E12
OnLove
THE PROFESSIONALS
For couples therapist Andrew Christensen, change isn’t always good
by Ellen McCarthy
One of Andrew Christensen’s
favorite old jokes goes like this: What is the bride thinking as she walks into the church to meet her groom? Answer: Aisle. Alter.Him. “It’s that notion of change,” says
Christensen, a psychology profes- sor at UCLA. “And men have the same notion — that once we’re married, things will improve.” Christensen, 63, has spent most of his nearly 35-year career in psychology studying couples — the ways they fight and the meth- ods of intervention that seem to help troubled pairs. In the early 1990s, Christensen,
frustrated that traditional meth- ods of couples therapy weren’t ef- fective enough, started working with his colleague Neil S. Jacob- son to develop a new strategy. Ja- cobson died in 1999, but the ap- proach they created, called in- tegrative behavioral couple therapy, has gone on to attract
significant attention in psychol- ogy circles, especially with the publication last month of the re- sults of a five-year clinical trial. A primary
difference be- tween Chris- tensen’s meth- od and tradi- tional
approaches revolves
Psychologist Andrew Christensen.
around that question of change. Typi- cally, a cou- ples therapist dealing with
an unhappily married pair might suss out each partner’s gripes about the other’s behavior and nudge them to make positive changes to please the other. The problem, Christensen says,
is that “for certain couples it’s very difficult for them to make certain kinds of changes, or if they make those changes they’re only going to be temporary.”
His approach, on the other hand, emphasizes acceptance of a partner — even when he or she is not meeting our expectations. Christensen’s brand of counseling would help a couple explore why a particular expectation is so meaningful and why a partner might not be able to fulfill it, no matter how reasonable it seems. If a wife’s need for affection as a display of love isn’t being satis- fied, for instance, the counselor might help her see that her hus- band wasn’t raised in an openly affectionate family, and that any attempts in that direction make him feel awkward and disingenu- ous. So perhaps they need to fo- cus on the other ways he express- es his love — by listening, say, or changing the oil in her car. Because the problem, Christen-
sen says, lies not just in a part- ner’s behaviors but also in our (sometimes overwrought) reac- tion to those behaviors. Another of his favorite sayings: “Most crimes of the heart are misde-
meanors.” Those dirty dishes left in the sink might not be as huge a transgression as infidelity, but they can still seem like blatant disregard of the other spouse’s feelings. Christensen’s method asks cou- ples to get past their routine com- plaints about the dishes or lack of affection and talk about underly- ing issues they may be avoiding. “We try to get at other things that are going on that haven’t been re- vealed,” he says. “And when they talk more about their disappoint- ments — their hurts in the rela- tionship — sometimes you can bring couples closer together in the session, to where they feel something differently towards each other.” In the five-year study published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Christensen
tracked 134 “chronically and seri- ously distressed” couples after they were given eight months of either traditional couples therapy or his integrative approach. Cou- ples who underwent Christen- sen’s approach reported higher marital satisfaction than the oth- er group for the first two years af- ter therapy, although the results evened out in the subsequent three years. Five years after either type of counseling, 50 percent of
“Most crimes of the heart are misdemeanors.”
— Andrew Christensen, couples therapist and co-author of “Reconcilable Differences”
couples were significantly im- proved, 25 percent were divorced and another 25 percent were still in troubled marriages. Christensen, who’s been mar- ried for 27 years and laid out his theories in the 2000 book “Recon- cilable Differences,” written with Jacobson, insists that one of the biggest keys to creating a happy home life is putting aside the as- sumption that we can tweak a partner into perfection. “Of course, people do change, but what Neil and I identified is that often the struggle to create change is the biggest barrier to change. People get into these dy- namics of, ‘I’m pushing, my part- ner is resisting,’ ” he says. “That pattern prevents either of us from changing and, in fact, locks us more deeply into a rut.”
mccarthye@washpost.com
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