#1 Reason NOT to Try Couples Therapy
You can't force your spouse to "take accountability", and trying will likely make things worse
“Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye’, when there is the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” - Matthew 7:3-5
The biggest obstacle to successful marriage therapy I’ve faced in my work with couples is an overemphasis on accountability. That is, requiring that your spouse take personal responsibility for his issues. Upon first glance, this probably doesn’t seem like a problem. So, let’s dig below the surface a bit.
More often than not, it starts off looking something like this: wife* brings her husband to couples therapy after many months or even years of suggesting they need help. Her husband, either invested or apathetic, is usually willing to admit he’s at least partly to blame for the discord.
However, as we get a few sessions under our belts, it becomes clear that those months and years of bargaining with and even begging her husband to give therapy a try, wife has lost her sense of fault. She believes he is the problem with their marriage, rather than seeing the broken dynamic between them as being the result of a deleterious two-player game.
A willingness to take personal responsibility for our own flaws is the big golden key to unlock the treasure chest of progress in couples work. However, an insistence on your spouse taking accountability for his flaws before being willing to face your own is a marriage therapy non-starter. After all, why would both spouses go to therapy if only one of them is causing all the problems? Therapy is for people who want help improving their lives, not people who want third-party validation of their own innocence.
Couples therapy differs from individual therapy in many ways, the most important being its purpose: couples work is meant to heal the relationship between two people rather than helping either individual achieve major independent self-discovery or personal growth. These things can and often do happen as side effects of healing the relationship, but they are not the primary goals.
As a result, when couples come knocking on the therapy door together, the only way to make it work is if both spouses are ready to point the finger at themselves, not just each other. Then you at least know that both spouses will cooperate with the therapeutic process, a process that allows the relationship’s problems to rise to the surface relatively unimpeded by one party’s inability to accept any blame.
If you or your spouse aren’t ready to accept your roles in the problem, you won’t have any role to play in the solution in couples work. That’s one of the often overlooked pearls of wisdom in the above passage from Matthew. Until you’ve removed the log from your own eye, you can’t even see the speck clearly in your spouse’s eye. In other words, our own issues cloud our judgment about our spouses’ issues.
One of the most fascinating moments for me as a couples therapist is when one spouse has this paradigm shift: once something inside of them heals or they change their perspective, something they thought was a major issue in the relationship vanishes, often without the other spouse doing anything differently.
Obviously, this doesn’t always happen. Some issues are real, concrete, and not solvable by a simple change of perspective. However, the majority of issues in marriages with spouses who love each other do seem to fall into this former category.
So, what if you or your spouse are convinced you’re blameless? Start with individual therapy or spiritual direction - for both of you but separately - so you each have a chance to discover what needs healing inside of you before revisiting the marriage therapist’s office.
Stay strong, wives and husbands! You’re doing the Lord’s work.
~ Cameron
*Wives aren’t always the accuser, and husbands aren’t always the accused. However, this happens more often than not. Women initiate couples therapy much more than men, likely because women detect potential or real interpersonal issues sooner than men do. So, for the sake of brevity and clarity, I’m using this dynamic for the example here.