Why isn’t my spouse getting better in therapy?    Answered by a therapist in Long Beach.

Often I have clients who have a partner or spouse who either encourages them to go to therapy or “sends them” to therapy and are disappointed when the person isn’t “fixed” quickly enough.

Since a therapist cannot talk to the spouse without a release of information signed by the client (allowing the therapist to talk to the spouse), the therapist isn’t going to return your calls explaining the therapy process.   In fact, this could be a bad idea for many reasons.

• The client might find that YOU are the barrier to their goals that they are trying to work out so they don’t allow you to be the barrier any more. Stop for a minute… I did NOT say it is your FAULT, I am just saying that you may be part of the thing they are trying to sort out.   Whenever possible, the goal of therapy is to have clients be open with their spouses, but please be patient with them.
• The client could need to get their head wrapped around their issue before they present it to you. Think about it.  If they talk to you, you will most likely have questions that they don’t know the answer to.  So then they have to make a decision that they don’t have time to think out.  Then when they do think it out and share with you, you may think that either they can’t make up their mind or they lied to you.  They might just need to sort it out in their own head first.

So why is it taking SO LONG:

• The therapist can only work with what the therapist is being told, so we can’t work on issues that we don’t know are there.  This isn’t a car that we can tear apart and see what isn’t functioning, and we don’t have a probe that we can use to find out where the “clot” is.  It takes time to dig into the issue and often in therapy we find reasons for problems that the client didn’t even know was there.   For example, maybe they get mad at you for chewing loudly and it seems to bother them way more than you think it should.  The client may not know themselves why this bothers them so the therapist has to ask questions in a systematic fashion to find out what it is about so that we can work on changing.
• Therapists “meet the client where they are at”.  If we feel like their story doesn’t add up, it is still their story.  We can slowly shine a light on inconsistencies, but we cannot fully work on an issue that a client refuses to work on or doesn’t want to work on. In this case, a therapist might work on superficial type issues to help the client develop skills that will eventually be needed to tackle the bigger issue (similar to the 1980’s version of the movie Karate Kid: “Wax on, wax off”.
• Humans usually don’t just change because we tell them to change. It takes time and understanding. How many people want to lose weight, stop smoking, be on time more often, (the list goes on)…?  Most people don’t just make a choice to stop smoking and BAM, they stop smoking.  It is a process.
• The more you push and pry, the longer the process can take. If I am in session with a client and we have been working on an issue and the client feels like they are finally getting an understanding of the issue, that is a great thing.  Then they come in the next week and instead of us working on the issue they have been making progress on, we are spending our time talking about how they have been avoiding their spouse and feel guilty about that.

So how can I help my spouse who is in therapy?

• My ask of you is: be patient and be supportive. If your spouse is being abusive to you, get your own therapy and think about leaving.  You don’t have to wait while you are being abused.  You can wait from afar.  However, if there isn’t abuse going on, be patient.
• Ask: “Is it okay if I ask you how therapy was today”, “Is there anything I can do to help”, and/or “When you are ready at some point, I would love to hear about your process in therapy”.