As the old saying goes, time is a great healer. For the most part people are resilient and can find ways through difficult times. However, there are some circumstances in which it may not be worth the potential damage to wait to get counseling. This post examines one such situation: marital problems that have gone on for longer than four months without getting any better. In order to illustrate some of the damage that can be caused by waiting to get marital help, I will use a made-up example about a fictional couple, Sally and Bill. (In order to protect our client’s confidentiality we never use client’s stories as examples.)[1]
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Sally and Bill had a pretty good marriage but when the economy took a dive Bill was laid off. This was really hard on him and even though he was eventually able to get another job, he has not really felt the same since he was laid off. He has been more irritable and tired because his new job does not suit him as well and is more demanding. He is short with Sally about things that never bothered him before and even sometimes yells at her for seemingly small things. Meanwhile things have been hard on Sally too. She has had to really cut back the budget and worries about the finances in ways that she never used to. Since she is already feeling a lot of stress, when Bill yells it really gets to her. She feels like he does not understand how hard things have been on her. So Sally starts pushing Bill away and is not as interested in spending time being intimate with him. Bill feels hurt and rejected and lonely, but he does not know how to express that so he gets even angrier at Sally. Bill and Sally are building up walls and it is happening one bad interaction at a time. This has been going on for about four months. If Bill and Sally came in for counseling at this point it is likely that things could be resolved fairly quickly because they had a good relationship to start with, the problem has not been going on very long and no one else has gotten involved.
Problems that have gone on for less than six months are generally much easier to resolve than those that have a longer history. Brain research has shown that the more frequently a mental pattern happens the more likely it is to happen again. In other words, we form mental habits. When we repeatedly have negative interactions with our loved ones, chances are good that we will continue to have similar negative interactions by the force of habit. Let’s look at an example. Say that one time Sally decides to open up to Bill and tell him how difficult it has been for her being on a tighter budget. He feels like she is criticizing him for not being able to get a better paying job and then feels angry at her for being so critical. They have a fight over their misunderstanding and Bill never finds out that Sally was not being critical at all. Later on they need to make a financial decision and Sally sighs and says, “I guess we just can’t afford it,” and because of the earlier interaction Bill interprets that Sally is being critical again. Bill’s brain is building a pattern of interpreting Sally as being critical of him and as that pattern gets repeated, he becomes more and more likely to interpret that Sally is critical of him, when in fact she isn’t. Similar things are happening with Sally. The longer such negative patterns exist, the harder they are to change. This is one reason that it is easier to resolve problems that have gone on for shorter amounts of time.
As marital problems drag on it is also more likely that one or both spouses will start seeking other relationships to fill the gaps left by the marital problems and/or take sides against the other spouse. Sometimes those other relationships turn out to be helpful, especially when it is a wise and understanding person of the same gender, but other times it can be very damaging to the marriage. The damage caused by romantic relationships outside the marriage is obvious. Let’s use the example of Sally and Bill to look at some other common pitfalls.
It’s now been a year since Bill got laid off and things have become pretty icy between him and Sally. Since Bill seemed to react defensively anytime Sally wanted to confide in him, she started calling her mother, Jane, more frequently. Jane’s own husband had passed away and Jane was lonely a lot. She loved getting phone calls from Sally. For his part, Bill turned to Rose, Sally and Bill’s oldest daughter. Rose has a similar personality to Bill and enjoys doing a lot of the same things that Bill likes to do. Since Sally and Bill have been having problems Bill has spent more time with Rose, even telling her about problems between him and Sally. Bill was really surprised at the good advice and insights Rose could provide, so he turned to her more and more when he wanted a second opinion about things.
Let’s say that Sally and Bill came in for counseling at this point. Once Sally and Bill started working on their marriage, Sally had less time to spend talking on the phone with her mom, Jane. Jane missed the time and felt subtly disappointed that Sally and Bill were working on their relationship because she realized the better things are between them the less time Sally will spend on the phone with her. Although in principle Jane wants the best for Sally, she finds that sometimes she says things just to try to get Sally mad at Bill again. Now Sally has to deal with her mom in addition to trying to fix things with Bill.
There are problems with Rose too. The counselor explained to Bill that it isn’t good for a child to be a parent’s confidant. It puts her in an adult position when she isn’t one which causes a lot of stress and confusion for her and takes her focus away from the things that she needs to be doing to grow into a healthy, well-adjusted adult. Bill really loves Rose and took this to heart and has tried not to confide in her anymore. The problem is that she’s just so good at asking the right questions that he starts talking before he realizes what’s happening. Then part way through the conversation he realizes that he shouldn’t be doing this and feeling awkward he ends the conversation abruptly. Rose feels hurt and rejected and starts acting defiantly. Now Sally and Bill have parenting problems to sort out in addition to their marital problems and the problems with Sally’s mother. There is still hope for Sally and Bill but they will have a lot of hard work ahead of them.
While time sometimes does help things to get better, if problems have gone on for longer than four months without improvement, it is probably time to get help. Not only can you save a lot of time, money and heartache, but many couples find that even good relationships can be greatly improved with counseling.
Footnotes
- Image from iStockphoto. ↩
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