why marriage counseling/psychotherapy fails: Lundy Bancroft

One of the reasons marriage therapy fails to help walking-on-eggshells relationships is that it relies on egalitarian principles. Noble an idea as it is, this approach can only work in a relationship in which the couple sees each other as equals. Remember, your husband feels that you control his painful emotions and, therefore, feels entitled to use resentment, anger, or abuse as a defense against you. He will resist any attempt to take away what he perceives to be his only defense with every tool of manipulation and avoidance he can muster. In other words, he is unlikely to give up his "edge" of moral superiority - he's right, you're wrong - for the give-and-take process required of couples' therapy. And should the therapist even remotely appear to "side" with you on any issue, the whole process will be dismissed as "sexist psychobabble."

These men have gotten so good at charming the public, including their marriage counselors, because they've had lots of practice. Since they were young children, they've used charm and social skills to avoid and cover up a monumental collection of core hurts. Though it can be an effective strategy in social contexts, this masquerade falls flat on its face in an intimate one. If your husband is a charmer in public, his resentment, anger, or abuse at home is designed to keep you from getting close enough to see how inadequate and unlovable he really feels. In fooling the marriage counselor and the public at large, he makes a fool of you but an even bigger one of himself. 

Why Your Psychotherapy Did Not Help Your Relationship and His Made It Worse

Research and clinical experience show that women in therapy tend to withhold important details about their walking-on-eggshells relationships. Most say that they're embarrassed to be completely honest with their therapists. One woman told me that she was convinced that her therapist, whom she thought was "awesome," wouldn't like her if she knew about the harsh emotional abuse at home. Though it is incredibly hard to believe, she saw that same therapist for five years without ever mentioning her husband's severe problems with anger and abuse. By the time I was called in, the woman was suffering from acute depression and anxiety that were destroying her physical health. When I spoke to the therapist, however, she had no clue about the abuse. 

When therapists are aware that their clients are walking on eggshells at home, they feel almost bound to persuade the woman to leave the relationship. The most frequent complaint I hear from women who have undergone this kind of advocacy therapy is that they were reluctant to reveal the depth of their guilt, shame, and fear of abandonment to their disapproving therapists. Some have reported that their counselors would say things like, "After all he did to you, and you feel guilty?" I have heard hundreds of women report this kind of pressure from their therapists and have heard hundreds of therapists at conferences express exasperation about their clients' reluctance to leave their walking-on-eggshells relationships. The trainings I do for therapists worldwide always emphasize the utter necessity of compassion for their clients' enormous burden of guilt. Making hurt women feel ashamed of their natural (albeit irrational) feelings of guilt is intolerably bad practice. Compassion for her core hurts is the healthy way to help her heal her pain. 

Despite these problems, your psychotherapy probably helped you a little, even though it did not help your relationship. Whether it helped your husband is another matter. The goal of traditional psychotherapy is to reprocess painful experience in the hope of changing the way the client sees himself and his loved ones. If your husband's therapy unearthed painful experience from his past, without first teaching him basic emotional self-regulation, he most likely dealt with that pain in the only way he knew how -- by taking it out on you. He either seemed more entitled to display resentful, angry, or abusive behavior or used the pain of his past as an excuse for it.
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Bancroft goes on to give critical perspective to therapists, clergy and law enforcement by explaining that in this power dynamic, where a man bullies his partner, they must change their traditional thinking and hold the man entirely responsible for his actions and by actively listening to the woman's story for clues they can help her stop enabling him. 


 Bancroft has seen the most powerful change in a man when his entitlements are thwarted in every direction from family, friends and society. 


He strongly recommends advocacy in the form of public campaigns to educate and to shine a light on this unequal dynamic.  

Lundy Bancroft is what a Feminist looks like.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/150156

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/150156