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The small things that hold a marriageStep 1 of 8

Before you read on

Before anything else. If any of these is true for you, this course is not the right one and you should not use what it teaches. You are afraid of your spouse. You change what you say to avoid a reaction. You have been hurt physically, even once. You are not allowed to see people, hold money, or go out alone. Your phone or your movements are checked. You have been threatened. Sex happens when you do not want it. Nothing is scored here and nobody is being told what is happening to them. But repair skills are not safe where one person is controlling the other, because technique in that situation becomes another tool for the person doing the harm. Go to the course called When home is not safe instead.

Lesson 1 of 6 · What is actually going wrong

Read this before the rest

This course teaches skills for two people who are both trying. Those skills are not safe everywhere, so there is a gate before the door, and it is here rather than buried at the end.

Read this list. You are afraid of your spouse. You change what you say to avoid a reaction. You have been hurt physically, even once. You are not allowed to see people, hold money, or go out alone. Your phone or your movements are checked. You have been threatened. Sex happens when you do not want it.

If any of those is true, stop here. Not because your marriage is beyond help, and not because anyone is telling you what is happening in your home. It is a mechanical problem. Where one person is controlling the other, communication skills hand that person a better script, and anything you say honestly in a shared exercise can be repaid afterwards, at home, where nobody is watching. That is not a small risk. It is the reason clinicians screen every couple before any joint work, and the paper that rule comes from is printed with this step rather than saved for the end of the course.

There is another course for that, called When home is not safe. It is recognition and routing, it teaches no technique, and it will not tell you to leave. Go there instead, and come back to this one another time if it turns out to be the right one.

What the research says

The same argument for screening every couple for violence before any joint work, on two grounds: it does not reliably come up when a couple are seen together, and joint work can make things more dangerous. That is why this course asks before it starts.

This is where the gate at the front of this course comes from. The authors argue for screening every couple for violence before any joint work, on two grounds. It does not reliably come up when a couple are asked together at a first appointment, because the person at risk has good reasons not to say it in that room. And joint work is not safe where one partner is controlling the other, because the skills taught are available to both people and are more useful to the one already in control.

Bograd M, Mederos F (1999). Battering and couples therapy: universal screening and selection of treatment modality. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 25(3), 291 to 312 doi

What is actually going wrong · Inshirah