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Solving Marriage Conflicts With Active Listening

By: lello

The wide range of marital therapies based on conflict resolution share a very high relapse rate. In fact, the best of this type of marital therapy has only a 35 percent success rate. In other words, his own studies show that only 35 percent of couples see a meaningful improvement in their marriages as a result of the therapy. A year later, less than half of that group--or just 18 percent of all couples who entered therapy--retain these benefits. When Consumer Reports surveyed a large sample of its members on their experience with all kinds of psychotherapists, most got very high customer satisfaction marks--except for marital therapists, who got very poor ratings. This survey may not qualify as rigorous scientific research, but it confirms what most professionals in this field know: In the long run, current approaches to marital therapy do not benefit the majority of couples.

When you really think about it, it's not difficult to see why active listening so often fails.There are some people who can be magnanimous in the face of such criticism--the Dalai Lama comes to mind. But it's unlikely that you or your spouse is married to one of them. Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics when their relationship can barely walk.

If you think validation and active listening will make conflict resolution easier for you and your spouse, by all means use it. There are circumstances where it can certainly come in handy. But here's the catch: even if it does make your fights "better" or less frequent, it alone cannot save your marriage.

After studying some 650 couples and tracking the fate of their marriages for up to fourteen years, we now understand that this approach to counseling doesn't work, not just because it's nearly impossible for most couples to do well, but more importantly because successful conflict resolution isn't what makes marriages succeed. One of the most startling findings of our research is that most couples who have maintained happy marriages rarely do anything that even partly resembles active listening when they're upset.

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