  They can't.
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  So it can't be your husband, it can't be your wife.
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  It just can't be.
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  They can't be the person that meets all your needs.
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  So we actually want to look at our needs from a different place.
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  All right.
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  And how I look at it is, first of all, I need to establish, here are the needs that I need or I want to get met first.
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  Starting out with that I want my need.
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  My needs might be that I want to have connection, that I want to have intellectual conversation, that I want to have wild, passionate sex.
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  Right?
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  That I want to have somebody who is a warm place to land, who will give me a big hug when things go Wrong.
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  We can just look at, like, these are the needs, right?
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  These are the things that I want to have happening inside of my life.
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  I want to have these things in place.
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  And then we can establish, here's what isn't being met.
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  Like, this need is not currently being met, and this need is not currently being met.
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  And then we can look at how I'd like them to be met, here's how I see them being met, and we can start establishing how we're going to go about getting our needs met instead of having the other
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  person have ESP and know when they don't know.
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  Okay, they don't.
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  And second of all, not, you know, assuming that that person is the right person to meet that need, because they might not be.
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  We really want to establish for ourselves, these are the things that I need to have in place to feel good about myself.
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  And this is the way that I'm going to take really good care of myself.
• 18:05
  That way we have just an established sort of full picture look of you and what you need, right?
• 18:14
  Once we have that, we also want to get clear on the person that you are actually in a relationship with.
• 18:23
  We tend to tell ourselves really interesting stories about the people that we marry.
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  We tend to assume things about them that maybe we don't want to assume, and we tend to attribute qualities to them which may or may not be there.
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  So it's worthwhile looking at that person and looking at what are their needs and understanding these are the needs that my person that I'm married to has, and these are the needs they'd like to get met by me
• 18:52
  or otherwise.
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  And this is how they go about getting their needs met.
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  Because you are not the same person as your partner.
• 19:02
  So you both have needs and they do both need to be met, but you both are going to need to know what they are.
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  Once we understand, here's my needs, here's their needs, here's the way I like my needs to be met, here's the way they like their needs to be met, then we have a really good understanding of, like, how we
• 19:20
  move forward.
• 19:22
  And then what we can do is we can look at both of us, both you and your partner, as whole people.
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  Listen, you are a messy person, okay?
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  How do I know I'm a messy person?
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  Your partner is a messy person.
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  And so we can start looking at your partner as being somebody who is messy, who does some things really, really well and does some things really, really poorly, and that you are a person that does some things really,
• 19:53
  really well, and you do some things really, really poorly.
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  We just want to bring a certain level of nuance to how we are looking at each other.
• 20:06
  Right.
• 20:07
  Once we can have that sort of bird's eye view, we can then start looking at separating responsibility.
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  So when I'm helping somebody with their relationship and note, I don't work with both people, I just work with the one person.
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  We can do all of this work on our own.
• 20:23
  When we're separating responsibility, it's understanding what I'm responsible for and understanding what they're responsible for.
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  And this is so, so important.
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  I am responsible for what I think, what I feel and what I do.
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  And we've really established this, right?
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  This is where we're moving into this like place for you, where it's like I'm going to take care of my nervous system regulation and I'm going to take care of getting, you know, myself emotionally regulated and I'm going
• 20:46
  to look at my emotional needs met and my physical needs met and my partner needs to do the same.
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  And then I'm going to remember I'm responsible for what I think, I'm responsible for what I feel, I'm responsible for what I do all the time.
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  And your partner, same, same.
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  They are responsible for what they think, what they feel and what they do.
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  And what we tend to do in long term committed relationships is we tend to over function, we tend to try and take responsibility for what they think, feel and do.
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  And we cannot do that.
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  We can influence them.
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  But it's so essential to understand you're not responsible for it.
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  One thing that I find, especially with women, but this happens with some of my male clients as well, is that we believe that we're responsible for making our partner happy.
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  That's not true.
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  And we believe that they're responsible for making us happy.
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  And that's also not true.
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  That is our responsibility.
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  Now that isn't to say that they don't have an impact and that there are things that they may be doing or not doing that don't make us happy.
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  And we might agree with ourselves on that, but we have to separate it out to begin with.
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  Once we have that separation, then we can partner from there.
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  Okay, then we can look at, here's what I want to build, here's what I want to grow, here's how I want to be a partner to another person and here's how I would like them to be a partner
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  to me.
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  We can also look at, here's what's working in the relationship and then establish, here's what's not working.
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  And ultimately, here's what we're going to try differently to create more of what we want.
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  And that's where you start to experience real success.
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  This is how you start moving it forward.
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  Now you might move it forward and realize there's no way in this relationship for either of us to get our needs met based on where we're at and what we're willing to do to move forward.
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  But most people haven't done the work beforehand, and there's too much of he said, she said, I blame you, you blame me.
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  You are responsible for my feelings, I'm responsible for your feelings.
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  And it just becomes this intertwined mess that doesn't work for anybody.
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  Now.
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  I always like to share with people when I'm talking about relationships.
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  My entry point into coaching, because my entry point into coaching was hiring a marriage coach.
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  And what's fascinating about that is that when I hired her, she basically marketed herself as, I'm a life coach for type A women married to type B men.
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  And I knew that was who I was.
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  I knew exactly what was going on in my marriage.
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  And you probably also have a fairly decent understanding of what's going on in your marriage.
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  But what I think is super interesting about this coaching is that she never talked to my husband once.
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  In fact, she's never met him yet.
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  We fixed what was going on in my marriage.
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  And why did that work?
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  Did we make my husband a different person?
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  Nope, he's still the same person.
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  I was able to get outside perspective on what I could and couldn't expect from my partner.
• 24:08
  And I started to see my husband as a whole person, and I started to see myself as a whole person.
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  And because I could do that, I knew how I needed things to be, to feel stable, and I knew how to take that back and empower myself to give myself that.
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  And then I was able to address my husband from a completely different place, from a place of, I'm your partner, let's do this together, but also have boundaries in place, stand up for the things that really matter to
• 24:36
  me in a way where I felt empowered and not victimized.
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  And when I was able to do that, I was able to really fix what was going on in my relationship, but also really fix what was going on in my life.
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  The truth is, a lot of the things that I was doing in my marriage, I was also doing with my kids.
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  I was also doing with my dad, I was also doing with my friends.
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  It was.
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  It was trickling into every part of my life.
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  I Don't do that anymore.
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  So I get to just have this empowered way of being that I never had before this, but it also fixed my marriage.
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  So what I want you to know is that this is something that you can understand fully and have a really difficult time implementing.
• 25:20
  So what I always want you to know is that if you have tried couples counseling and it isn't working, or you've tried counseling, it isn't working, or you have, you know, done other things and you've noticed that it
• 25:35
  isn't working, it's not because there's something wrong with you.
• 25:39
  It may not mean that the relationship is doomed either.
• 25:43
  It may just mean that you need a different approach and that you've never had somebody working with you side by side, helping you implement this in a way that actually works for you.
• 25:54
  Whether or not you stay in the relationship, getting your needs met is your responsibility.
• 26:01
  Okay?
• 26:01
  And you can do that with this type of support.
• 26:05
  So the next best step always is going to be booking a discovery call and you can listen to this podcast and understand the how.
• 26:14
  But if you feel that calling that.
• 26:17
  That feeling inside of you where you're like, man, I would really love to have this kind of support.
• 26:23
  The next step is a discovery call, and on that call we can walk through how working in tandem with my support could help you build this in a really simple, peaceful, sustainable way.
• 26:41
  We can look at doing me right by your side and all the way through this, and we can look at also more community based support.
• 26:51
  There are different ways that you can work with me, but this approach I've never seen not work.
• 27:00
  And that's worth thinking about.
• 27:03
  So some food for thought for you today when it comes to your relationship.
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  I hope this resonates for you and sparks something inside of you that maybe it hasn't been sparked before.
• 27:14
  And if you'd like to continue the conversation, you know where to find me.
• 27:19
  I hope you have a beautiful day.
• 27:20
  And just to keep in mind that my Stop Overthinking class is still running every week.
• 27:25
  And if you would like to register for that and have more of this in your ears and understand it a little deeper, you can go to amandahest Ca overthinktoregister.
• 27:36
  Bye for now, friends.
• 27:43
  Thanks so much for listening today.
• 27:45
  If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.
• 27:50
  It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.
• 27:56
  I'm excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.
• 28:00
  Until then, take care, friend.