Brandon Gimbel (00:00)

I’ve recommended that a number of my patients do couples therapy. I have heard more times than I can count. "No, we've done that before, it just didn't work." I imagine you hear that too.

Jason Price (00:09)

All the time. Yes. One of the things that I do a lot of is just as an exercise, is I ask couples to take five minutes before bed and just each person kind of say to the other person: "here's what I tried to do today for our relationship. Was it helpful?" And it does a couple of things. They get to show the other person that I've been thinking about our relationship and what I've wanted to do. And it gives the other person a chance to give them clarity. Like, "yeah, I noticed that. That was nice. But I'd actually like this instead." Or "Actually, I didn't see that, but now that you bring it up, that's really great. That was thoughtful. I'm sorry I missed that." As opposed to what most couples do is they go after the other person about what they're not doing right. And so I really try and change that dynamic. And what couples hear me say a lot in that first session is you're going to hear me talk a lot about the piece that each of you are responsible for.

Brandon Gimbel (00:58)

It gives them a sense of agency.

Jason Price (01:00)

Yeah, it has to. And it takes the other person off the defense. So much of what happens in relationships is if we're on the defensive because we feel not good enough or criticized, we shut down or we to give people a chance to say, "I'm going to focus on me and what I can do to better our relationship" and have two people contributing in that, makes a makes a big, big difference.