{"id":20851,"date":"2025-07-10T20:47:25","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T19:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=20851"},"modified":"2025-07-10T20:47:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T19:47:25","slug":"dissecting_a_divorce_what_about_counselling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2025\/07\/10\/dissecting_a_divorce_what_about_counselling\/","title":{"rendered":"Dissecting a divorce: What about counselling?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why is the content hidden?<\/a><\/p>\n

If you’re comfortable reading about the details of my divorce, click here to read this post<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Why did we not try to fix things, you may wonder. Get help, get counselling, solve your problems together!<\/p>\n

We did. We attended many sessions of counselling. After the fact my verdict is that it was at best useless.<\/p>\n

Usually we spent each session talking about something that had happened that had bothered us. How did that make us feel? What did the other really mean when they said X? What was the other feeling when we did Y?<\/p>\n

In my mind, I thought of this approach as “find something that hurt and then really inspect it”. It was like going to the dentist every week, for a dental cleaning. Uncomfortable, over and over again.<\/p>\n

I thought: this is painful, but it’s worth it if it makes things better. And I thought so because I believed that this process was an initial phase of understanding the problem, and at some point we would start working on doing something about it.<\/p>\n

At one point I said, “what are we going to do about [negative thing]?”<\/p>\n

The therapist’s answer was: “Oh no, nobody needs to change<\/i> themselves!”<\/p>\n

What is the point, then? I wondered. She said that for other couples just hearing the other’s feelings often resolved things. That may be true. But she actually never made sure that this was the case for us. It appeared that she never had a plan for following up progress, or for fixing things; she just hoped they would improve on their own due to us talking about them. She sounded so wise and caring and insightful in each individual session, but she had no overall plan.<\/p>\n

Maybe the “just talk about it” approach works for some people, but for us it was nearly useless. Yes, it gave me better insight into Eric’s thoughts and feelings, but not in a way that actually had an impact. It didn’t improve our communication. <\/p>\n

Now years later I also note that our therapy sessions didn’t uncover any of the problems that I’ve been writing about in this series – not a single one. It remained superficial, at the level of “how did that make you feel” rather than questioning things in depth.<\/p>\n

Even after being told that nothing needed to change, I changed one or two things on my own initiative, when I realised that they were causing problems. That actually made things worse, I think, because I sacrificed my own needs for what I thought was good for our relationship. I stopped speaking Estonian when Eric was around, for example, and I grieved and resented it ever since.<\/p>\n

We considered giving counselling another try, with a different therapist and a more practically oriented approach. But by the time we had gotten there, I had already realised that we didn’t have any kind of foundation to build upon.<\/p>\n

Maybe we would have had better results if we had tried earlier, with a more suitable therapist. But on the other hand, some of the fissures were so deep and fundamental that I don’t see how they could be mended at all. (See my earlier posts about love, trust, and negativity, for example.) Perhaps effective therapy would have uncovered them earlier and saved us both years of frustration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n