Ever since I started helping couples out of crises, I was looking for an answer to the question why relationships go wrong, why some couples create loving relationships and other couples can only create hostile relations.
I looked for the answer in the different history the two bring along, in the different character motivating them, the different expectations driving them, since it was obvious to me that effective couples’ therapy must relate exactly to those unique characteristics that distinguish each of them.
Yet the results were disappointing because we couldn’t rewrite their history or change their expectations or change their character. I realized I had to search for another source. But what am I searching for? Where should I search?
Then came to me young and successful man and woman, who have two children, due to very bad communication that did not allow them to have the simplest conversation without arguing. While I was writing their basic details, something unexpected caught my attention: I noticed these two are the one thousand couple on the list of couples I treated.
I told them: “you are symbolizing a closure to me of a thousand couples”. They looked at me for a minute, as if trying to understand the meaning of that number, and then the woman remarked: “I was sure our lives are a unique phenomenon, but after a thousand couples sitting on these armchairs, I guess it is hard to innovate”.
That casual sentence enlightened me with a sudden realization: one thousand couples, each of them unique, without a doubt, but there must be something they all share, something very basic, that is bigger than any personal story. And suddenly it became clear to me what I was looking for: not their unique characteristics, but on the contrary –the characteristics they share with other couples. My search became focused and clear: what is the common factor that all happy couples have, that the unhappy couples lack.
As soon as I looked at the right direction I immediately noticed what it was: happy couples learn to focus on the other’s favor before thinking of their own favor, and unhappy couples focus each on his own favor before considering the other’s favor. If so, the key to couples’ success is found in the right balance: “You first, I second”. And the key to couples’ unhappiness is found in disrupted balance: “I first, you second”.
When each partner focuses on his personal favor first, they sooner or later find themselves in separate spaces, and from those two ends each of them fights for his needs and wishes, and none of them sees or hears his partner’s needs and wishes.
This is how my couples’ therapy program “For one another” program was born – from two separate spaces to one shared space.
This program is suitable for any couple in difficulties or crises, because there will always be an impaired balance of “Me first, you second”, and there will always be two people in separate spaces. Together, we build a bridge of new love, to move from the separate reality in which they are trapped, to the shared reality they will eventually reach at the end of the process.
This program brings couples to a shared space where you speak one language, striving for shared goals. The shared problems are solved without leaving casualties on the way, the frictions are stopped there before turning into an argument, and each partner takes care of the other’s happiness first.