I must admit, I have a dual attitude towards working with pairs. This work sometimes takes up more strengths than a group or one -day seminar. On the other hand, often it is pair sessions that turn out to be the most interesting and are remembered. And I seem to know the reason for my conflicting feelings.
This reason is communication. Attempts to understand what the partners want to say to each other are similar to the wandering of the vest in the labyrinth, only no one will give you a guiding thread.
Not only to us, people, but also animals living in flocks, it is extremely important to correctly understand each other’s signals. But people, like no other, have learned to manipulate information. This is especially true for married couples.
Once I heard such a dialogue in a cafe.
– You yourself said that this year we are going to rest in ..
– I didn’t say that! You are trying to prove to me all the time that I said something.
Husband (with an understanding smile):
– I’m trying to explain to you what you want.
– You don’t know what I want! You don’t listen at all when I’m trying to explain!
– You just don’t understand what you want, – the smile is becoming more and more understanding. – I know better from the side. I just want you to realize that you want it.
This kind of dialogs happen in a next to the couples with which I work;Usually these are couples in which one of the partners suffers from anxious disorder or depression. The specialist in therapy Par Kurt Hahlweg has developed a wonderful questionnaire, which allows you to determine the status of relations and their prospects.
There are three scales in the questionnaire: “tenderness”, “communication” and “quarrels”. And that’s what is interesting. High indicators on the “quarrel” scale do not necessarily lead to the breakdown of the pair. But the low indicators on the “Communication” scale (which mean that partners do not understand each other or do not discuss their problems) – a statistically accurate sign of a possible divorce. American psychologists Benjamin Carney and Benjamin Karney, Thomas Bradbury studied the factors of satisfaction with relations and found that mutual understanding by a wide margin overtakes such important factors as sexual satisfaction and similar values 1 .
What is the benefit of this knowledge for the couple? We enter into relations with different experience and views on family life. We in different ways imagine the roles of a man and a woman, the responsibilities of family members, interpersonal boundaries. You can endlessly appeal to the past experience and constancy of character – “in our family it
is so customary”, “I will never change”, “What is there to be here at all, we are just different”. But you can learn to talk. Express your emotions and talk about how they are caused. Listen to a partner and respond to his expression of feelings. For couples with difficulties in relationships, special training is often needed to develop these skills. But if we learn to communicate, we can discuss any differences in the characters. Well, almost any ..