The MC recommended "Intensive Couples Counseling"

[flourdust]

We've been seeing an MC for about eight months. We see him roughly biweekly. It's been ineffective, to put it mildly. The MC is familiar with BPD and TBI and aware of my wife's issues.

He recently recommended something called Intensive Couples Counseling, provided by a local firm that is mostly staffed by LFMTs with master's degrees. It's supposedly for couples who are in crisis, on the brink of divorce, stuck with serious issues they can't deal with, and so on. They have a range of programs -- the basic package is 15 hours of therapy in either 5 three hour sessions over multiple weeks or all at once over the course of a weekend.

It's expensive -- though less than a divorce, obviously -- but I'm wondering if this is worth pursuing. Has anyone had any experience with this kind of heavy-duty therapy in dealing with BPD relationship problems?

[formflier]

 

Can you describe what is going on that leads you to say MC is ineffective.

Then I would directly ask the MC guy how this weekend might address it.

No guarantees though but I am a big believer in trying, as long as both parties are interested in putting out effort.

FF

[flourdust]

Interesting that you and my therapist gave me the same advice -- ask the MC what outcome he expects from this intensive!

Our MC's modality is called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. What this has translated to for our time with him has been his attempts to find areas where we have agreement we can build on. This has been a slow-motion train wreck. How can we agree? Our memories of conversations are different. My actual thoughts (the ones in my head) and her description of my thoughts (her projections) are different. My view of the problems and hers are completely different.

If I was to describe the bottom line of issues that have been raised in MC, mine are that I don't want her doing the things that I've had to create boundaries for -- raging at me and the like. Hers would be that I need to support her by not enforcing boundaries and be there for her unconditionally while she verbally abuses me.

She doesn't seem to see the raging behaviors as a real problem or at least one that she should feel responsible or remorseful about, and I'm not willing to accept verbal abuse. So there we are.

So the MC sessions for a while became the therapist trying to get "quick wins" to build a foundation of rapport between us -- agreements that we would do things like have weekly meetings to plan the week, or rules on how to disengage from arguments. Very little of this did any good.

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I asked him about the intensive counseling. He clarified that he didn't necessarily recommend the intensive, but that he liked the therapists there and maybe they could meet with us more often. I also showed the program brochure to my T, and she said that there is no way this is going to save my marriage. If MC is ineffective, then doing more of it isn't going to make it work better. We are simply living in different worlds.

[formflier]

Here comes advice from the "staying" FF.  I would find a way to go.

Keep your expectations down, but give it a shot.

If 1 or 2 good things come out of it, perhaps it is worth it.

Listen, I get it that my and many of our situations don't look good.  I doubt any of us would be shocked if we eventually end up in divorce court.  We would be sad (at least I would) but not flabbergasted and wondering what happened.

I would not want you to have regrets that you didn't give everything a shot that you could.

Is your wife in DBT?  Or some kind of T.

I'll look up the kind of MC T that worked well for us.  It was some kind of emotional attachment style.  Where we found areas we "felt" the same and built on that.

FF

[Ceruleanblue]

That, to me, is the saddest part of BPD, that their views of things are often not reality based, and so often terribly negative.

I've wanted to attend just the sort of MC intensive you are talking about, but don't know of one locally. My thoughts are you can have the best therpist/s in the world, but if one partner isn't willing to work on things(like your wife is in denial about her anger), then I don't think the therapy will really work. Therapy works for those who do the self work.

[HopefulDad]

I went to two MCs.  Both came to the same conclusion: BPDxw has a PD.  Both said she needs help.  Both said that if she doesn't seek help, our marriage faced tough odds (as proven by the "x" above).  They know marriage counseling doesn't fix problems brought on by a PD.

I'm kind of surprised your MC, who is well versed in your spouse's issues, is recommending *more* marriage counseling.  Not to sound cynical, but this MC seems to be toeing the line between "exhausting all options" and "blatant money grab".

My personal take is to save your money.

[formflier]

 

There have been times when my wife has gotten onboard and done some hard work and things have really improved.

I wish I could understand the rhyme or reason behind that.

Perhaps the other thing to think about and look at is to figure out if MC is doing harm.  I don't think I have ever been a part of that.

There have been several storm outs by my wife when things got to hot or heavy.  One of those led to me hearing about stop walking on eggshells.

I do think is some situations having pressure put on them is good, better to put pressure on in those situations rather than without a T or other neutral third party.

FF

[thisagain]

15 hours of MC in a weekend sounds like a pwBPD's idea of hell. My ex couldn't even keep it together for 45 minutes.

What does your wife think about more frequent MC? How has she felt about what you've done so far? If she's semi-open to going, then it might be worth a try. Especially if she's also in DBT or some halfway decent T for herself.

[flourdust]

A few scattershot answers... .

It's not a cash-grab by our MC. The other therapists aren't affiliated with him. If anything, it's an attempt by him to get us to fire him and go see someone else.

My wife has been in DBT for almost a year, has an individual T, and is on a dozen medications. I've posted before my concerns that DBT isn't really doing any good for her. My overall impression is that she participates in the program but still doesn't take ownership of her behaviors in our relationship, so she's not particularly good at applying the skills there.

I haven't asked her what she thinks about the recommendation for the other counselor. She tends to view counselors as sort of like trips to urgent care. She gets anxious if there's too long of a wait between sessions, and if, say, our daughter has a meltdown at school, she wants to write to her T right away and try to get an appointment immediately. I sympathize with the desire to take some kind of action right away, but I haven't found that running over to a therapist for an hour of talking is an instant cure for anything. So I suspect that she likes the idea of more intensive therapy, just because it feels like doing something.

Considering where we've been and where we are, I don't see this as anything more than a waste of time and money.

[Ceruleanblue]

My wife has been in DBT for almost a year, has an individual T, and is on a dozen medications. I've posted before my concerns that DBT isn't really doing any good for her. My overall impression is that she participates in the program but still doesn't take ownership of her behaviors in our relationship, so she's not particularly good at applying the skills there.

This is sort of my experience with my husband who is in DBT. He isn't really taking ownership, or he's still wanting to blame me a lot of the time, so he's not really getting the help from DBT that he could be. His anger issues go outside our relationship, and so do a lot of his behaviors, so I don't see why he wants to shift all blame to me, but he seems to always need a "target". When I met him, it was his boss.

We too are in marriage therapy, and this time it's going "some" better, but last time got off topic and he was again bringing up things we've already hashed out, and it felt like he's trying to triangulate the therapist. She called a halt to that, but we never did get around to the subject we'd both said we wanted to address that week: "repair, after a meltdown".

It's so hard to get good results in marriage therapy, just like someone stated above, because it takes two people willing to work on, and change behaviors that don't work. People with BPD tend to want to project, and not look at their contribution, and in our case, it always felt like he was using it as a soapbox to paint me black. Plus, marriage therapists are usually inclined to split blame(bad word for it) down the middle, and let's face it, when you are dealing with a pwBPD(or any PD), chances are one partner is already doing way more, taking way more, and trying harder, to make up for the deficit that the person with the PD's behaviors create.

My husband likes going to therapy, which is great, but what's not great is he just uses it to vent, and not do much work. Just recently though, I've seen him actually watching some DBT videos, so that is giving me hope... .