Marriage Counseling
When communication between a husband and a wife breaks down, marriage counseling is sometimes sought as a last resort effort to save the marriage. Often, married people think they are seeing the counselor for a particular problem and by the time everything is said and done, they find that what they thought was the problem really wasn’t the problem at all.
Lack of communication is one of the reasons many marriages break up. People in general, not just men and women, don’t understand what the other person is saying to them. Another common problem married couples face, also based on a lack of communication is that they both have different expectations from the marriage and when those expectations don’t line up with each other, conflict arises.
While marriage counseling isn’t an instant fix by any means, if the counselor can help both spouses understand where the other is coming from, that can be a big step in the right direction. For example, a common technique that marriage counselors use is “mirroring.”
Mirroring takes place when, after one spouse has told the other spouse how she feels about something, the spouse who was doing the
listening, mirrors, or voices back to the spouse who was doing the talking what he thinks she said. For example, suppose the wife says to the husband, “You don’t spend much time with me anymore and it hurts my feelings.” The counselor would then ask the husband to “mirror” what he thinks his wife just said.
If the husband then says something like, “You just said I don’t love you because I’m never around and I don’t understand that because I work so hard for us.”
At this point, the marriage counselor would point out or allow the wife to point out what was actually said, which was not what the husband heard.
Sometimes we hear what the other person never even said and we react on that instead of what they really said. It is in this way that the marriage counselor can facilitate better communication between a husband and a wife.
