Couples Therapy / Relationship Counseling

This blog is a follow up to last week’s “Empathy Vs. Sympathy”. It talks about the experience of the person who is pulled to be “the fixer”. Sometimes when someone we love has a problem, we want nothing more than to fix it and make things better for that person. However, sometimes fixing the problem is equivalent to ignoring the emotions surrounding the problem. It is more important to be emotionally attuned to your partner than it is to provide solutions.

A common problem that comes up in couples counseling is when one partner tries to “fix” the other person’s problems rather than listening and providing accurate empathy. It is ok to want to help your partner in any way you can, but if you provide a solution without empathizing, your partner may be left feeling unheard, misunderstood, and unsupported. This can be confusing for the “fixer” who is only trying to help. Receiving accurate empathy from our partner makes us feel heard, supported, and understood. These feelings are a fundamental attachment need that each person needs in order to feel safe and secure in a relationship.

Do you find yourself blaming others a lot? Every human being has a need to express themselves and be heard by others. Often times when this doesn’t happen, people will try to suppress their emotions and not express them to others. This is an uphill battle and typically suppressed emotions will leak out in other ways. One of these ways is blaming. In relationships blaming is a symptom of unexpressed hurts that need to be addressed.

Often times trouble in couples relationships is due to miscommunication of underlying emotions. We are all wired to pay attention to things that can hurt us, and relational pain is no different. When faced with a real or perceived threat in a relationship, many people respond with gut reactions like trying getting the first punch or punching back. A primary goal of couples therapy is to help people to identify and verbalize the primary emotions that are behind those gut reactions. All too often anger is really the result of fear, and people who act defensively or offensively in a relationship are really just trying to keep themselves safe.

Its important to take time to have genuine, open conversations with the people we love. Sometimes life gets in the way and reconnecting with each other can feel like extra work. Following this path of least resistance can lead to trouble down the line. This is something that I work on a lot with people in couples therapy.