华尔街英语中级Lesson 46

6. -What do you think are the most important elements of a happy relationship?
-I know now that the most important element is being able to listen to your partner and actually having time for your partner. It’s communication, communication skills all the time. The most important. So what are the commonest problems that people bring to you? Is it an inability to communicate?

7. -Yes, It comes in all sorts of guises. It can be sex or it can be, um, his mother’s, with a house, or it can be the children. But the reality, the problem is that they are not able to talk about what the problem is. So the skill is actually often not to look at what they’re bringing you, but try to look at the behavior that’s going on and actually get them to start to see what each are doing that blocks the understanding. Because if you have been brought up in a family that doesn’t ever talk about things and then you hit a problem that really needs talking about, your reaction is not to talk about it, because that’s how you were taught to behave. So, what I’m always trying to do with clients is introduce new behaviors to them in a safe way, in a safe environment that they can experiment with, and hopefully then go out of here and practice on outside.
-You say that clients often turn up with one problem disguising what the real problem is. Do they do that on purpose because they find it difficult to talk about the real problem?

8. - It's a mixture of both. I mean they might believe that what they’re bringing is the real problem. You know, if they are saying “sexually things aren’t too good for us”, that for them is the real problem. But if you can Then get the understanding that if they could talk about what’s going on in the bedroom that perhaps he doesn’t bath often enough and, therefore, she doesn’t like to go to bed with somebody who’s a  bit smelly and she doesn’t like to say it. So if you can actually get them to communicate, then the learning can be how you could improve all aspects of your relationship by being able to talk about it. So I never minimize what is being brought.  What they bring initially is, for them, often the real issue.