Making Assumptions in Your Relationship
How Group Therapy Helps You Work on Contempt in your Relationship
If you come to me for marriage counseling, counterintuitively most of our work together will be individual and in group therapy. You can help your relationship the most by practicing certain skills without being in the presence of your partner. One of these is working on contempt.
You’ve probably heard that when you assume, you make an ass out of “u” and “me.”
The problem is, it’s impossible not to assume. We are all making assumptions constantly. All we can hope for is to be a little more aware when it happens.
In group therapy, Jenny says to David, “I can just tell that you’re against Black Lives Matter, and I have a lot of feelings about that.”
She continues sharing her reactions and other members join the conversation. David is silent.
Eventually, he pipes up.
“You know,” he says, “you’re making a lot of assumptions about me and I’m mad about it!”
“Why didn’t you tell me right away?” Jenny asks.
“I preferred to withdraw, silently hate everyone and see if anyone noticed.”
Jenny smiles. She can relate to this sentiment and is attracted to the honesty of it.
What David is talking about is what John and Julie Gottman would refer to as contempt. The Gottmans are the authors of the Gottman Method of couples therapy and a tremendous amount of research on what makes relationships fail or succeed. Contempt is one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” for relationships.
In Pragmatic Experiential Therapy for Couples (PET-C), Brent Atkinson distills from the Gottman’s research the key habits of relationship success. Becoming aware of one’s own contempt is a huge first step to realizing the fundamental truth that in almost every case, both partners contribute equally to the destruction of the relationship.
When David withdraws instead of confronting Jenny for her assumptions, he is holding her in contempt. She shouldn’t make assumptions in the first place and if she does, she should notice his withdrawal and make the repair. If she doesn’t, well that just proves that she’s insensitive, selfish, and so on.
It’s a testament to David’s work in group therapy and on his relationship patterns that he can notice what he’s doing. Usually withdrawing like this keeps the anger and contempt that we’re feeling out of our awareness. We think we’re being polite, respectful, taking the high road, when in reality we’re responding to being hurt with a vicious passive aggressive rebuke.