Therapists and lawyers sometimes share professional office buildings, eating lunch together and building their business similarly. We both need comfortable chairs to work through uncomfortable issues with our clients. Nobody ever goes to a therapist or a lawyer because life is going too well, they go for the opposite reason. One of my close friends is a lawyer, and we share many similarities in our jobs which is funny because we work in very different fields.

At the end of the day, in the courtroom, somebody needs to be found at fault, which is not the case in the therapy room. Honestly, I’m not concerned with finding who is at fault, because my job is to show how healing can begin.

When a couple comes to me to work on their relationship, both of them are usually afraid that they’ll be found out as “the problem” of the relationship. So, I have good news for them and for you: it’s never just one person’s fault.

Now sometimes, one spouse is unrepentantly harming the other one, potentially in an abusive way, and has no desire to fix their marriage, so it really is mostly or entirely their fault. Unfortunately, those couples rarely make it to my office, and I urge anyone with a spouse like that to prioritize their own safety and seek help from a therapist individually.

When your relationship develops deep, long-term issues, that means you’re not really solving problems when they arise. So, you try to fix your issues, but you unintentionally make the problem worse, so eventually you both start ignoring the issues since we don’t believe we can fix them. It’s not that either of you wants to harm your marriage, it’s just that you aren’t on the same page about how to rebuild the foundation of your relationship. Furthermore, it’s so hard to consider what is best for your future when you’re desperate for relief, and both spouses usually struggle to help fix their marriage when they’re individually in pain. Rebuilding the foundation of a relationship is hard work, like rebuilding a car engine, and most of us don’t know how to do that on our own.

So, to be more concise, what I’m saying is that two things can be true at the same time:

1. You have been harmed by your spouse’s flaws, and also you have been harmed by others’ flaws from your life and past relationships, and that’s not your fault at all.
2. Also, you have harmed your spouse because you are not perfect, you have contributed to your marriage’s issues, and you’re responsible for that regardless of what your spouse has done.

These two truths seem to be opposed to each other, but they are not, they coexist.

Like I said, it’s not all your fault, and it’s not all your spouse’s fault. The truth is, both of you have a part in the problem, which means that both of you have a part in the healing. 

As I work with a couple, I want to help them understand how they have fallen into an unhelpful cycle, and then show how they can form a new cycle that brings them closer together, rather than farther apart. It’s not easy work, but it is possible for any two people who are committed to improving their relationship and themselves.

And in this knowledge, there is freedom. Freedom from thinking that you’re the problem, and freedom from thinking that you have to wait for your spouse to change for your relationship to improve. When you understand how you and your spouse interact in cycles, you will be more empowered and hopeful as a result.

I promise you, if you and your spouse go to marriage counseling with a genuine desire to learn how you can love your spouse well, rather than to assign blame, your future is bright.

Thank you for reading my practice’s blog, my library of all the random thoughts that would make a terrible book but make a halfway-decent blog. To request a session or contact me, head to my Scheduling page to get in touch with me today!