Partner unwilling to couple counselling as CBT is about fooling yourself...

[stef]

Hi all there,

This post is also a reply from another post of mine.

http://forum.psychlinks.ca/relation...elings-due-to-dreadful-situation-of-mine.html

I am currently living a crisis in my relationship (in my other post I explain why).

Long story short I proposed him couple counselling but he is sort of against it as he feels it is just about "fooling yourself" into thinking/feeling differently facts and situations.

If I have well understood, he refers to CBT here where - among others - you are asked to repeat yourself "mantras" in order to changes your feelings about situations or your reactions. I am aware to oversimplifying the teraphy here, but just to make you understand what I heard from him.

And to a certain extent - and limiting it to cbt and not other types of teraphy - I agree with him about it: In the past I have also approached CBT and I got the same feeling of terapists giving me tools to fool myself.

On the other hand, I do not know if they use cbt in couple counselling.


Any hint?

 

[David Baxter PhD]

First, CBT is not about "fooling yourself" or "repeating mantras". Not at all.

The key to understanding CBT is to recognize that often our negative feelings are either triggered by or fueled by negative self-talk based on cognitive distortions or misinterprations of a situation, conversation, or interaction. The purpose of CBT is to identify when your self-talk/thoughts contain distortions or misniterpretatioins and to correct them. When negative feelings are the result of cognitive distortions or misnnterpretations, it means you are feeling hurt, angry, rejected, anxious, sad, or whatever when you don't need to be, or you are having a conflict with your partner that isn't necessary.

Sometimes, CBT is used in couples counselling but it's certainly not the only tool.

Don't give up on trying couples counselling because of inaccurate assumptions about what it entails.

 

[Dragonfly]

Any hint?

ummm .... Stef, if someone doesn't want to do therapy (couples, group, individual), there is all kinds of misinformation available to justify that decision. Because the decision has been made about not doing therapy (for whatever reasons). When this is happening, in general, I often notice someone hanging on to their misinformation - despite being offered alternative (correct) information. It means they're not ready. In the context of couple's therapy, if one person isn't ready, that is generally the signal that it might be time for the other person to do their own individual work.

 

[stef]

First, CBT is not about "fooling yourself" or "repeating mantras". Not at all.

Nothing to do with my original query but sometimes ago - as I had anxiety attacks when out shopping during working hours [but was not in any work due to unemployment] - I have been told to do the following homework: what do you repeat yourself? "I should be working!" (probably) Then add "..all the times" to your sentence -> "I should be working all the time!". Repeating this obvious nonsense should have eased my anxiousness. It did not work.
Despite this, it might be working in some (different) situations like when someone tells him/herself "I should be perfect" -> "I should be prefect at all times" -> "this is a nonsense!"...

Isn't it CBT? What if not CBT? What went wrong in my case?

Thanks a lot for your reply.
Stef

 

[David Baxter PhD]

What you describe is not CBT. I'm not sure what your therapist was attempting to do - perhaps try to trake your self-talk to an extreme where you would recognize the distortion? - but that is certainly not CBT.