Couples therapy and individual therapy concurrently?

[Rose White]

My husband was kind of confused about transference and therapy so I suggested he go to therapy himself to ask questions. He was kind of motivated and said he wanted to work on himself.

He went two times and I think he just kept talking about how frustrated he is with me because she referred him to couples counseling and he is fired up to go.

I feel like I am making progress in individual therapy. I only started in August and am trying to recover from csa. I’m afraid that if I start couples therapy that I will feel the need to focus on it exclusively and abandon my self development.

What are your experiences? Looking for advice.

 

[Surfergal]

My husband was kind of confused about transference and therapy so I suggested he go to therapy h...

I think you can do both and they will complement each other. He may also have some areas of concern that he would like to address or maybe he just wants to be able to support you better. If you can afford to do both why not? I have the opposite problem. I am currently going to individual therapy and whilst it's really helping me I know that my husband and our relationship would benefit from either his own therapy or couples therapy but due to the cost of our current therapy, he is not keen. I'm not ready to stop individual therapy so will have to come back and revisit it again at a later stage. I know that whilst my parent's addiction directly impacted me it has also indirectly impacted my husband and my relationship. To me these are just as important to my growth/healing as my own self-development.

 

[Deleted member 44517]

I don't have experience with doing them together but I have done both kinds. I think they can work. It's ok to tell the marriage counselor that you are working on heavy issues in personal counseling and that most of your energy needs to go there. This is more for the benefit of your husband. You can let him do the heavy lifting in marriage counseling.

 

[Deleted member 34328]

My husband and I started couples counselling as the issues at the time were directly related to our marriage. PTSD hadn't kicked in for me yet.

The council I received at my first assessment meeting with my therapist was that because my trauma in large part had to do with abandonment from my husband, it would not be long before I would also resent getting therapy by myself as well.

My husband did come and had it continued that way, I would probably have healed from the ptsd issues much better and a stronger marriage.

Once the flashbacks became intense, the focus turned to that and unfortunately the marriage counseling never picked up again.

I don't think I could do both concurrently, but I strongly believe that my husband would greatly benefit from counselling on his own.

If you are able, then that would possibly make your husband a much stronger supporter for you so that you could both work towards healing.

 

[Rose White]

Thank you for sharing your experiences. I don’t think I can do them both at the same time. I told him that I wanted him to go to the therapist to learn how to be a supporter and how to cope with being triggered when I set boundaries.

He said he will continue to go to his new therapist. He also said he will try to respect my need for him to ask before touching me in any intimate way.

I told him that I know it seems weird that I need him to do that, but I just do, temporarily, while I heal my brain. He doesn’t quite get it, but he seems to be trying to, in his better moments.

 

[Quakegirl]

Hi Searching, sounds like a wise decision for me.

I’ve just started couples therapy with my husband. Session 1 was absolutely excruciating and felt almost violating (and I don’t use that word lightly). My husband brought up things I am NOT reasy to talk about - things about my past/history, and it was hell. They are things I can’t even talk about with my own therapist. It felt so exposing to have them talked about, in front of me, like they were just every day, matter of factual things.

I had said to my own therapist about how scared I was I wouldn’t be able to handle it, and I didn’t. I ended up just sobbing my way through it and feeling like a complete idiot.

 

[Rose White]

@Quakegirl that sounds traumatizing, I’m sorry you are dealing with that!

I’m surprised but glad that more than one person agreed how difficult it might be to do both at once. It is so easy for my inner critic or my partner to dismiss the work that I’m doing in therapy. It is very hard, but I’m doing it and I deserve to be able to focus one thing at at a time.

 

[Friday]

To be honest, I'm shocked your trauma therapist isn't insisting on couples therapy, since -if I'm remembering correctly- "kind of confused about transference" = he was splitting bank accounts in preparation for divorce?

My experience is that stabilization is something that most T's really don't f*ck around with. Major life stressors, like cancer, losing your home, losing your marriage, etc. usually throw the breaks on trauma therapy while the immediate problems are sorted... or... if it's too late to prevent them? Stopping trauma therapy altogether -instead of incorporating life problems whilst trauma therapy goes slower- until your life is stable enough again to restart.

 

[hymnless]

I’m with @Friday on this- couples makes it a lot easier to keep trauma therapy moving because you don’t have to deal with everything else’s. Honestly I don’t know how we could have gone through so much of this had it not been for both couples and my wife’s individual therapy. We don’t have to spend time during my trauma therapy processing the ins and outs of the week, but I also know that she has someone to reach out to in order to be able to process the intensity of everything rather than processing at me.

 

[Rose White]

Hmmm... @Friday and @BookerNoe I hear you. Yes my husband did say split the bank accounts in supposed preparation for divorce. He regularly told me he was leaving, but he never meant it—it was always a ploy to get me emotionally drawn into his problems rather than my own.

My therapist helped me not to fall for it anymore and his therapist told him to never do that again. He has told me that he recognizes that he shouldn’t do that anymore and that he won’t.

Ever since I started recovery my partner keeps struggling with making it about him and his fears, with getting triggered from my setting up boundaries, and with accepting that this is actually happening.

I always told him that my goal was to get back to intimacy with him. His fears drive him to act cool or distant from me, then to act out by accusing me of being manipulative or wanting to leave, then to crumple with a sense of defeat and say he will do anything I say. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is about a three day cycle but it can be longer or shorter.

Does that seem like a perfect candidate for couples therapy? I guess I don’t really want to try anymore. My emotions have been toyed with for so long (I realize that I allowed and likely elicited it for all my marriage until I woke up in August) that I don’t feel anything.

I told him that I don’t want to be sexualized anymore and that it’s not something that I want to do to him anymore either. He was fiery upset and characterized me as prude and anti-sex. He said I was enjoying hurting him with my recovery and that sexualizing him is one of the only ways he (and all men, from his point of view) feels good and loved.

So we ended that conversation on opposite ends of the spectrum but the next day he tells me that he thought about what I said and that I’m absolutely right and he’s going to try to follow it.

I think he’s just saying that to try to smoothe over the tension, and I don’t believe that he has “come over to my side.” I don’t like his strategy of saying one thing during a discussion and then only reversing his point when he sees how upset I am over the next day or so. If he really meant it he would consider my thoughts and words while we are talking.

I don’t know why my T isn’t insisting on couples therapy but I don’t really want to do it! I don’t trust him and I don’t like his values. I don’t believe he really wants to be a supporter. He is in denial that this is even happening. He still tells me things like, “This is fun for you,” or “You could make all this go away if you wanted to,” or, “Why don’t you take a break from therapy for a while and see how you feel?”

I am wary that couples counseling for him is about, “When will we have sex again?”

Currently he is agreeing to all my boundaries and conditions without throwing them back in my face. Maybe he will be patient enough to wait for me to feel comfortable enough to reach out to him again and strong enough not to abandon me emotionally if I tell him no.

He has to be able to accept “no” without getting triggered into simmering rage or depression. I think if he could do that I might begin to trust him and would consider couples therapy.

 

[hymnless]

That absolutely sounds like you all are a good candidate for couple counseling then. If having sex again gets him in the door and keeps him there- great. If your goal is intimacy once he is able to accept and respect boundaries- awesome. Your therapist will be there to advocate for you all as a couple, not for each persons individual goals. Those two goals are just means to a similar end though. Any good therapist isn’t going to let just one of you dominate the session or allow you to go into full on meltdown mode based on what HIS goals are. We often end up doing couples separately for a couple weeks when things are really difficult. That was we are both able to say how we feel without tension skyrocketing and it gives our therapist a clear path as to how to guide our sessions when we come together. I’d really consider a session or two if you’re up for it. If not, we all know therapy isn’t going anywhere anytime soon :)