A famous counselor who has treated 2,000 couples talks about “the lesion of married couples.

According to Mr. Ando, marital problems are divided into three levels: communication, attitudes and values, and feelings.

The problem that tends to surface is the ‘communication’ problem. When there is a decrease in conversation or an increase in fights, or when people say things like, “I don’t like the way you say it,” or “I don’t like your attitude,” there is a high probability that there is a problem with “communication,” but when you look deeper into why the problem occurred, it is often due to differences in “ideas and values. However, when we dig deeper into why the problem occurred, it is often due to differences in “ways of thinking and values. For example, when we dig deeper into the background of “less conversation,” we find that there is a difference in values, and every time they try to reconcile their differences, they end up fighting, and because they don’t want to fight, they have fewer opportunities to talk.

However, it is natural for couples to have different values and ways of thinking, and that is why it is necessary for couples to come to terms with each other little by little when they live together. However, behind the inability to do so, there may be a latent feeling of “why do I have to do it all myself? If this is the case, then the problem is not only that they have different values, but that they cannot “forgive” their differences, and behind this may be a latent “emotional rift.

In many cases, what appears at first glance to be a problem of ideas or values is in fact a problem of emotional rifts, he says.

Rather, when we delve deeper into marital problems, we almost always end up with emotional issues,” he says. Especially in the case of couples who have been married for a long period of time, I believe that in many cases, what was initially a problem of miscommunication and lack of understanding of differences has over time created an ‘emotional rut.

According to Mr. Ando, emotions have no time axis. In other words, if something that happened today makes you angry because you remember something that happened 10 years ago, even if what happened today is a trivial matter, the feelings that have been rattling around for 10 years will become tied to it, and you will become very angry. So, what can we do to solve such emotional problems?

If today’s event is tied to a past event, the problem is that the “emotional rut” has not been resolved, so simply resolving the current problematic event may not change the situation. If you have an “emotional rut,” you need to first go back to the time when the rut was created and take care of the emotions that are there.

I said that emotions do not have a time axis, but the fact that they do not have a time axis also means that once the hurt feelings and swallowed thoughts are taken care of, they can be resolved, even if they happened many years ago. Then we can sometimes isolate it by saying, ‘Maybe this is just remembering feelings from 10 years ago and not feelings from today.'”

However, for “discordant” couples who do not communicate with each other and have no intention of doing so, even “improving” the relationship is difficult.