Need Management Therapy (NMT)

Chapter two doggedly takes on the very dismal subject of relationship failure with its tragic wake of regretable sequelea. We’ll brandish the heart-wrenching statistics of divorce, and the perils of remarriage. Next, we’ll cover the conventional explanations and theories of couple failure which have been invaluable in guiding NMTs thinking. This review will serve as a prelude to our discussion of NMTs own theory of relationship failure and success. We’ll then shift gears to overview the early pioneering theories of love including, Sternberg’s Triangular Theory of Love, and Bowlby’s Attachment theory. We’ll compare and contrast these earlier theories with NMT’s. Lastly, as was done to finalize chapter one, we’ll conclude this chapter with an applied personal exercise targeting how relationships fail and succeed.

THE CRISIS IN COUPLE RELATIONSHIPS

The love and Intimacy challenge (is it sustainable?)
Without question, the intimate relationship is difficult, challenging, and complicated, therefore, not surprisingly, it often fails. And when it does, it devastates us, not only emotionally, but physically. Next to losing a partner to death, divorce and separation rank number two on the top ten list of stressors (Holms and Rahe, 1967). Let’s briefly trudge through the very sobering statistics on divorce: One marriage dies every 3 seconds! In the aggregate, the failure rate is roughly 48% for first marriages (National Center for Health Statistics, 2004). And despite its rising popularity, cohabitation is not an answer, or an escape; couples who live together fail at a slightly higher rate (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2012). Nor do these statistics suggest that couples who survive, the undivorced or, unseparated, bask in a haven of blissful togetherness, enjoying flourishing relationships. No doubt an inestimable number of marriages hang by a thread, fragilly fastened together for questionable reasons related to social, family, or religious pressures, or to retain a necessary but rocky instability out of fear, or for economic necessity, or for the sake of the children, etc. This is bad news and it gets worse.

A Statistical Nightmare
At its statistical best, the marriage, or cohabitation survival rate is roughly a coin flip. The cure rate for many forms of cancer is higher! Alarmingly, couples who marry for the second and third time, divorce at stratospheric levels!; 60% for second marriages, and 70% for the third round of nuptials (Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy, 2012). Famed English writer, Samuel Johnson, quipped, “Remarriage is the triumph of hope over experience!” Further, most distressed couples rarley seek therapy, and regretably, when they do it is often too late. Sadly, the news gets darker.
Ironically, and embarrassingly, marriage counselors divorce at, or around the national average, and according to some studies at an even higher rate than the average (Deutsch, 1984, McCoy, and Asmodt, 2010, Klag, 1997)! Think of it, those professionals charged with the sacrosanct duty of protecting the vitality and health of our relationships, divorce at the same rate! And to pile irony atop irony, a significant number of them don’t seek treatment! (Deutsch, 1984). We believe these bewildering statistics reflect the inherent difficulties of the intimate relationship, as well as the need for new, integrative, and improved couple’s treatment models (Murstein, Mink, 2004). (Just a quick aside: Consider that every intimate relationship you have ever been a part of, except the one you may be a part of now, has failed, otherwise you would still be in it.) All relationships end by one means or another; you break-up, your partner dies, or you die. Despite this mirthless fact, Alfred Lord Tennyson insightfully encouraged us, “Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all,” which is the choice the overwhelming majority of us make!

The NMT Point Of View (Our Best Thinking)
Like you, we are appalled by these high soaring divorce statistics. And we confess, the authors themselves were statistical victims. Frankly, a noteworthy chunk of our motivation for developing a new couple’s treatment model is based upon our own personal suffering. Remember Friedrich Nietzsche’s epigram, quoted so often it has morphed into a cliche: “Whatever doesn’t kill you simply makes you better.” Well, here’s “our better,” the NMT treatment model, the “sublimation” of our conjoint divorce pain!
We would like to help others avoid the pain of separation and divorce, especially in cases where children are involved. By creating a model that is an effective, short term, and easily applicable/teachable treatment for couples, we hope to help reduce this suffering. As you now know, we’ve named the approach, Need Management Therapy, and we offer it as an alternative to current treatment choices, or, to the risky gamble of a mere rolling of dice, the 50% chance of taking the slippery slope to separation and divorce.
With this said, we are pleased to introduce our new treatment model! It comes neatly packaged with our equally new theory of love, both of which are firmly planted in the cognitive behavioral school of thought (CBT). Couched within CBT’s supporting purview, NMT has developed as a CBT derivitive, its own practical, easily learned and applied approach that can untangle couples twisted in stress and crisis, and it can also be effectively deployed to improve relationships regardless of their level of affliction, or their purported health. We confidently propose that the NMT treatment approach offers hope as an aspiring antidote for the crushing divorce statistics and their disastrous aftereffects. There is reason to be hopeful!