Why Therapy Didn’t Get You There

Couples tend to go to a counselor or a therapist or a coach only long enough to take the edge off the pain. They only create enough stamina, enough commitment to reduce the itching, burning, and swelling. And kind of like when you're taking antibiotics, you know, if it's a two week round of antibiotics, it often makes you feel better after about three days. And then the motivation to keep taking your antibiotics really falls off. You have to will yourself to know, like, that's right, I'm supposed to keep taking all of these. Or this virus is just going to come back stronger than ever. So I guess that's this bacterial infection. So what we really need to do is set our vision to be longer than that. Hi, welcome to Sex Love Power. I'm your host, Michelle Lizenberry Christensen. This podcast is where I convene the conversations about love and sex that help powerful women and those who love them to create the intimacy and intensity they really want in bed and in life. Together, we navigate the tensions between our desire and our devotions, between our wildness and our security with our eyes wide open. This podcast is designed to help you create more closeness, ease, pleasure, and justice in your relationship. And we do it by blending wisdom from the fields of sexuality and spirituality, trauma and self regulation, and intersectional feminism. I'm so glad you're here. Almost every couple I work with has already been to couples counseling. At some point, they saw a therapist, a pastoral counselor, one of them had an individual therapist, and the two of them went to that person together or that person referred them to someone else. They went to a Gottman workshop. They've done emotion focused therapy. They've done any of dozens of different modalities. And my husband and I went through many different kinds of therapy together through the years that we've been together, which is now more than 24. And this episode I want to talk about. If therapy didn't get you where you really wanted to be in your relationship, some of the reasons why I've seen that happens. You've tried therapy before and it didn't get you where you wanted to go. Maybe it helped. Almost certainly. It's doubtless that if you go in earnest to even one counseling session as a couple, you're going to walk away with some benefit. And many people report to me that it got them directionally appropriate, kind of like if they were working on something to improve their physical health and they got better, but not really to their goals. My goal is to help couples not just reduce the itching, burning, and swelling, but that they're facing when they come to me, but truly create a great relationship. And truly today, many of the couples who come to me aren't facing itching, burning and swelling. What they want is to go from a good, really solid relationship. They really love each other. They do feel close, but they know that it could be deeper and they want to go there. They want to have a truly great relationship, which I call legacy love. So we're going to talk about why couples counseling often doesn't get coupled couples to that place and how to make sure that next time you do make an investment in your relationship, it can get you where you really want to go. So let's dive in. The first reason I'm going to take these chronologically in terms of what happens in your work with a couples therapist. So the first thing chronologically is when you go. Many people wait until they're totally miserable before they start looking for a counselor. They don't, as a consultant I worked with once said, shovel while the piles are small. They wait until they're knee deep in dung before they start shoveling. And if you're already really frustrated with each other, really in a lot of pain, a lot of anger, a lot of sadness, that's harder going for all three of you when you finally wind up in someone's office. So one of the ways to overcome that one is to work yourself and invite your partner to dig in when there's something that you desire to have be better, but it's not an emergency yet. It's way easier to do the work before the house is on fire. The next thing that gets in the way is if there's one of two things. This is kind of a twofer. A lot of times when you're working with a couples counselor in that kind of appointment based way of working, every session is an airing of the grievances. And the therapist may be just sort of working as a referee. You go in there and you talk about the latest. I remember sitting down once with our counselor and saying, well, I've got a list of things to talk about, as per usual. And I thought that was good of me to bring that list of grievances. And I was annoyed that Kurt didn't have a list of grievances or things he wanted to talk about or work on. I took that as a sign that he wasn't as invested in. In the relationship or in this work that we were doing with her. And he took it as him being more positive and me being more negative or critical of the relationship. So there's lots of ways to view it. But in essence, if you're going to a counselor each week with like, and here's another thing, and you know what else we need to talk about, I have a lot of compassion for the truth that you may not have productive conversations outside of your counselor's office. That may be what's going on, is that you go there because the presence of that other person lends a degree of safety that you don't otherwise have. So I have compassion for that. And what you both need is to learn how to self regulate enough so that you can have conversations on your own. And so those skills of listening well, of communicating in responsible, clean ways, and of being able to calm yourself down when your partner missteps and does one of those other two imperfectly, that's what allows you to not have to hire somebody else in order to have the important conversations that you need to have together. I said this was a twofer. The other side of the coin from a counseling or therapy relationship where you're focused on airing grievances is the kind of experience that I've had where the counselor was so focused on the positive, so focused on building on what was working, that when I wanted to talk about what hurt, she said, we need to come from focusing on what is working. And even though there was lots of benefit from that, there was a lot of good to be had from appreciating what was worth appreciating between us, we never got to the things that were really hurting on a daily basis. And it reminds me of Eli Goldratt's book the Goal, which I first read as an undergraduate business student. And he's talking about constraint theory. And he sort of says, if you're running a factory and a salesperson comes in to sell you a better machine for your assembly line, and it makes your fastest machine faster, that will actually cause more problems in your assembly line because there'll be more backup in front of the next machine down the line if your faster machine gets even faster, you know, so if the better things between you keep getting better and better, but the worst things between you, you don't change. You've still got that rock in your shoe. And so we need to have a balance of building on the good and really addressing the most painful places. And we'll get to some of the reasons why we don't get to those hardest places in a minute. The third thing that happens sort of chronologically or this is a structural piece that's there from the beginning in the way that most of the couples support people that we worked with anyway. And most of my colleagues that I see how they work is on a session by session basis. You pay when you go. And you kind of. You might commit to not getting divorced while you're working together, you might commit to sticking it out. But the engagement really runs session by session. And so it's sort of expected that you'll come back in one week or two weeks or whatever the rhythm is, and that you'll take the counselor's recommendations. But what Kurt and I have done ourselves and what I've seen people do time and again, I've been working not that way for a very long time because I saw the drawbacks of it, but what I've seen people do and people have described doing is that they would only go every week or two. And that would be dictated by their budget or by their emotional experience of how it felt to pay every time and to decide every time we're going to spend another $100, 150, 250, whatever they're spending to do this. And they would do that processing that we've been talking about every week or two often, that would be so emotionally exhausting that they wouldn't have anything left with which to change their behaviors in between. So you go, you open up a can of worms, you maybe get some new insights, or you get challenged in certain ways on how you're showing up. You get invited to consider your own part in the challenges between you and your partner. You, you might learn some new exercises, but between then and the next session, nothing, you're on your own. And that's not a good way to learn piano, that's not an effective way to get fit. If you're working with a personal trainer only once every two weeks and you don't work out in between, you're not going to make very much progress. We don't do anything else in that way. And so I don't think it's a great way to do couples work. More education in between, more availability of your support, people in between, more community connection, are all factors that I build into my programs because I think that they create way faster results. And my clients results have borne that out. The next reason that therapy doesn't get us as far as we want to go a lot of times is if there's not enough emphasis on habits and building capacity. So if there's only emphasis on the psychodynamics, you know, what were your parents like? And what were your parents like or what's happening in your communication here in the moment and not really tracking and supporting the development of new self care habits, self nurturing, self connection, self soothing and interpersonal habits, things like wagging and really greeting each other when you come together and when you part, things like having stress reducing conversations with each other, things like sacred dating, things like the couple stroking practice that I teach that deepen your erotic connection without putting it into the realm of initiating sex and you know, having a fellow centric penetration oriented view of sex. If we don't build habits like that, then we don't grow our capacity. And so your growth as a couple will be stalled or slowed by the model of just meeting up with and talking about it. So an emphasis on the somatic experience of being in love with this person, of having an erotic relationship with them, and of being yourself. And your own responses and reactions to your partner and to your life make a huge difference in terms of making leaps and bounds growth forward in your relationship if you're building habits and changing the way that your nervous system and your body experience your relationship. The next reason that therapy often doesn't get people where they want to go as a couple is that a lot of people that are working with couples are not putting the conversation about the relationship in the context of trauma, of power, of patriarchy and of colonization. So when we ignore all of those truths, we miss a a ton of the context and a ton of the both explanatory and diagnostic and salubrious potential of dismantling some of those things. So bringing a trauma aware context in allows us to honor the lived experience of both partners. I've talked on the podcast before about men's sexual trauma. I don't hear a lot of talk about how very many men have experienced sexual trauma. And if we don't talk about that in the context of what happens in the bedroom of a married couple, we may entirely miss the root of many of the problems. If we don't talk about male privilege in our patriarchal culture, then we really do a disservice to women who are inviting their husbands to listen differently, to connect to their own emotionality and their spouse's emotionality in a different way. I recently heard a TED talk about the man box and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. But what he's talking about is that there is a definition of what manhood is and men have to performatively starting when they're boys, live up to these stories about what it means to be a Man, how you have to perform, how you have to show up, and which parts of yourself you have to excise in order to qualify for. For the privilege that being a man affords. And the man box as he describes it doesn't include an acknowledgement that all of those qualities can be abusive, that those privileged stances can damage the people around you. And there's not room inside the man box for your own vulnerability, your emotionality, your hungers, your desires. There's room to grab and take what you want, but there's not room to hunger for it. So there's lots more to say about that, which I will do in future episodes and which I would definitely recommend. That man box. I know that guy's name is. His first name is Tony and I'm not remembering his last name, but we'll link to that. So that context is really crucial. And that's something that I know is not the thing that people are looking for when they're. They sign up to do work on their emotional connection or their erotic connection. Yeah. And we want to dismantle patriarchy while we're at it. You know, that sounds like some lofty feminist ideal, but truly patriarchy hurts men as much as it hurts women. And it's essential to acknowledge its effect if we want to create more aliveness, because it is so deadening to everybody inside this system. And it's like the water we swim in, so we don't even see it. So it's really important that whoever you're working with helps you both see how patriarchy is affecting your male, female relationship, if that's what you have. And patriarchy affects every relationship, even if you aren't men and women. Just. My audience is mostly male, female couples. And then the last thing I want to talk about in this episode is that couples tend to go to a counselor or a therapist or a coach only long enough to take the edge off the pain. They only create enough stamina, enough commitment to reduce the itching, burning and swelling. And kind of like when you're taking antibiotics, you know, if it's a two week round of antibiotics, it often makes you feel better after about three days. And then the motivation to keep taking your antibiotics really falls off. You have to will yourself to know, like, that's right, I'm supposed to keep taking all of these, or this virus is just going to come back stronger than ever. So I guess that's this bacterial infection. So what we really need to do is set our vision to be longer than that, to be deeper the aim that we're going for is not just relief. I want it to feel less lousy to be married to you, but I want to actually build the skills and the capacities and the vision for us to have a truly extraordinary relationship that nourishes both of us on every level. That gives us the energy to do the work we really want to do in the world. That helps us really both feel seen, supported, encouraged, met. And that truly is a doorway to the divine, that helps us both feel like we're connected to something larger. However, we might conceive that even if it's just like the power of love, this isn't necessarily a theistic or religious thing. But love is one of the most powerful forces on earth. And because of the systems that we've lived in, we've been taught that marriage is something that you enter into and then over time it sort of winds down. It gets dulled just by time. And there's not a lot you can do about that. The sexual passion is going to wane. You're going to kind of rub each other the wrong way and be sort of scritchy together. And the best you can hope for is relative kind of peace when you're in your rockers on the front porch. And that's a huge disservice to our children, to model that for them and to tell them that story about their futures. It's not what we go into relationship feeling or being capable of desiring. And I think it's really just a. It's a sloppiness. You know, if we, if we ran companies the way that we run relationships, if we just care of our bodies in a way that just said, yeah, it's basically, it's going to break down over time. I just got to eat what you feel like eating and move when you feel like moving and take what you get. We wouldn't be very healthy or very long lasting. So I think that our divorce rates and our rates of normal marital mediocrity can be chalked up to not having a high enough vision and a deep enough devotion to being one another's person, being one another's angel. As the Talmud says, every blade of grass has an angel leaning over it whispering, grow, grow. And we can be that for each other, but only if we take a long enough vision and if we get support long enough to take us past where we've given up before or where we've said, eh, good enough in the past, and really going all the way to the shining, emotional and energetic aliveness that we'd really like to have in our relationship. So next time you choose to invest in your relationship, I do hope that you don't wait till you're miserable that you do it from yeah, we're good and we want to be better. I hope that you don't just use it to air the grievances, but also I hope that you don't just focus on what's already working, but you really reveal to your partner the places that hurt or that you're really hungry for more. Next time you invest in your relationship, may you get support that really wraps around you both. That's not just every week or two, but that operates on many levels, giving you community support and education, skill building and just in time contact with your person so that you can really make changes right there in your real life where your relationship happens, not just in the office of the person that you're seeing. I hope that your next investment emphasizes habits and building capacity in each of you and between you. I hope that it comes with context, including deep awareness of trauma, power, patriarchy and colonization. I hope that it helps you break the man box between the two of you and in each of your minds and hearts. And finally, I hope that you keep going until your relationship is amazing, that you set a high bar and that you play a long game. That's what I desire for you. It probably goes without saying that's what I do in my work, but I'm not the only one. And I just wish for you every ounce of love, passion and pleasure that you desire in your relationship and in your life. And I want that for your children and all of our children. And I want that for the world. So go for it. Enjoy and drop me a line. Let me know if you have any questions about this or about working with me. I'd love to hear what you're taking away from this episode and what questions you have. Where do you feel this conversation in your body? My Free Conscious Couples Circle is the place to continue our conversation. You can share your experiences, ask questions, and get more actionable ideas for creating the love and sex you deeply describe desire in ways that evolve you both. It's all happening@society.lizenberry.com that link is in the show notes for you. You know, new listeners need to hear what you're taking away too. Podcast reviews are what really help others recognize how this podcast is different from other relationship and sex podcasts. So thank you in advance for leaving a review right now in your podcasting app. While you're thinking of it before. Before you forget with just a few words about what this show gives you. And, hey, have you subscribed to the podcast? You're gonna want to, so you never miss an episode. Please go to the app where you listen, hit that subscribe button, and then you'll always get notifications of new episodes when they drop. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Michelle Lizenberry Christensen, and this has been Sex Love Power. I will see you on the next episode. And until then, may the light within you illuminate the world around you.