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How Are We Different?
Soon after I began Marriage Counseling 33 years ago, I realized that the common denominator in all my clients was that they were angry. Thus, we came to focus on anger and its consequences, and this is our first difference.
Not only were they angry, they had never learned how to identify, let alone manage, this emotion that nice people were not supposed to have in the first place. This lack of preparation for adult living took its toll on my clients' health, their relationships at home and at work, and most important, their relationship with themselves. These people had come to feel inferior, inadequate to cope, out of control, worthless and guilty of offenses they could not name, let alone remedy. We showed them these were all components of self-contempt, self-doubt and self-anger carried from the past to the present, where they do not belong. These qualities precluded a healthy, happy marital relationship.
Even more serious, they prevented a healthy relationship with oneself. That relationship is basic because, as we say, "Everywhere you go, there you are." This is another one of our differences: we use absurdity to help break the grip of these carryovers from the past.
We are also different in that we use the successful resolution of an anger problem as a means to a larger, more important end: replacing a lifetime of childhood self-doubt, inferiority, guilt and worthlessness with mature self-respect. We assign "Homework" for the clients to do at home and at work, homework that allows our clients to outgrow their old ways of moving through life. Homework is doing what reality requires in a situation, nothing more and nothing less.
We give assignments because we have found that the therapy takes place out there in the real world, not in our office. These assignments take courage, which is exactly what our discouraged clients did not have and did not know how to get. They learn what courage was, and that it comes after they do their Homework, not before. They are able to build on these accomplishments. In a short time, their Homework successes all run together, earning them the right to replace their lifelong self-doubt with mature, well-earned self-respect, which we define as the feeling that one is a worthwhile human being in spite of one's faults and imperfections. No one had ever told them that before. They found this new way of moving through life was very encouraging.
We replace years of self-doubt with self-respect, discouragement with encouragement, fear with courage, negative control with the positive kind, insecurity with security within oneself and negative control with positive control. When individuals feel in control of their situations and their lives, their depression and anxiety are replaced with feelings of security, confidence, competence, identity, responsibility, belonging, living in the present and all the other components of self-respect, which is the prerequisite for mutual respect at home and at work. It does not take twelve years on a couch. We do not have that kind of time.
-- Mitchell H. Messer
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| Stressed ? |
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Read the Managing Anger book
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| In MOTORMANIA, Mitch Messer takes you through the steps of coping with road rage. |
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