by Nathan Chua
Couples often wonder how the person they loved has turned into someone they can’t stand at all. Why can’t he be responsible enough to take care of our finances? Why is she so disorganized and impulsive? He seems to care more about his family than he cares about me. I’m bored in this relationship. My partner doesn’t care about what I feel. She is too quiet and aloof. I don’t feel any closeness anymore.
Of course, there are legitimate reasons for you to consider leaving your partner such as violence and infidelity. But most couples often say that their issues mostly revolve around their differences. Thus comes the term, irreconcilable differences. What I enumerated in the first paragraph can be summed up in this term that we often hear couples declare as their reason for separating. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean that these cannot be legitimate reasons to call it quits. I am in no position to tell you that you should stick to your relationship just because your problems simply fall into this category. And if your partner refuses to seek the help that your relationship could benefit from, then you may have a legitimate reason to find a more meaningful life either without a partner or with someone else.
Herein lies the beauty of Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy or IBCT. One of the details that I look for in couples as I work with them, are the reasons why they fell in love with each other in the first place! Let’s take the complaints that couples bring to the therapy room that I enumerated in the first paragraph.
Contextual Thinking vs. Essential Thinking:
Complaint #1: He’s not responsible enough. He is disorganized and impulsive.
You may have liked the idea that your partner now was, during your dating days, the helpless person who appreciated it everytime you would come to his rescue. Somehow you found a role that was satisfying in this relationship. It could also mean that your partner’s impulsiveness in certain contexts, can be an endearing quality! Why, he would buy me an expensive gift out of nowhere!
Complaint #2: She seems to care more about her family than us.
I think this is one of those issues that couples complain about quite often. Given our culture of being in a context where family is a Filipino’s greatest resource in hard times, is it any wonder that your partner finds it difficult to split loyalties in the context of your relationship?
Complaint #3: I’m bored in this relationship. My partner doesn’t care about what I feel. She is too quiet and aloof. I don’t feel any closeness anymore.
Maybe when you were looking for a partner, there was an attraction to this person’s aloofness. It made this person mysterious and interesting. She is also quite the opposite of the noisy, agitating people you grew up with as a child. Finally, I can have the peaceful and quiet relationship that I was looking for. At the same time, your aloof partner may have liked the idea that you gave him the emotional element in his life. So goes the saying that opposites attract.
IBCT encourages couples to see that their partner will never be everything to them. No couple is one hundred percent compatible. In fact, the chances of you ending up with someone who is incompatible with you is 100 percent! Let’s face it, your partner who goes at a snail’s pace will go at a snail’s pace in situations when this quality can be disadvantageous to facing life’s inevitable problems as you go through it no longer as individuals but as a couple.
So if you are wondering what I mean by contextual vs. essential thinking, your partner and you behave differently in different contexts! Your partner is not essentially a bad person. (Believe me, I have yet to encounter a client who I felt had inherently harmful intentions!) If you come to therapy with the same intention of saving your relationship, it is more likely that you and your partner are doing your best to show that you care and you want your partner to be happy. Your partner is not essentially defective. They just learned to behave in certain ways in certain situations that at times covers other situations that do call for a different behavior!
That’s what IBCT makes you aware of as aspects of your relationship that are better off accepted and may take a long while or even forever to change. If we can learn to notice and accept these so-called irreconcilable differences, chances are, your partner will notice that. And having the minds that we have, I always go back to what Carl Rogers had said many years ago. Let me paraphrase it to apply not just to yourself but also for your partner and your relationship.
The Quote from Carl Rogers:
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.”
Paraphrase:
“The curious paradox is that when my partner accepts me, just as I am, then I can change.”