Enhancing Marital Communication
March 25th, 2008 | Email this to your Friendsby John Gerson, Ph.D.
Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile
I’d like to begin with the following vignette. It’s fictional, but contains communication snafu’s that, although probably unintentional, can be wounding. How the wound is dealt with can determine if its effects are short-lived or if they become part of the catalog of complaints that one spouse holds and remembers about the other.
“Kitty and Joe, both in the early 40’s, have been married for 15 years, and have 2 children, Cathy, age 12, and her younger brother, Bobby, age 8. B0th Kitty and Joe are attorneys; Kitty works part time for a local corporation, and Joe works full time in his family’s law practice. They are generally a thoughtful, cooperative couple, and after Cathy’s birth, found that the increased stress and demands placed on both of them made their cooperation with each other even more important. Their relationship is strong, and its durability has rested on their usually being mature and above all, conscious of their own behavior and how it affects their partner.
Recently, however, stress has mounted. Joe’s law practice has suffered an economic downturn; fewer and fewer litigation cases are coming into the firm, and although Joe’s compensation is not yet being affected, he’s worried. Cathy continues her part-time corporate job. She’s is as yet personally unaffected by the slowing economy, but she is aware that the company has been considering laying off less essential personnel. In short, both husband and wife are somewhat worried; their sleep is being affected, and Joe, the spouse more inclined to somaticize his stress, that is, to put it into his body, has had bouts of diarrhea and headache.
It’s a Tuesday, not one of Kitty’s work days. She has spent her morning doing bills; she has had a few phone conversations with neighbors about their kid’s health and the sports activities that their children have in common. Kitty has been frustrated that Cathy hasn’t been selected to play on the town basketball league, and has both been trying to understand the coach’s position and dealing with Cathy’s feelings of hurt and anger. She knows that her daughter can be moody, and for years has seen Cathy scream and have mild breakdowns when playing with other kids who she sees as ‘unfair.’ Nevertheless, she tells her friend on the phone, “this is a children’s league, after all, and sports are where they are supposed to learn sportsmanship, and Cathy is a good player. Maybe I’ll talk to the coach myself.” Kitty’s irritation is supported by her friend, and she finds the feeling useful as she tackles some housework, carrying the laundry downstairs and putting the first of at least 4 loads into the washing machine. The house is not completely picked up, and has that definitely lived in appearance. Kitty is hungry, decides to have lunch, and get to the house later, maybe after she’s dropped Bobby off for soccer practice, and before she has to pick him up again. Bobby’s bus drops him off, he has a snack, and Kitty loads him and his equipment into the car. Just as she says goodbye to her son, he begs her not to leave and to watch him play. She agrees, and stays at the field.
Meanwhile, Joe is driving home early from the office, having had his own frustrating day. There have been more and more of them, as local firms are becoming more competitive for clients, and clients are thinking twice about retainer fees in this environment, preferring to wait and tolerate whatever their injuries are, at least for now. When traffic on 684 suddenly slows to a crawl, the feeling that he just can’t get a break becomes compounded. He and Kitty have not been getting along as well as they used to; each of them has become more peevish and irritable, and the bad feelings have been circling with little interruption for weeks. Somewhere inside him he implicitly knows that his frustration has been leading him around, driving the car, rather than sitting in the back seat as one of his emotional passengers.
Kitty’s efforts to recognize what he’s been going through have not really hit the mark, and as a result of his relatively unabated irritability her needs for loving attention have gone unmet, and she has become more aggressive in return. Now there’s this miserable traffic! He picks up his cell phone, calls the house, only to get their answering machine. She won’t even be there when he gets home, he thinks to himself, with growing resentment. Joe’s need for soothing has been growing, and when he left the office early, he thought that maybe today he would get what he needed from her. Irritation blended into despondency and back again in a slow cycle that seemed to match the traffic’s crawl.
Joe finally pulls into his driveway; Kitty’s car is not there. Given the recent emotional stalemate between them, he’s not sure if this is the good news or the bad news, and resolves to take a bike ride, thinking the exercise would help to reduce his stress. His bicycle shorts are nowhere to be found, and there are no athletic socks in his drawer. Grumbling to himself, he heads down to the laundry room, to find 1 load of wet laundry sitting in the machine, and the rest of the wash in baskets on the floor. He heads back upstairs with mounting anger, developing a case of his own that he doesn’t count around here, that he can’t get his needs met, and lately that’s included in the bedroom. Kitty comes home with Bobby. The afternoon has been a good one for her, and she had found herself glad to have spent the time at the field with her son, enjoying the children’s activity and breathing in the cold wintry air. Her own irritation and despondency had been softened by the sensuousness of her experience, and when she saw Joe coming down the stairs she approached him with an affectionate hug. Joe’s mood remained dark, and unable to accept her gesture, he snapped. “What have you been doing all day? The house is a mess, and I can’t find my bicycle shorts, which I assume are still wet.”
Kitty attempts to explain her day, and Bobby wanting her to watch the game, when he cuts her off. “I can’t get anything around here. Bobby got what he needed, but not me! I’m working my ass off all day, and that’s not adding up to much. Do you have any idea the pressure I’m under to bring money into this house?”
Kitty backs up, feels like crying, but doesn’t. She’s no lightweight, and can defend herself. “Don’t speak to me that way, like I’m a piece of trash. I have a life of my own, and I’m your wife, remember? Screw you!”
With that she storms past him, and he heads for the door, needing to be away from her. Before slamming it behind him, he fires a last volley, escalating their conflict: “And what about last night?” referring their not having sex.
What’s happened here? What’s gone wrong? Is their marriage in trouble? What steps would you take to heal their hurt feelings?
Key Points to Remember:
1. Demonstrate that you have empathy for your partner’s experience. People who do not experience empathy in their relationships feel unimportant and disconnected.
2. Empathy occurs through Active Listening, with such language as, “I hear what you’re saying,” and even better, “I hear you,” spoken with real feeling.
3. Efforts to empathize with words alone are shallow and insufficient. Tone of voice must be consonant with the intended message.
4. Accurate empathy requires emotional perspective – make every effort to identify with your partner’s position – to see the context of her feelings.
When conflict arises:
1. Healthy families provide a frame or container for the entire range of feelings, and recognize that anger is an expectable part of living; the frame has to be especially strong when family members are angry at each other.
2. The implicit message needs to be, “this feels really bad, and I really don’t like you right now, but we’ll get through this and be stronger on the other end.
3. Ride with the bad feelings; don’t regard them as signs that your relationship is in trouble. Remember, healthy families are able to express anger and navigate through them and resume understanding, love, and peace.
©Copyright 2008 by John Gerson, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. The following article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the following article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. Click here to contact John and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile
March 26th, 2008 at 11:05 am
While this article shows very clearly how hurt feelings started and escalated, to simply ask a partner to show empathy in the middle of a triggering experience doesn’t seem like enough. How do you advise a person to calm down enough to then feel empathy? And what do you do with couples who have had these interchanges for years and are stuck in very rigid patterns? How is this couple interacting with the hurt feelings, and finding out where they are rooted? And specifically, instead of Kitty storming off, what should she do? How should she turn toward her partner, and with what words? How does she soothe herself enough to turn toward him and hear his feelings in a way that he feels heard? I find I’m suddenly in the repair process and I missed something in between.
March 26th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I see that perhaps this was a sort of training post–is that correct? Then my apologies for my questions.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
Laurel- I’m glad that my article stimulated so many good questions. The couple illustrated is not entrenched in rigid patterns, and presumably have a history of love interest and respect for each other to want to heal this rift. A cooling off period is indicated, and seized by Kitty, as she has approached Joe in a very positive way and been rebuffed. If she had her anger more in control and persisted in her desire for contact, she might have found some words in the moment to soothe Joe and make that happen. Family of origin dynamics of course play a role in attitudes toward resolving conflicts.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I’m reminded of the song, “Only a Friend Can Betray a Friend” when I read this blog entry. It seems like the ones closest to us that we depend on the most for support are the ones who have the potential to hurt us the most. It does leave us wondering, “What went wrong?” Fortunately, when couples seek help at the stage where Kitty and Bobby are, true healing can take place. It definitely takes some retraining in the mind set, but it can happen.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
I am a marriage counselor, so I see this over and over again. These steps are certainly tried and true ones. Thanks for getting them out there!
March 27th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Been there, done that-these steps didn’t help me!
March 27th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Margaret,
I’m sorry to hear that the steps above weren’t able to help your marriage. It’s disheartening when we give it our best shot and things still don’t work out. Do you have any advice for others? Something you wish you could have tried but didn’t know about at the time? I’d be interested in hearing more of your story and what happened. I guess it’s just the therapist in me!
March 27th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
jerry,
Thanks for you interest. I don’t mind sharing my experience. My husband and I started having difficulties similar to those described above. We were once great supporters of each other, then things fell apart and we started arguing more. When we went for counseling, it came out that he was seeing someone else. He wanted to make that relationship work rather than ours. Not much you can do about that.
March 27th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Ouch! I guess that would pretty much do it. I’m sorry you had that experience. I hope you continued to pursue individual counseling so you could heal from that experience.
March 28th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
Margaret-
I heard the anger and pain in your response. Doing everything one can to sustain or even repair a relationship, and find it out of control, going nowhere, and really unresponsive to one’s efforts can make any sentient being feel helpless; when we feel helpless, we feel angry. Of course that experience is only the first step in healing. The second task to gradually accept that one’s inability to change the course of a relationship had meaning. Often the meaning had much to do with the existence of incompatible needs, values, desires, etc. The manner in which power is distributed between a couple and the manner in which power is activated are highly influential in setting the tone of a relationship. For example, one couple may be able to navigate pretty smoothly through most everyday living with humor, patience, courtesy, etc, and on the other extreme, a competitive, even violent tone dominates conflict situations. Of course, there are many gradations of these behaviors. I hope you find some of this helpful.
Regards,
John Gerson, Ph.D.
April 1st, 2008 at 5:42 pm
This is so typical! It is so easy to see how fights like this happen with one person on the offensive all of the time, always finding the negative in a situation rather than the positive. It is no wonder that the divorce rate is so high.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:18 am
But what has happened that has made that divorce rate climb? Is it this lack of communication or is it just because it is now so easy? I am not necessarily advocating staying in a loveless relationship but there are ways to make things work without just throwing in the towel. Sometimes you just have to fight a little harder for those things which need to stay important and a focus in your life.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:21 am
Carolyn I hear what you are saying but I am still in a relationship like the one between Kitty and her husband and it is hard NOT to think about divorce sometimes! We made a conscious choice for me to stay home with the kids yet my husband becomes such a baby if I have to neglect other things to take care of them. Come on! This is my job right? To be a good mom and run the household! I get so frustrated with him sometimes and just want him to take a minute and think about the many things I have going on here at home while he gets a nice leisurely lunch hour or two. I definitely relate to the conflict cited.
April 4th, 2008 at 7:06 am
Carolyn-
Achieving balance in a complex family life can be very difficult, as you know so well. As wife/mother you are called upon to give to everybody, and this can be of course exhausting, and become the source of some resentful feelings, especially if you haven’t been getting enough sleep and loving attention yourself. By loving attention, I am not just referring to affection, kissing, hugging, sex, etc., but the provision of your husband’s labor with respect to house and child care. When a couple establishes itself as a real working partnership, where one spouse can rely on the other for real physical help, the sense of friendship and affection usually become a natural outgrowth of this. Of course, your husband may be also feel deprived of the understanding and support regarding the stresses of his working life, and carry his needs for nurturing attention home, especially as he sees himself “putting out fires” at his job. A first step toward healing might be to try some active listening, or mirroring. You can find a description of this in Hendrix’s “Getting the Love You Want.” Basically, it involves sitting down when your children are asleep and both of you are relatively peaceful; begin with one of you revealing a problem, protest, etc, to the other. Your partner can only listen at this point, and not reply defensively, such as to say, “yeah…but…etc.” When you are finished, it is your partner’s job to say with as much empathy as possible, something like, “so what I hear you saying, is, …is that right?” If the content or tone of voice is wrong, you get to say “no,” and the process continues until your answer is “yes.” Then reverse roles. This is an empathy building exercise, and may feel like an awkward way to talk to each other at first, but can be very productive. Before strategies for real problem solving can go forward, emotional understanding is necessary.
April 21st, 2008 at 4:04 am
I have a spouse who would never participate in this kind of strategy. He instantly takes everything as criticism and never wants to work it out from there.
April 21st, 2008 at 9:08 am
Maddie-
Is there a gentle way you can help your spouse feel safe enough to explore your concerns with you? People who take everything as a criticism are often fragile, even though their reactions to legitimate complaints may be to become angry. If there is no way you can help him to feel “held” and valued enough so that he can truly hear you, he might benefit from some individual therapy. In a therapist’s office he may be able to access his own vulnerability, and then become more sensitive to yours.