James Cordova

and pair them with two strangers, suddenly they're really good at communicating and really good at problem solving.

And so the implication of that isn't so much that they lack a skill, it's that the emotional environment in their relationship has become so

toxic, so poisonous, so conflictual that they're not actually willing to collaborate.

They're not willing to use the good communication and problem-solving skills that they actually have because I don't want to problem-solve effectively with you.

I'm mad at you.

It is the most common way that couples come into therapy, stuck in this, it's almost like one of the analogies we use is it's like a Chinese finger trap, right?

Like each of them is pulling so hard for change that the harder they try to make things better,

the tighter the trap becomes.

And they exhaust themselves.

They frustrate each other so completely that often they find themselves in a spot where the only way that they can see forward towards some sort of escape is either therapy or divorce.

In this couple, the husband and his son just had a long history of being able to get into these deep, sometimes hilarious conversations about world politics, which wasn't a particular interest to his wife.

And she would find herself just feeling left out, sort of left behind, ignored.

which she found really hurtful.

And she expressed that to him as, and the change that she was pushing for was, you need to talk to your son about how rude he's being to me and how thoughtless he's being to me because he needs to include me more in the conversations that we're having.

And the husband said,

would defend his son to her and would just like not confront him in that way he would ask her for change like you just need to throw yourself into the conversation right like maybe read the paper in the morning and like you know in the service of like we're gonna have a conversation about this stuff later so so that's where they got stuck he's trying to get her

to jump more enthusiastically into their conversations.

And she's trying to get his son to be more respectful towards her.

I think what I started to realize and what colleagues of mine as well started to realize is that we had done everything that we could to help couples change the things that they were asking for change in the relationship.

And again, the discovery that what is left are the things that arise out of naturally occurring differences between people.