Couples’ communication problems: The counselor's perspective

Abstract

Marital and relational counselors bring their normative ideas about couples’ communication to the therapeutic setting and these ideas become a part of the ongoing dialogue between counselors and their clients. Although many therapists emphasize couples’ communication problems as a source of relational difficulty, it is not clear how therapists conceive of, and explain, those problems. The current study addresses this issue by examining counselors’ perceptions of, and attributions for, couples’ communication problems. Interviews with 50 couples’ counselors suggest that communication problems are common among clients. The most frequently noted communication problems involved failing to take the other's perspective when listening, blaming the other for negative occurrences, and criticizing the other. Most of counselors’ attributions for couples’ communication problems referred to stable, unchanging causes and focused on external factors. A content analysis of the attributions further indicated that many counselors felt communication problems were the result of patterns taught to individuals by their family of origin. Finally, when asked to identify the most central problem for dissatisfied partners, only about one‐fourth of the counselors cited issues directly related to communication. The majority noted that communication was usually a manifestation of other, more fundamental, difficulties. Taken together, the findings indicate that counselors tend to focus on individual, rather than interpersonal and relational factors when conceiving and treating the cause of communication problems.