The Secret Task that Improves LGBT Relationships… FAST!

One Task that Improves a Relationship

I’m going to discuss with you an important part of systemic couple counselling and how this knowledge may be used to create one simple task that will dramatically improve a couple’s relationship.

I’ll even reveal the secret task later on, taking you step-by-step through the straightforward process.

Systems in Couple Relationships

In systemic couples counselling, the term “system” refers to the couple’s relationship, specifically how the partners respond to one another in their responses and behaviours.

An Example:

• Partner A asks: “did you buy milk on the way home”.
• Partner B responds: “You didn’t ask me to!?!”.
• Partner A responds: “I thought it would have been obvious, so why didn’t you?”
• Partner B responds: “How many times have I asked you to tell me…”

Do you see an argument building in this interaction yet?

This is a system in which each response is based on the previous one, and the couple has locked themselves into an escalating argument.

Couples regularly come to counselling because their relationship has been going wrong (possibly for some time). Systemic counselling focusses on how partners behave with each other in their relationships.

Systems are not limited to couples (monogamous, polyamorous, open, etc.), either. Systemic counselling can be helpful to a polyamorous group, a set of friends, a family, even an orchestra, and many more combinations!

What we can learn from Systems

The systemic therapy model can help partners recognise poor, bad, or violent patterns of behaviour and introduce changes that disrupt bad events. Partners discover how they might perturb a system together. When this is being discovered in, say, couple counselling, the partners grow to become independent of the counsellor’s ability to recognise and teach them (by, say, circular questioning) what’s happening in their relationship systems.

A systemic counsellor works by being curious about how the relationship’s system works (what goes wrong, what works well, why the differences, etc.), and the counsellor’s skills lie in their independent curiosity (they can ask about matters the couple might be turning a blind eye to).

What partners can learn from a System

With curiosity comes some discoveries: we gain new information. With new information comes the opportunity for partners to make new behavioural choices; they can change how they respond.

The couple benefits from learning that it’s not the person that’s the problem; it’s the problem that’s the problem.

When you look at things through a systems lens, the aim is to stop treating either partner as “the issue” and instead look at the pattern you’ve both been pulled into. A couple can get stuck in loops (misunderstandings, habits, reactions) that feel personal, but the loop itself is the thing causing the trouble. When you perceive the issue as distinct from the two of you, you can unite and approach it collaboratively. That shift lowers defensiveness and makes room for practical change, because the goal becomes adjusting the pattern rather than blaming the person. It turns the relationship into a joint problem-solving team rather than a courtroom.

The couple counsellor helps the couple see that their differences can enrich their relationship, not that they need to be as similar as possible.

Systems can Halt an Argument

Counselling can help a couple identify when an argument (or other unsatisfactory behaviour in the relationship) is beginning.

Interrupting behaviour earlier is far easier than disrupting it later.

It is much easier to change the course of an argument when the argument is in its early stages – something either partner can step into to alter: the course of an argument.

How Systems Ideas Help LGBTQ+ Relationships

So you’re learning that a relationship can be viewed as a system; a system that you and your partner(s) have created over time and that responds to various needs and circumstances.

When a couple gets together, we hope that our relationship will grow happily and that the two of you will work together to solve problems as they arise. But sometimes the relationship – the system – develops faults or brings in flaws from other places (such as our past experiences) that can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to fix.

This is where a therapeutic systemic approach can be helpful to a marriage in trouble.

A systemic model of therapy is an effective way for us to learn about where the system (the marriage) is going wrong, what’s contributing to the faults and inability to apply solutions, and what’s giving the marriage the power to identify behavioural changes (changes to their system) that they might make together.

An Example of a “System”

Let’s compare two systems: your washing machine and your relationship

(trust me on this…)

How is this helpful?

Each event  is (or has become) dependent upon the previous event (are you noticing the similarities between these two seemingly helpless systems?)

Of course, your relationship is not a washing machine, and in Systemic Couple Counselling we can help you and your partner make changes to your “human systems”,  aka your most intimate and important of all relationships.

Relationship Counselling (using systems)

Now that you’re familiar with systems and a systematic approach to tackling one problem, you might find that relationship counselling with a systemic counsellor could be useful.

A systemic approach to counselling aims to assist the couple in developing their ability to recognise things going wrong, to put in place behaviours that quickly stop matters going wrong when they’re recognised, and to support both partners in using their inspiration to change the poor direction of their relationship.

Integrating Systemic Therapy with Psychodynamic Therapy (as does Dean Richardson MNCPS (Accred/Reg) from LGBTCoupleCounselling.co.uk) combines two powerful therapeutic approaches: improving your current relationship and improving issues from the past that one or both partners are bringing into the relationship. 

Learning to Mitigate the Relationship going Wrong

In counselling, we will turn our attention to inspired learning about what can be done to improve the marriage’s behaviour. We’ll rely on the marriage partners’ own ingenuity, inspiration, and ability to hypothesise (i.e. thinking about what might be going on or what might be hidden feelings that may be masked by behaviour).

We’ll talk about how to stop a situation before it turns into an argument or physical abuse.

We’ll help the couple set up measures and stop-gaps that help them to stop or alter their direction when things start to go wrong.

Ending Counselling

By the end of counselling, the relationship (the couple or group) will be able to manage their behaviour more effectively themselves, without the need to consult a counsellor any further.

A couple does not have to wait until all their problems have been erased by counselling in order to leave. After couples leave, relationship problems still come up, but the couple are now able to deal with them better than they did before. They no longer have to talk things over with a counsellor.

An advantage of this therapeutic approach is that the couple has learnt to manage new/unknown problems as they arise.

We haven’t simply taught them instructions: “When this happens, do that!”

We’ve helped them learn about their relationship system so that they have the ability to manage future relationship problems as effectively as existing ones.