Do we Really need to talk about it?

In my practice over the years, I have worked with a wide variety of presenting problems, reasons for seeking support, levels of severity and so many different dynamics within relationships. However, the one common factor I have seen throughout is the fact that these problems have been going on for some time.

You have to ask yourself why? Why do we only go to counselling when we feel like we are at the final straw? When we may  already be thinking about ending the relationship? Or when something has eventually happened or escalated to a crisis point where it would be difficult to move beyond it?

 I ask myself and my clients this question a lot. Although there are undoubtedly many factors, one of them is the fear that talking about the problem will in some way make it bigger, worse, more serious and maybe more insurmountable. That if we can just keep plugging away, then maybe it will resolve on its own and we can avoid opening up that scary looking box and begin unpacking its contents.

I often use the analogy of a house - your relationship is a house that you bought together. At first the house feels great, you bought it after all, you saw enough in it to invest, you dreamed about what you could fill that house with, the memories it would provide. However at some point you found something. Maybe it was some mould in a room? Maybe it was a hidden room? Perhaps a door is broken so that you can’t even get in to part of the house? So what do we do when we find this room or this part of the house? We usually talk a little about it, slap some new plaster on the mould. Perhaps we simply shut the door, find a new way of getting to the part of the house, pretend the hidden room isn’t there by putting some paper or a poster over the door. If we do this, you can carry on living in the rest of house, you can continue as you were. You can probably be quite comfortable, for the most part, in the rest of the rooms.

But that original flaw doesn’t go anywhere. Sometimes you will walk past that door and remember it is there. You may ask yourself What was in the hidden room? How would we repair that way through the house? What can we do to get rid of the mould? But once you being to think about addressing it, you may have the fear that the answer simply be I don’t know how to fix this.

Eventually, if we don’t do anything about these rooms, they will begin to spread. You will resent that they are still in the same state, you may find that there is another hidden room, you may discover that the mould has spread.

What happens sometimes is that by the time you allow yourself to think about these rooms, it feels too big, too many rooms have been taken over, it will take too long and cost too much. And so some people will then sell the house. But without ever really figuring out where the problem came from, or how to work together to maintain and repair those rooms, how will you make sure the next house doesn’t end up the same way?

So the first point is that recognising the rooms,  acknowledging the mould or the secret doesn’t make it bigger, in fact, it might make it feel smaller. We need to get into that room and tackle it head on. A lot of us maybe feel we tried that before the door got shut, but did your conversation look like this:

“Look at that mould!”

“We need to do something about that mould”

We definitely don’t want more mould in the future.”

And then did it change? Perhaps it didn’t and maybe that’s because you didn’t get to the next part of that conversation which is firstly What is the problem? What does it look like? We might not ask this because it seems fairly obvious: Well it’s the black spreading blob on the wall.  However, if you were curious, it is possible that your partner might actually respond with  What are you talking about? It’s the broken window! Do you actually want to change the same thing? I can’t tell you how many couples feel like they have both been working so hard, with absolutely no recognition for it, only to find out that they have been trying to “fix” different things. Or secondly, that the way they want to fix it looks different. Therefore the next questions need to be What does it look like if we fix it? What would help us to fix it? What will I specifically do to make sure it doesn’t come back again?

Our hope here at EWG is that more people can try to keep that door open, have the conversations they can, as early as they can. And most importantly to accept that counselling is not a place to feel like you have already failed, but a tool to help you succeed, to figure out what DIY you are going to commit to within your relationship and how to maintain it over the years.