32. How I run my couples therapy practice in Roseville, California.

I recorded this interview at Salem Media in Sacramento.

Matt: On today's show, we have James Christensen with Roseville Couples Counseling. He provides therapy for couples—husbands and wives, marriage counseling.1 So James, thanks for being on today. It seems like our society is in a crisis when it comes to marriage. It just doesn't seem like it's a priority anymore, and more marriages than ever have been failing. That's not just amongst non-Christians; that's amongst Christians as well. What's going on? What are you seeing in your counseling sessions as the issues causing marriage not to work out these days.

James: I think marriage has always been really hard. Today, people just know that there are other options, so they quit. Maybe a few hundred years ago, that wasn't as much of an option as it is now.

Matt: What are those options that you're referring to?

James: Well, people get divorced, or they do what I call "quiet quitting," where they don't really participate in the marriage, but they don't really leave either. They leave without leaving, I guess is another way of saying it.

Matt: So they are just kind of coasting through their marriage?

James: Yeah, checking out, not participating. The way marriage works—I've been married for a long time—is if you focus on it, if it's your primary focus and the most important thing in your life, then you can make it work.

Matt: Does it need to be a priority? Is it something that couples should be working on, or is marriage kind of like this old tradition that's not really necessary anymore?

James: No, I think it's the most important thing in life. It's the foundation of the family, which is then the foundation of society. When the marriage falls apart, everything else falls apart.

Matt: Why is it that more and more younger people are waiting longer to get married or don't see it as something they need to have in their life?

James: I think we're scared. We look at our parents and our grandparents and think, "Wait a second, marriage was really hard for them." People think if they wait longer, it's going to work better. I'm not sure that's necessarily true. I got married when I was 25, and if I'd waited until I was 30, maybe it would've been a bit better, but I'm not sure that waiting is better.

Matt: We've heard from folks like Charlie Kirk who have said that it's important to get married young and have more kids than you can afford. Do you think that rings true? Is it better to get married younger or older? What are the benefits of getting married younger that you lose out on as you age?

James: I don't know that I have an opinion on what age you get married. I do think he's right that getting married and having kids is one of the best things in life, and people do a lot less of that these days. Sometimes, a young couple in their twenties with a couple of kids will come into my office, and it makes my day. I'm just glad that people still do that because, as you were saying, it's becoming less common. I think it's a great thing to do. I had kids in my twenties and don't regret it at all.

Matt: Let's talk about Roseville Couples Counseling. Tell us about the kind of services you provide.

James: All I do is couples counseling. It's my passion in life. The reason I'm passionate about it is that it's what saved me. I have a history of a lot of psychological problems—narcissism, psychological immaturity—and what saved me wasn't individual therapy; it was couples therapy. There's some power in couples therapy that doesn't exist in individual therapy. So when I'm talking to someone who has some pretty severe problems to work through, I ask, "Do you have a partner, and is your partner willing to come with you?" The worst of me comes out in my marriage, and if I can bring my marriage into the therapy office, then we can deal with that.

Matt: We hear from a lot of spouses that the opposite is true—that when they're in counseling sessions, nobody agrees on anything. How do you get couples to a point where they're actually being productive and not just arguing and disagreeing, with the woman blaming everything on the husband and the husband just shutting down and saying, "This is stupid. I told you I didn't want to come here in the first place"?

James: It is a whole thing. I've devoted my life to learning how to do exactly what you're talking about. It's quite difficult. I start by saying the way you're treating each other is unjustified; there is no excuse for it. Everybody comes in saying, "Well, I'm only doing it because she did this," or "because he did that." We're making these excuses. But if I go home today and treat my wife poorly, I'm sorry, but there's no excuse for that. It starts with, "This is not justified. It needs to stop." You are the one who's responsible for your behavior; your partner is not responsible. Most couples come in starting from the place that they're not responsible for what they're doing. So we start from the idea that, no, you're responsible for what you do, and they're responsible for what they do. That's the first step.

Matt: Do you see a lot of selfishness within partners? Do you have to figure out how to overcome that and teach them that to be successful in a relationship, especially marriage, you have to overcome the idea that it's all about you and that you're there to serve the other person?

James: The way I look at it is that the human brain isn't natively capable of marriage. We need to upgrade our brains. It's like my friends who run hundred-mile races. If I really wanted to do that, I probably could if I was willing to put in thousands of hours a year of training. Marriage is kind of like that. When I got married, I was honestly not capable of being a good husband, not even remotely. Now I am. That's something I deliberately learned how to do. I didn't know how to care about my wife, how to be courageous and kind, or how to communicate in any reasonable way. I had to face the fact that I am not capable of being a good husband, and if I want a good marriage, I'm going to have to change that.

Matt: For wives listening right now who say, "I'm willing to go to counseling, but my husband is not. He just doesn't seem interested in making this relationship successful," but she doesn't want to quit or say the word divorce—what do you advise her to do?

James: It's a tough situation. Sometimes I tell people that you each have 80% of the power in your marriage. If I go home today and treat my wife really well, then she is living in an environment that makes it easier for her to treat me well. And treating her well isn't coddling or pretending. If there's something she's doing that I think I should talk to her about, I will, but I'm not going to be mean about it. That's the difference. If I need to talk to my wife about something she's not going to want to hear, do I care about her enough in that moment to make it easier for her to hear what I'm saying? That's the key.

So if I were in a situation where my wife didn't want to go to therapy with me, that would be really hard. But I still have the power to make the relationship better on my own. It's basically always 50/50. Each partner carries about 50% of the responsibility for the problems. If I deal with my side, it makes it a lot easier for my wife to deal with hers.

Matt: Tell us about your counseling sessions. How do they work for people who have never been to marriage counseling? Can you paint them a picture of what that looks like when they reach out to you?

James: I offer my first session for free because I want everyone to try it out. It's a 50-minute session. Most of the people I work with have never been to therapy before. You just come in, and I get to work right in the first session. We start talking about relationship dynamics immediately. There's no filling out forms, no assessment, and I don't meet with people individually. We start by talking about the biggest problem in your relationship right now. I usually ask, "What do you want to change about your relationship?" People usually say they want to improve communication, which is interesting because communication is usually not the problem. It's usually a behavior problem. The problem is we're being mean to each other, but it feels like a communication problem because you start being mean when you're trying to communicate.

Matt: So what are you hoping to achieve in that first session? Obviously, the marriage isn't going to be fixed right away.

James: What I hope to achieve is that each of them resolves a blind spot of some kind. I want them each to walk out the door knowing something about themselves they did not previously know. Blind spots cause a ton of problems in marriage. What usually happens is we grow up in a home where our parents did certain things, and we end up doing those same things without knowing it. If I can point out in the moment, "The way you just talked about your wife was full of condescension and dismissiveness, and that's going to be really hard for her to be on the other side of," that person might see something about themselves they weren't aware of. That's key. If I can learn something about myself, I might see it in a way that makes me say, "I actually don't want to be that way anymore."

Matt: So they walk away from that first session trying to be a little more observant and aware. Where do you take them from there?

James: I usually ask couples to come in for four weeks in a row, and after that, it's every other week or every month as we get into more difficult pieces that take longer to work on. It's always about personal power and personal responsibility. Couples often come in feeling hurt, stuck, and powerless. I'm going to talk to you about one thing you can do right now that will have a positive impact on your relationship, and I'm going to take away your excuses. You're not going to get to say it's your wife's fault or your husband's fault. No, this is on you. This is what you can do.

With women in particular, I'll often ask, "Are you physically safe in this relationship?" The answer is almost always yes. I'll follow that up with, "If you are physically safe, then there's room for you to be really courageous and start saying more of what you really think." There are obvious dynamics between men and women where women sometimes have a tendency to not speak up until they're already angry. If I'm already angry, my message is going to have trouble getting across.

Matt: Why does it take a counselor like yourself? What are you providing that they can't accomplish by just talking to each other?

James: The problem is when we talk to each other, what's usually happening is I feel really bad, and I'm going to talk to you as if it was your fault. If I came to you and said, "Matt, I'm kind of nervous right now, and it's your fault," that's not true. I'm nervous because I've literally never been on a radio show before. It makes sense that I'm nervous, but it's not fair for me to blame that on you. We do that in marriage all the time. I have an anxious attachment pattern, so I have this deep fear of abandonment inside me that's been with me forever, and my instinct is to blame that on my wife. One night, my wife was working late and stopped by Target on the way home. I had an abandonment panic because she stopped at Target. It's not fair for me to blame that on her. But in the moment, it sure feels like it's Target's fault. I need to grow up enough to say, "Okay, my feelings are my responsibility, and the way I treat my wife is also my responsibility."

Matt: So if someone has had those issues for a long time, it's like a natural reaction. How do you help them overcome something that has been with them for 20, 30, or 40 years?

James: The pathway is often getting used to feeling the thing you don't want to feel. When I have that abandonment panic, it feels really bad, and I want to make it go away. It's like eating a jalapeno; my tongue starts burning, and it feels like something's going really wrong. If I put my hand on a hot stove, my hand burns, and I need to do something because there will be tissue damage. But with a jalapeno, the best thing to do is ask, "Is there actually damage occurring right now?" It feels bad, but how bad is it?

That's what I need to do when I have that abandonment panic. I need to say, "Okay, my wife's at Target. I wanted her to come straight home, and I feel like I'm going to die." That's a bit of an exaggeration, but only just. What I need to do is say, "This feels really bad. Is there actually damage occurring to me? Am I going to be okay?" I need to honestly ask myself that question and honor that feeling. If I just say, "This feeling is stupid," it's just going to get louder. If I say, "Okay, this is a real feeling. I really do feel bad in this moment, but is there actual harm?" then I can learn to just sit with my feeling instead of acting on it. When those unpleasant feelings drive our behavior, we end up doing all sorts of bad stuff.

Matt: What about people who say, "We don't need a counselor. We've been married for 45 years. There ain't nothing James is gonna tell us that we don't already know"?

James: I call that a "marriage tune-up." If your marriage is good enough, come make it better. My marriage was really hard for the first 20-something years, and it took us a long time to find a therapist who was able to help us. Now it's a lot better, and we're still working on it. I do know couples whose marriage is good enough. What I say is, "Would you like to fly first class in your marriage, or would you like to stay in coach?" To be honest, most marriages are not that great. Most marriages are two people kind of tolerating each other for a long time. Then there are some couples where they actually love and appreciate each other and really do make each other happy. But that's not that common. I would love to help you get to that first-class marriage.

Matt: How do you know if you need counseling? You're saying everyone could benefit, but what if something is more severely wrong and you're not aware of it? Are there any signs that a husband or wife could notice?

James: One sign is if you're avoiding conflict. You think, "I should talk to my wife about this, but I'm afraid to." If there's a lot of arguing going on, or if your sexual relationship isn't doing very well, that's a concern. Whether you need counseling really depends on what kind of marriage you want to have. A lot of couples come to see me after infidelity or some sort of obvious break in the marriage dynamic, but we're better off if we start before that happens.

Matt: What's the impact of kids on a marriage? I have three kids, and I know they are my joy, my mission, and my passion, but they can also provide stress in a relationship because the husband and wife focus so much on the kids that they don't spend enough time with each other.

James: I have four kids, and yeah, they're a lot of work, but they're my pride and joy too. The way I see children is that the most powerful gift you can give them is to have a better marriage. Your kids are growing up and trying to learn how to love and care about someone. They're looking to you for that example. You provide that example in how you love and care about them, but also in how you love and care about your spouse. That's not something that comes naturally to most of us unless you happened to grow up in a family where that was really modeled for you, which isn't most families. That's a path we have to walk on our own. It's quite difficult. Most of us want to leave some sort of financial wealth to our children, but I think it's even more important to leave emotional wealth to my children. I would love to leave my children with the ability to build and create happy marriages and families of their own.

Matt: For the husbands listening who are reluctant to come to counseling because they think, "You're gonna sit me in this chair, she's just going to complain about everything I'm doing wrong, you're gonna take her side, and you guys are gonna beat me up"—can you reassure them that's not the case?

James: Sometimes it is. Here's how this works: my focus in the first session, if neither person is being disruptive, is going to be pretty equal. But about 30% of the time, one person is going to be pretty disruptive to the process. If they're actively insulting their partner in the session, I have to deal with that. So it does happen where one person feels like they're getting picked on. I try to balance that out by saying, "I care about you a lot," but sometimes things are happening in the session that are so bad that if I don't deal with them in that moment, I'm colluding in the problem. As far as me taking the wife's side, I think I'm pretty fair. In the end, I really do believe that marriages are equal, where we each contribute half of the problem. It's just that sometimes some problems are taking up so much space in the room that I have to deal with them first.

Matt: Real quickly, explain how you got into doing this.

James: I actually spent 25 years in the Air Force as a pilot. So this is a bit of a career shift. I got into this because my wife and I had a really tough time being married. We did not want to get divorced; we were very opposed to it. We had four children and a dream of a happy marriage. After my first military deployment, we went to counseling, but it wasn't very helpful. We spent years with different therapists, and nothing was changing. Then we found a therapist who was so different—much more powerful and direct. She took me on. She really laid into me and said, "James, you are treating your wife poorly every day, and it has to stop." She saved me from myself in that moment. I became a therapist because marriage therapy is what saved me individually and what saved my family. It's a passion of mine.

Matt: Is there anything you want folks listening to know about Roseville Couples Counseling? Do you have a website?

James: Yeah, if you just Google "couples therapy Roseville," I'm right there.

Matt: And anything else you want to tell us about?

James: My first session's free. Come in and give it a try. If it doesn't fit, it doesn't fit. I actually have three or four brand new couples coming in today, which I'm super stoked for. My favorite part of the job is meeting a couple who is courageous enough to take the step and come in and say, "Let's see if we can do something about this."

Matt: I love that. James Christensen, thanks for your time today. Appreciate it. Roseville Couples Counseling—check them out.