Rebuilding Your Relationship

It’s important for therapists to keep up to date. The trouble is, one indicator of the vast literature on “couple therapy” produced over 300,000 hits today.  As troublesome as it is to keep up to date, it is possible for therapists to read a few key journals that focus on their areas of interest. Being that couple therapy is my most favorite focal point, I read the widely referenced Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.

Well over a billion people now use the internet worldwide. As a result, more and more partners are complaining of internet infidelity. I keep my eyes open for new research concerning this key topic in couples therapy.

When I saw a study of Internet infidelity in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy published as recently as February 9, 2012, my interest was sparked. The study conducted in-depth interviews of 15 therapists with experience treating Internet infidelity and the interviews were analyzed for basic themes used in treating this problem.

In summary, the study reports that prevalent themes therapists focus on during treatment of internet infidelity include: 1. Developing physical boundaries, 2. developing psychological boundaries, 3. managing accountability, trust, and emotional escalation, 4. Increasing client awareness of the causes of the Internet relationship, 5. assessing the couple’s context and readiness for change, and 6. working toward forgiveness.

Although this was a small study, some of the themes are easy to recognize as useful when treating any concerns around infidelity. In support of the themes, my own treatment approach includes attending to interpersonal boundaries, assessing whether clients are ready for change, and building awareness around desires and attitudes towards exploring sexuality with those outside the marriage.

To reference the article, go to:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2011.00275.x/full

Stay tuned in coming weeks for more about how to improve your satisfaction with your intimate relationship.

What better time than Valentine's Day to invest at least a few minutes - better yet a few hours or even the whole day - rebuilding your relationship!

After a few years together, many couples find themselves getting caught in a bit of a rut - not a sexual rutt, but a boring or frustrating rut. Basically, after being together for a while - could be a month, a year, or a number of years - the novelty just wears off.

This is quite natural and consistent with the notion of habituation or tolerance - like needing more to get the same effect. But when the romance, intimacy, and sexual arousal of the relationship starts to dwindle, it can get pretty frustrating. The temptation to seek novelty outside the relationship can be expected to accompany this shift.

It might seem paradoxical to suggest that spending more time with your romantic partner - even if it's been a while since you were intimate - could bring back a feeling of chemistry between you. But clearly, if we make an effort to do something we both enjoy together, it can feel pretty good and can re-energize what was starting to feel like a dwindling relationship only yesterday.

Another route to rebuilding your relationship - and bringing more energy into it - is to spend less time together. Yap! Spending time doing something you want to do while apart can re-energize your desire to be together. "Absence makes the heart grow fonder," as they say.

The trick with spending time apart is to come back together with something new to share and be open to each other having enjoyed spending time apart.

I can hear the naysayers now! No, Jack or Jill is supposed to miss me the whole time we're apart....I would respond that it sounds like you don't want Jack or Jill to have a pleasant life unless you are right there side by side!  I don't think this is love. Instead, it's more likely to be dependence and insecurity. A related folk adage here is "If you love something, set it free! If it comes back, it's yours; if not, it never was."

Here are some more tips for rebuilding your relationship: http://blogs.psychcentral.com/positive-psychology/2012/02/what-do-you-look-for-in-a-partner-how-to-find-love-this-valentines-day/

Even if you're apart today, remember to appreciate your time apart while somehow finding a way to renew the relationship you have with the special other(s) in your life.

This blog is intended to:

1. how understanding relationships can help us live a more fulfilled life,
2. suggest ways to improve the health, fulfilment, and emotional connection in relationships,
3. explore difficulties that couples generally face and to provide some ways I understand these problems,
4. provide some general recommendations and resources that will hopefully help readers,
5. more about my approach to counselling than is already provided on dawsonpsychologicalservices.com.

This blog is also intended to provide information about the new Home Study resources available on the website, and to hopefully make them easier to use.

It is important to state that I'm not speaking for all therapists or all psychologists in this blog. What I write here is my opinion only. If I cite others, I will provide my interpretation of what others said or found in their research. It's also important to say that this blog is not set up for publication beyond dawsonpsychologicalservices.com, nor is it set up to automatically publish feedback or questions from readers. If you have questions, concerns or feedback about couples counselling, the blog itself, or about dawsonpsychologicalservices.com, please email me at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . I would be happy to respond to your email either personally, by posting an FAQ, or by addressing a question generically through a blog post.

What is this blog not?

In addition, although I am occasionally asked to give advice to couples who I see in my private practice, the purpose of this blog is not advice-giving nor is it designed for any individual client or couple. But that doesn't mean it can't help those looking for advice. There will be a lot of information shared in this blog, perhaps so much that you might think you don't even need to go to see a counsellor. Not to take way any value from seeing a couples counsellor, if that's what you choose to do, great! I'm happy to save you some money!

It is important for readers to be aware that any recommendations or resources provided here are not intended to be a final solution for any specific couple. Instead, it is most helpful when any suggestions or recommendations are taken as representing or symbolizing part of a relational process.

In essence, this blog is not intended as a replacement for face-to-face counselling. Having said that, research on self-help supports the helpfulness of circulating information about the psychology of couple relationships. Better informed couples hopefully can use the information to better understand themselves and each other.

Who is this Dr. Dawson anyway?

To acquaint you a bit with who I am...I have been married almost 20 years and have been in private practice working with couples for 8 years now. I have also worked with families in the area of child and youth mental health for 11 years, and prior to that was a substance abuse counsellor with young offenders for two years. I was trained from a perspective that appreciates the role that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour play in our family relationships. An important part of my training and my upbringing was to value the unique story each person brings - because in that story are the seeds of improving the quality of life.

Couples come to me to help them improve their relationships before they get married or a few years after they're married, or many years after they're married. When I see these couples, I don't assume that they will be fixed in a specific period of time, by a specific amount, or that they even need to be "fixed".

Instead, what I do assume is this. Individuals encounter stressors in many areas of life. These areas may include juggling demands of looking after the needs of aging parents, supporting oneself, ensuring visits with children or dealing with a spouse from a past relationship, and still somehow eaking out some time to get enough exercise and enjoy hobbies and personal interests.

When two individuals, each with their ongoing demands, decide they like or love each other enough to hang around each other a lot, or even decide to live together or get married, their personal stressors overlap. They overlap "big time"!

Now, stressors come in three major varieties. One is the sort of stress that is manageable and is associated with positive coping and good functioning. Another is the type of stress that is still managable but is starting to impact functioning and is a little bit distressing. The third type is stress that is unmanageable and is having a large impact on functioning and is very distressing. 

What are the possible responses to these stressors? On an individual basis, it can help to look at how we respond to difficulties or roadblocks in our daily lives. It could be a roadblock if a child doesn't do what she or he is told...or if our car breaks down between our home and the ski hill...

Either of these could be stressful situations, depending on how we handle it. We might have an argument with our partner in either situation, and then, after we have vented our feelings at each other, we might handle it calmly and work together to resolve it.

Research has shown that a large factor in how we handle stress is our interpretation of the stress. We might see the stress as manageable and not get upset. We might see it as manageable and get a little upset, or we might see it as unmanageable and get very upset.

When couples come to me for counselling, I've noticed that there is practically always something that has alienated them from each other.  Based on questionnaires I give couples who I see, there are numerous ways they have become alienated. These include arguing too often, not communicating well or understanding each other very well, disagreeing strongly with each other on certain issues, not spending the time together that they would like, and - perhaps surprisingly - spending too much time together.

Of course, becoming alienated from our partners can be very stressful. That stress can come from the relationship not functioning like we would prefer it to, or like it did when we first met when it was all romantic and sexy. It can be emotionally painful and stressful to realize that the relationship is moving away from the warm feelings of romantic love, frequent intimacy, and deep connection that we felt at the beginning.

Back then, our new partner was perhaps a kind of solace, a special person we could confide in, who helped us to relieve stress we felt elsewhere in our lives. Our new partner really became a way of coping with - or even escaping - the personal stressors we were dealing with at the time.

Now that we've moved passed that point, and we're noticing that our partner has some foibles just like us - some of which are kind of irritating - they stop fulfilling us in the way they did at the beginning. Now, we have to start buildling a whole new set of coping strategies to deal not only with our own personal stressors at work and with our own parents, siblings, and kids we have already, but also with the stressors our partner brings into our lives.

How do we support our partner when they start increasing the level of our stress? Sometimes, it can even feel like they are doing it on purpose, just to bug us!

More information about stress management (including an interactive video) can be found on Mental Health Pros which can be accessed through the Home Study section of www.DawsonPsychologicalServices.com.