Your relationship is like a big room, with windows
If you have already worked with me, you probably know I love metaphors. (And sometimes I get a little carried away, but I’m working on that!) I have a new metaphor for relationships that might help you understand your relationship and also get a better idea of what couples counseling is like.
Imagine that your relationship is a huge room. The room is filled with the life of your relationship–your memories, your shared beliefs, the tension you have (healthy or not) about your differences, the “magic,” if you want to call it that…no, the mystery of the two of you and what you have together.
And inside that room is an issue–a problem, if you want to call it that. It’s the issue that brings the two of you to couples counseling. And this is where the image of a room can be helpful: the issue is not sex, or money, or your parents, or someone’s abuse history, or you name it. Those are all important things, but they are not the issue. They are the windows through which you can look at the issue.
Example: sex isn’t going well, and hasn’t for a while. We can talk about that in terms of making your sex life better, but the only way to do that well is to use your sex problem as a window to see the issue in the room. The issue could be how one or both of you handles (or doesn’t handle) anxiety. (In fact, that’s probably most often what the issue is.) But if we change the subject from sex to, let’s say, the fights you have about money, we are then looking through a different window to see the same issue.
That means that if we address the real issue by talking about sex, there’s a good chance your usual money argument will change–for better or worse. You may think that your problem is, let’s say, your partner’s habit of lying. But that’s just another window: looking through the window of “you think your partner has a habit of lying,” we might see a deeper issue about honesty and intimacy in your relationship, and how that issue causes problems in lots of areas.
I mention all of this to give you a little more to think about before you come in for couples work. You will probably find, when you get here, that we’re not talking about the thing that you think is bugging you. And if we do talk about it, we’re going to use it as a window to deal with the central issue in your relationship.
