How to Know When it's Time to get Marriage Counseling

Lingering Stigma Around Therapy

There isn’t an area of mental health where no work needs to be done to reduce social stigma. While it can sometimes feel to a counselor that progress has been made over the last few decades (and it has), it is always worth checking that creeping sense of complacence in the matter.

Marriage counseling seems to be one of the most pressing areas where this is true. Maybe you’ve noticed that the divorce rate has actually dropped in recent years, which might look encouraging at first. However, closer inspection shows us that the marriage rate is also falling in tandem. No matter what the cause, it is at least clear that one of the most central institutions to our society is in decline.

On a much more anecdotal note, I work in a building with a handful of general practice attorneys. More and more, it seems that the cases coming in are all divorce filings. Perhaps some of these marriages truly were destined for failure regardless of any intervention. If not, though, would it not at least have been worth reaching out for help if it were available? If so, it might also be true that the perceived embarrassment surrounding the idea of getting marriage counseling deterred some of those couples from reaching out.

So, When Do I know that I should Reach Out?

Let me respond to this question with another set of questions. When is the right time to get a physical? When is the right time to go to the gym, or to get a physical trainer? When is the right time to take up music lessons or to take a class that interests you?

Presumably, you would take music lessons before you book your first show, you would get a physical before you fell ill, and you would go to the gym before your muscles atrophy. It seems, though, that marriage counseling is often the final tool to prove a willingness of effort before calling it quits.

This is not to say that more severe cases are absolutely hopeless, but early intervention clearly produces the highest chance of success. So instead of thinking of marriage counseling as a badge of shame that suggests your marriage is failing, we can use it as a way to strengthen a marriage that simply has areas to improve upon. At the end of the day, this is the purpose of marriage work. To restrengthen a marriage to its peak.

After all, life already has so many obstacles and unknowns. You don’t have to let marriage be the one that you struggle through without a helping hand from the outside.

Why the Unknown is Scary Even when it Must be Better

Learning to Succeed

From the moment you were born, you began your slow and steady path of incremental progress. Though you don’t remember it, you had to learn to control your flailing limbs. You had to learn to distinguish between different sounds. You had to learn what the presence of your mother and father meant. Success in each of these pursuits armed you with the ability to navigate more and more complex situations. And you also gained the comfort needed to try bigger ventures. Eventually, you learned how to crawl and then walk. As your orbit around your parents grew, you tackled newer and bigger feats. Going down a slide, swinging on the swings, getting on a bike. The list is endless, but each item on the list began with an unsure footstep in that direction.

Of course at that age, the concept of questioning any of it is not as overwhelming as it becomes later on, but why do progress and success begin to scare us as we get older?

Before we get into that, lets look at a commonly held assumption. The assumption is that people naturally fear failure. While this is definitely true, a far more dire truth exists in tandem. And that is that people tend to fear success even more.

Implications of Rapid Success

Lets look back at the example of riding a bike. Perhaps it starts with a strider or tricycle. Then maybe a bike with training wheels. Eventually, you are riding on your own with no assistance at all. Freedom.

And with that freedom comes more adventurous exploration. Of course, then you start hearing conditions accompany that freedom. “Be home before dark,” for example is a phrase that sounds foreign to nobody. And what does that demand imply? For one, it suggests that being home after dark comes with consequences. Maybe one of those consequences is losing bike privileges.

However, a more weighty implication is that you now have the agency and responsibility to monitor your time and to then make it home before dark without having to be reminded. Furthermore if you do manage your time well and abide by your parents’ rules, nothing happens. Everything goes on the way it should because that is what’s expected of you. If you don’t, something you don’t like will happen.

This means that the more success you have, the higher the expectations become. As a consequence, doing well is not rewarded the way it might have been earlier in life. Likewise, performing poorly comes with negative consequences.

If this is true, the question becomes why you should bother progressing further if rewards decrease and punishments increase.

How to Overcome the Fear of Success

As we previously established, a situation where rewards are far less likely than punishments is one that naturally inspires avoidance. If, however, such a situation arises as a result of progress and success, how can we ultimately call that success?

The answer to that is the key to overcoming any lingering urge to avoid success. While it is different from person to person, much of the how in finding that answer comes from how you personally derive meaning in your life. Getting to the root of that allows you to build the sense of reward from within instead of looking for it from somewhere else. Mastering that allows you to bask in the life that you achieve through realizing your goals rather than dreading the change that it begets.

I'm Hearing more about IFS, but what is it?

How IFS Developed

The first important thing to remember about Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS) is that it did not come about by accident. It was not the product of a long shot hunch. Instead, it was born out of people’s natural pattern of talking about themselves in terms of separate, internal parts. Very commonly, people will say things like, “Part of me wants to read this book I’ve had my eye on, but part of me doesn’t even want to start it until I have the time.” This is a clear articulation of the feeling of having conflicting parts inside that pull in different directions. In this example, it seems that the part that wants to put off starting the book is winning out.

In any case, this is likely similar to something that you have heard in your own life. Whether it be in a movie, from a friend, or even in a song, you have almost certainly heard somebody express different desires in this way. Because people do this so frequently, it seemed worthwhile to lean into that and to engage with those ‘parts’ that have such starkly different motivations.

How IFS is used in Counseling

Another understandable question to the fact that people naturally speak this way is, “So what?”

Because the success of counseling often hinges on being able to build a relationship between counselor and client, one important thing to consider is how a client speaks. Because it is such a common pattern for people to refer to their parts without thinking much about it, it only made sense to explore that further. Another way of thinking about this is that people often use different words to say the same thing and similar words to say different things. Without taking a deep dive into what is behind a sentiment like, “Part of me really feels like I should study for this test, but I can’t find the motivation,” it is much more difficult to gain an understanding of what is inhibiting the desired behavior.

This is where IFS in the counseling room comes into play. It might seem initially beneficial to lean into that desire to study. You might think that if you can just channel that energy hard enough, you can overcome your perceived laziness to just do it. However, what if we explore the part that is taking control enough to inhibit studying?

Think of it this way. Imagine being at a party where several people are talking about the same topic in a group. Perhaps a few of the participants are comfortable asserting their points of view, a few aren’t particularly moved enough to interject, and then one is trying to find the moment to speak his mind. Maybe he isn’t comfortable finding the right amount of space to effectively say what he wants to say. So instead, he waits. He waits and waits, and his point of view now builds up inside of him. Maybe it builds up with so much frustration that instead of finally finding his moment to be heard, he acts out instead. Maybe he throws his drink or storms off. At this point, all eyes are on him, but his emotion has pushed him into a state where he can no longer voice his sentiment in a way that accurately reflects what he believes on the inside.

This same phenomenon happens all the time internally with our parts. By gently engaging with the parts that have felt suppressed to the point of lashing out, we can more meaningfully gain a perspective on why our actions don’t match our desired behavior. With a skilled IFS counselor, it is much easier to build that internal relationship and adjust the feelings that we are slightly out of touch with.

Do you Procrastinate, or are you Internally Conflicted?

The Misconception of Procrastination

We’ve all had that experience where the end of the work day comes, and the whole world is there for us to take advantage of. We’ll go home and check off the next ten items on our to-do list. We’ll write the next chapter of that book we we have planned. We’ll call our friends for a game night. All we need to do is get out of these work clothes.

Only, we get home and push all of the rest of that aside to just do… nothing.

Often times, we hear this phenomenon get brushed off as procrastination. “You’re not a self-starter!” you might tell yourself. “You always do this.” Maybe you even hear such comments from someone else. In either case, the question of ‘why?’ has likely come up. Why is it that we can feel so motivated when we’re leaving work (a time we might think of as the most drained moment in our day), yet we feel it fade away by the time our evening commute is over.

One of the misconceptions about this is that you likely aren’t simply slipping into a passive state. This is not an instance where you recede into the background while life begins to rush by for a few hours. Instead, what has actually happened is that you have, indeed, made a very deliberate choice. This particular choice comes down to the fact that you experience that rush of motivation right after leaving work.

A Brief Analogy

Throughout the day, everyone expends energy. That seems obvious. After enough energy has been expended, you will need some amount of sleep to regenerate. At some point during the day, your body starts sending signals that it would be a good time to disengage and to get some sleep instead.

However, you probably still have things that need to be done before you can get that sleep. So you ignore those signals. In turn, your body takes measures to keep you going. You have a stress response that produces adrenaline. Now if you try to sleep, you likely feel to hyped up to calm down.

How this Applies to Procrastination

At the end of the work day, it makes sense that a few competing feelings run through you at the same time. On one hand, work has potentially worn you out. Whether you have a physically demanding job or a mind-numbing one, it becomes taxing to do it day after day. Therefore, there is a part of you that absolutely is somewhat exhausted and relieved to be away.

However, a different part of you is very excited to be done with work. This excitement fuels a drive to get other things done. Everyone has a running list of things that they have to tend to, and this is finally the opportunity in the day to accomplish as much of it as possible.

Then the commute comes. Whether it’s five minutes or an hour, there is a pause between the moment you walk out of the office and the first opportunity you have to engage in anything else. This pause opens the door for that exhausted part of you to take over. Once this happens, you act out of that desire to unplug a little bit. After all, you have to get up and do it all again tomorrow.

How to Overcome

Becoming aware of the different parts that pull you in different directions allows you to understand and connect with why you are engaging or disengaging when the opportunity arises to check off some to-do items. First, though, it is necessary to form a relationship with yourself and the different parts that have different motivations. This allows you to take a step back and bring your decision-making process to the forefront of your mind instead of allowing it to happen in the background.