Getting a Couple Unstuck: It All Starts with Listening
When first starting out in treatment, it’s common in my Manhattan therapy office for couples to enter the room hot, recalling a fight with two wildly different points of view. One might ask, how is this possible? Especially if it’s been established that each partner is genuine in their desire to be constructive, how is it possible for there to be such a chasm between their realities?
The starting point for such a couple is staggeringly simple and easily overlooked: radical listening. I add the word “radical” to emphasize that it is necessary to do more than to simply hear your partner out. A couple needs to feel safe and secure enough to truly open themselves up and take in their partner’s perspective, which is hard to do when one is feeling hurt, scared, or misunderstood. Radical listening is an important first step to learning about a stuck pattern and is an opportunity for the partners to build trust and good will.
What’s So Hard About Listening?
Often when left to their own devices, couples embroiled in a fight will get defensive when they feel their partner is asserting something untrue or unfair. This is completely understandable. If someone is saying something about you that feels untrue, especially someone you love, it’s only natural to want to stand up for yourself and set the record straight. However, this can end up stalling the conversation out, leaving each partner feeling hurt and leaving the issue unresolved.
In the therapy room, I have the opportunity to provide a framework to help the couple understand why the activity of listening without defensiveness is so important. In a relationship, we need to both hear and feel heard. We will get to the part where we try and understand the objective reality and what is at play, but this is where we need to start.
Hearing and Being Heard
It is imperative that we hear our partners’ experience it in order to know what lens they are seeing the relationship through. This can help us understand what they are struggling with, which can increase our empathy and, in many cases, may show ways that small modifications in our behaviors can increase the likelihood for a better outcome. Additionally, taking in that your partner hurt you because they are struggling (vs. they wanted to hurt you) increases goodwill and decreases feelings of unsafety.
When we feel heard, truly like our partners are taking in and believing our experience, even if they see the situation differently, it creates trust, goodwill, and closeness. It makes us want to share and open up more and can also add some generosity to the bank for future fights.
Building a Bridge for Deeper Work
As a therapist, I want to create as much intimacy as possible in my sessions with couples in order to model and facilitate a closeness that the couple can take home with them. I also want to normalize that we all see things through a subjective lens. Learning each of the partners’ “lens” and what they are experiencing during hard moments helps me map out with the couple what is getting raised for them in their relationship. This is imperative in understanding what future work is needed, both in individual and couples therapy contexts, to help couples be more on the same page.
