timid exclusive: HELPING COUPLES REUNITE ? The Register

Posted by The Hand on April 3, 2012 in Relationships |

As relationship counselor Tony Cubito puts it, ?When you ask people what they want most, they usually say health, prosperity and a good relationship.

?They never say, health, prosperity and several relationships.?

Nonetheless, that?s where many people end up, and Cubito has devoted much of his professional career to helping couples on the brink of splitting up put their relationships back together.

Decades of listening to the troubles of twosomes led the Eugene counselor to conclude that many relationships fall apart because one or both people come into it having been hurt in some way by a previous relationship, which makes them fearful of being open and honest in a new one, for fear of failure.

?So when they get together, they want to be open and close, but they also have a fear of being open and close,? Cubito said. ?They have both desire and fear at the same time, and fear tends to be stronger.

?They end up cocreating a pattern of communication that distances themselves from each other. Many, many couples come in saying, ?We?re just not close any more,? but when you ask them how that happened, they just say, ?I don?t know.???

Cubito?s workbook, ?Couple?s Journey,? offers a blueprint for people to identify the way they interact and try to recapture the hopefulness and happiness they had . He also periodically offers group sessions to help couples evaluate their communication skills, as he will this week in Eugene.

Cubito, 70, developed the curriculum with his wife, Cristi Cubito, also a trained counselor, who died of late-stage colon cancer 16 months ago at age 50.

?We had both been divorced when we met in 1988 at the Zenon restaurant, where she was working as a waitress, although she had finished a master?s degree in counseling,? he said. ?Both of us had come from dysfunctional families, and there was a lot of significance for us in creating a good primary relationship, to make it functional and healthy.?

Through separate and joint practices, the Cubitos developed the concept that instead of communicating with each other adult to adult, many couples over time instead develop parent-child or parent-parent speech patterns. And that?s part of what leads to emotional distance between them.

?We all have parent, adult and child components in our makeup, but how we use them with other people has great importance,? Cubito said. ?A parent-parent type of communication is often blaming ? you did this, you shouldn?t do that ? very accusatory and critical. Parent-child communication is more when one person does all the talking and the other withdraws and does not participate.?

The issues that underlie the communication problem may be any one of the big three ? money, sex or family ? ?but fear can latch onto any issue. People begin to argue and not resolve their differences, and as time goes on develop more and more hurt, resentment and ill will. By the time some people come in for help, they can barely look at each other.?

When couples do seek help, ?I tell them: One, you need to understand your are distancing yourselves because of hurt; and two, the way you?re doing it is a way of communication that you have cocreated between you.?

Beyond that, Cubito encourages battling couples to ?have a little compassion? for themselves. ?I tell them, you are here, so you have a strong drive to be a couple. It?s the ones who break up because they have ?irreconcilable differences? and then just go on to the next relationship, and repeat the pattern, who have the real problem.?

Learning how to communicate adult-to-adult makes all the difference in the way couples relate to each other and come to feel about each other, Cubito said, and his belief is reflected by many of his clients.

Chad Wiest said he heard about Cubito?s counseling method through a friend.

?My wife and I had been having the same revolving argument, and history kept repeating itself ? we couldn?t seem to solve the problem. But Tony helped us go back into the past to see where our communication habits had come from, to become aware of how we were really interacting with each other. It?s been over a year now since we last saw him, but everything is much smoother ? we?re in a real nice place with each other.?

After a 10-year relationship, 3? of it married, they had been on the verge of disaster, Wiest admitted. ?We had become so frustrated with each other; we had devolved into a really poor relationship. But it wasn?t what we wanted; underneath it all, we loved each other.?

Others were equally enthusiastic but more shy about exposing their past troubles by sharing their full names. A woman named Brandy said that after 16 years ?of lots of screaming and fighting,? she and her husband already have improved their communications after just two sessions with Cubito.

?He?s taught us quite a bit ? it?s amazing how much easier it is to talk to each other already. Part of what he has shown us is active listening and responding in a way that doesn?t hurt the other person but lets him know that you heard what he said.

?Now, I don?t feel so alone any more; 16 years would be a lot to throw away, especially with three kids. And the way we treat each other trickles down to them, too.?

In fact, everyone in the family is benefitting from improved communication, Brandy said.

?We have a rule about not chewing gum in the house, because it gets on things, and one day one of the kids was chewing gum. Instead of getting angry, my husband said, ?I feel disrespected when you chew gum in the house,? and she just took it out and threw it away.

?We want this to work; that?s the key. And I think it is working.?

Cubito agrees that peppering couples? conversations with ?I feel? statements ? both positive and negative ? is a critical way to improve communication.

?When you calmly tell another person how you feel about something in the relationship and why, it makes sure you stay in adult-to-adult mode,? he said. ?That was one of the things that Cristi and I learned to do with each other, and it?s borne out in studies.

?In one case, of 1,175 couples who had been married at least 30 years, 90 percent said they had a good marriage because they could talk together. So what I say is that communication determines the quality of a relationship.?

Sometimes clients meet with Cubito as few as six to eight times, sometimes as long as two years, he said, depending on their personalities and their needs as a couple. ?But one thing that has surprised me in recent years is how often men make the call to seek counseling instead of the women.?

Maybe it?s because there?s more equality in male-female roles now, and men feel more comfortable initiating relationship discussions, Cubito said. Whatever the reason, ?As a man, I think it?s great to have men calling and wanting to work through relationship issues. I think this is much for the better.?

That?s how it happened for Brandy .

?We were talking about what we could do about our problems and he said, ?Will anything work?? and I said, ?I don?t know,?? she recalled.

?He said, ?What about counseling?? And I said, ?If you schedule it, I will go.? And he did, and it has turned out well.?

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