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Relationship Tips For Couples Counseling - Sharing Thread

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Fearless

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I thought it might be useful for a lot of us to share tips for couples counseling (tips for finding a good couples therapist, tips for coordinating with the one you have, bringing the idea up to your Honey, etc - anything counts!). I'm not sure how many of you have also tried couples counseling, but I'm guessing its a fair amount. My Honey and I tried it and am thinking about bringing the idea up again.

I'll start. My tips are:
Double, triple, quadruple check to make sure your therapist knows ya'll's triggers. The one therapist we finally found that my Honey felt he could trust ended up inadvertantly triggering him big time right at the end of a session, with the advice of "I think you two should talk about _____ (the trigger, which not only was the subject of ___ but also the act of talking about it) and then come back and tell me what you think." As soon as she said it I knew he just rocketed into PTSD mode and there was no way to discuss this topic without serious therapeutic help, and was so angry at her for not realizing how incredibly counter productive her approach was. He couldn't get out of her office quick enough and we narrowly avoided a big fight later because we were both so freaked out. We pretty much never spoke of what she said again and never contacted her again. I was really disappointed because I was very much looking forward to getting some issues sorted out and opening up better communication with a couples counselor's help. Looking back on it, I realized two things I would change- remind the therapist of triggers as often as you can, especially if you can't meet regularly. Second:

Try to find a therapist that is both a couples counselor and has worked with PTSD. I have a feeling our therapist really didnt understand PTSD because of her mistake. Maybe in the future I'd ask a PTSD therapist to do couples counseling even if they have next-to-no experience with couples, rather than a couples counselor with next-to-no experience with PTSD :/ Otherwise we'd have to educate them ourselves...


What tips/experience do some of you have to share?
 
When you talk about couples counselling do you mean for couples having issues or do you mean when one has PTSD and you are bringing the other half in to help understand the PTSD and to work together to help the sufferer with PTSD?
 
I mean mostly couples counseling for couples having issues (where one or both partners have PTSD). I wasnt really directing my original post towards the "one has PTSD and you are bringing the other half in to help understand the PTSD and to work together to help the sufferer with PTSD", although thats mostly just because I havent experienced that. I'm sure theres some overlap, so that could be included in a thread like this as well. :)
 
Thanks for sharing this @Fearless. I am interested to hear other's stories. I have never brought up the idea of couples counseling with my guy. While i imagine that it would be beneficial in many ways if we were both keen to do it, I doubt he would be receptive. At this point we are going along okay and I suspect it would do more harm than good to try and get him to go.

I remember trying couples counseling with my ex (who was also a PTSD sufferer but also not a very nice person in some respects). It was an unmitigated disaster. It actually made things worse because he became very angry at me afterwards. He said I was using the session as a way to get me to stop doing things I didn't like.

And yeah, I guess I was. Case in point - whenever we were out in public and he saw a person who was obese, he would make very loud and mercilessly cruel comments about their weight. Everyone could hear what he said including the person themselves. As you can imagine, I was mortified and embarrassed to be with him during those times, but I could never make him understand why making such comments was wrong. I appealed to the therapist for help and he finally stopped. He resented me for dealing with the problem by involving a third party after that.

I dunno, maybe he had a point, maybe I approached it in the wrong way. But even though he was just a cruel person, it marred my view of the efficacy of couples counseling. I now see it as more of a last resort unless both people 100% want to be there.
 
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