I am going to post this article from the L.A. Times here, in the hope that someone might tell me their honest reaction. It is pretty negative on marriage counselling, which I have found helpful in the past. It is also quite positive on letting the woman in a relationship be fairly dominant.
This was the subject of an interesting discussion at my house. I don't really think either person in a marriage should dominate, or rather each person should dominate in the arenas where he or she has some knowledge, talent or success. When I thought about it all, though, a man whose wife is happy tends to be happier himself, because in the domestic sphere, a woman's unhappiness is so POWERFUL, and affects so many areas of their lives.
BY THOMAS H. MAUGH II--Los Angeles Times
Husbands, forget all that psychobabble about active listening and validation.
If you want your marriage to last for a long time, the newest advice from
psychologists is quite simple: Just do what your wife says. Go ahead, give
in to her.
Active listening, in which one partner paraphrases the other partner's
concerns - "So what I hear you saying is..." - is unnatural and requires too
much of people in the midst of emotional conflict, says psychologist John
Gottman of the University of Washington. "Asking that of couples is like
requiring emotional gymnastics," he says.
Gottman and his colleagues studied 130 newlywed couples for six years in an
effort to find ways to predict both marital success and failure.
Couples who used such techniques were no more likely to stay together than
couples who did not, they reported Saturday in the Journal of
Marriage and the Family, which is published by the National
Council on Family Relations.
"We need to convey how shocked and surprised we were by these results for
the active listening model," the team admitted in the article. In fact,
Gottman and his colleagues have long recommended active listening to couples
seeking counseling and had expected that its use would be a predictor of
success in marriages.
That it was not a predictor, he said, suggests that its use in counseling
should be abandoned.
The marriages that did work well all had one thing in common - the husband
was willing to give in to the wife.
"We found that only those newlywed men who are accepting of influence from
their wives are ending up in happy, stable marriages," Gottman said. The
autocrats who failed to listen to their wives' complaints, greeting them
with stonewalling, contempt and belligerence were doomed from the beginning,
they found.
But the study did not let wives completely off the hook. Women who couched
their complaints in a gentle, soothing, perhaps even humorous approach to
the husband were more likely to have happy marriages than those who were
more belligerent. "That type of [belligerent] response is even more
exaggerated in violent marriages," he added.
The fact that happily married couples do not normally use active listening
is not a surprise, according to psychologist Howard Markman of the
University of Denver, author of the 1994 book Fighting For Your
Marriage. "We've found that in our own studies," he said.
In fact, he argues that Gottman is setting up a "straw man" in the study of
active listening and validation, which is another form of recognizing the
legitimacy of a spouse's opinions. "When active listening is taught, it is
not because happy couples use it," Markman said. "We use it to help couples
disrupt the negative patterns that predict divorce."
Gottman said he is "very sympathetic" to that idea. "If you can genuinely
listen and be empathetic when you are the target of the complaint, that can
be very powerful," he said. But for the average person, he said, "it is
just too hard. The average person meets anger with anger."
The differences between Gottman and Markman are typical of the turmoil in
the field of marital counseling. A 1993 report argued that marital therapy
has a relapse rate so high "that the entire enterprise may be in a state of
crisis." A recent Consumer Reports study found
that people who underwent such therapy were the least satisfied among
people who had undergone any form of psychotherapy.
Gottman's study was designed to identify the factors that naturally
contribute to a successful marriage so those might be brought into play in
therapy, thereby making it more successful.
"If you want to change marriages," he said, "you have to talk about the
'emotionally intelligent' husband. Some men are really good at accepting a
wife's influence, at finding something reasonable in a partner's complaint
to agree with." That group represents perhaps a third of all men, he added.
"Another group just rejects all attempts at influence. That's very
characteristic of violent men," he said, but a majority of men do it to some
extent. "They feel, 'If I give in on this, I'm going to be totally
manipulated and controlled'."
That is not to say that men are the source of all problems in a marriage, he
hastens to add. But changing the attitudes of men "is a very powerful
lever" in changing the course of a marriage.
"The only way to change marriage for the better is to improve the quality of
friendship between a husband and wife and to help them deal with
disagreements differently," Gottman says. |
