Why Therapists Get Divorced More Than the Rest of Us

Big thoughts, quick talk, flip facts, tick talk, level up your mind, every single line. This is a question that it's been nagging me. I've been thinking about it for a while, which is like, does doing all of this research, all of this podcasting on conflict actually matter for me in my practice. That is, that was one of the goals after all, is like, I would like to get better at conflict for my mediation practice and for my life. I would like to be excellent at this thing and is learning all of this helpful.

And then at the sort of thing, are therapists better at conflict, whatever quote unquote better at conflict, than non-therapist, similarly like are religious leaders, quote unquote like shepherds, stewards of the piece, are they more peaceful in like, do they have less conflict or more tranquility, more calm in their own personal lives, like let's, so this episode of anatomy of conflict, it's a deep dive, it's a microscopic turning toward this question of can we get better, do we get better at conflict as we age? More therapists, more skilled than non-therapists, and conversely like if you go to couples therapy, do you become better at couples conflict, and what is getting better actually mean?

So if you stay to the end, you will have the learnings, the answers, and I think you'll be surprised. I think you'll be surprised. If you're interested in, yeah, are couples therapists happier in their marriages, stay to the end, that's the question we're going to investigate, which is, what's the most, if you want to get better, and this is all in service of, if you want to get better, how do we do it? What's working and what's not working? Guys, my name is Ryan McLaughlin, this is anatomy of conflict podcast, thanks for being here. Before we even dive in, share with a friend, like and subscribe.

Now, what you know earlier from our podcast is that like and subscribe is something we hear over and over and over again, and because we hear it over and over and over again, your brain just zips right past, it's like you don't even hear it. So think about places in your own life where our brain as a predictive machine just zooms right past whatever we're saying and doesn't even catch it. It could be something you said to your kids, like put your shoes on the shoe rack, it could be something you said to your spouse, like, hey, how did you sleep the last night?

It could be something you tell yourself, like the things you're grateful for, but you're not even really hearing the thing, let's do your grateful for when you say what you're grateful for at night. What are some of the things like that for you guys? And for this podcast, like and subscribe, what I mean is go into the Spotify or Apple podcast app right now. And hit that, it is asked you for a rating, hit that rating button.

Okay. And what I mean by share is talk to someone about this right now in your own world, message someone right now. Pull up your phone and be like, I listened to this podcast today called Anatomy of podcast. You should listen to the episode on apologies on I feel statements on whether therapists are happier. And the reason you should do that is not only will it start a conversation with them and deepen that relationship with them, but it builds another neural pathway for you and makes this information that you're learning more relevant, more practical, deeper groups, more neural depth for you, which is a good thing. That's what we want.

Okay. Let's get into it. Let's start with a therapist because that's the juiciest one. Are therapists better at conflict or they happier in their marriages? What do you guys think? I would say like, I don't know. I was initially split. I initially thought, yes. But then I thought ironically, no, and I was like, how could it be no?

So the short answer is no. A therapist are not happier in their own relationship, the non therapist. Which I think is absurd and kind of funny, right? It's absurd and I sometimes think absurd things are funny. So that's why I think that's funny. It's likely the opposite, that they're significantly less happy. And let's go through why. Well, why would we think they are?

We would think that they are, and this is the implication for the podcast because they're learning all these skills, they're learning all the skills of how to communicate, of where people go, a foul, where people run a muck, where people trip up, where people are frustrated and they're learning their brains are adjusting and they're learning and they're optimizing it. They leave with all of this human concentrated doses of human wisdom. It's like they're in a gym all day, training the muscles of their mind. That was my hypothesis set.

The research though, found that amongst therapists, the divorce rate was an average of 12% higher than the average person, according to 2000 census, US census data, and they sorted by occupation. So what does this mean? It doesn't necessarily mean they're unhappy, it just means that they get, they report divorce rates at least 12% higher.

So let's get into the data if you guys want. The overall divorce rate was 16%, for the 2000 census, and therapists were at 24%, social workers were at 23%, counselors were at 23%, psychologists generally were at 19%, so everyone's higher, higher than the national average. Now again, does that mean, is that a proxy for unhappiness? It's a proxy, who knows what it's a proxy for, but it means they're getting divorced.

So it means that they're choosing to separate more than average. And they have survey data that echoes this, that divorced prevalence is higher among these professions. And they specifically note, and once they, that psychiatrists, who are physicians, have the highest divorce rates of any medical specialty.

Now obviously, this is just correlation data, right, and it's not randomized, it's not a controlled trial, this is just survey data, or what's the census data called? Yeah, survey data I think. And so the question is why, why are therapists, marriages definitely no better, perhaps worse. And from the studies, almost half of these therapists surveyed report some degree of burnout. They report bicarious trauma, they report exhaustion, emotional exhaustion, and the mechanism would be that this spills into their personal life. That they become anxious and irritable, that the burnout leaks out of the therapy office. That's one mechanism, right, it's just burnout, professional burnout.

The other mechanism is that maybe it's hard to turn off the therapist brain and that marriages and families, if you're a marriage and family therapist, marriages don't thrive when you're always under the microscope. If you're a therapist and you're always scrutinizing your relationship.

So that's that, if you're a therapist, it's not all, it's not that you will be married longer on average and happier married. In fact, the opposite is true, which is like, okay, let's bring it back to this podcast and learning all these things. I think it is a cautionary tale to avoid putting yourself under undue scrutiny all of the time. And I think it's also a way of saying like, maybe therapy is a toxic profession because you're just, there's lack of self-care, there's lack of boundaries, there's increased level of burnout.

Maybe it wouldn't be the case if the workload weren't so high, if people had appropriate, like off, like therapy for therapists, right, if that was sufficient because, and that hasn't, maybe that's a systemic problem. I don't think that, I think the therapists are gaining valuable knowledge and they are sort of in the gym training of their minds in this way, but maybe you just need to take better care.

Okay, then my question is even deeper about therapists, are they better communicators in their personal relationships, not the divorce rate, but within, like, do they carry the tools that they learn in therapy into the whole life? And I know from my own personal experience, this is very, very difficult.

It's very easy to be a hypocrite to learn all these things and then the second the kid comes in, like, I do a podcast on like emotional regulation and keeping things in the prefrontal cortex and not the amygdala and taking a physiological side to relax and doing bilateral tapping and then something happens, a kid comes into my office and takes something without asking if I freak out, right, like standard Ryan operating procedure.

So the long and short of it here is that there's no data to suggest that therapists are better communicators. There's no empirical studies, there's no reports, they say about that therapists perform about on average, but that, like, again, these factors we pointed to are important. They have high levels of burnout, they might have compassion fatigue, the sort of secondary or vicarious stress, that these all matter and that they ultimately worsen the alliance between them and their family and they ultimately worsen their alliance between, because it worsens the alliance between the therapists and the family, that out of therapy deterioration affects the therapist's client relationship as well.

So it's a really tricky, really, really tricky thing. Now what about all their training and skills and they went to college and grad school and they learned all these different techniques and modalities, all these different tools that they're going to pass on to their clients, they used them. One therapist says it well, which I think, you know, is where we are right now. Therapist says, I know that in my experience as a psychologist, I'm much more aware of others' issues and spend less time looking at my own, sort of the hazards of the trade.

So you're very, very good at issue spotting with other people, but you develop a blind spot to yourself. And that is the thing that I do not wish for myself and for listeners of the podcast. I don't want us to develop blind spots. I want everything to be self-benefitting and self-educating and actionable and revisionary, meaning we look to others for input.

So it's just a myth that, I think it's a myth that I had that therapist, they bring their A game to their therapy clients and then they bring that same A game home. It's much different. I'll be it with limited evidence. So that's therapists. Now I want to just look at old age and then in training. Like do you get better at conflict because you age because you have life experience because you have wisdom because you've got burned by the stove enough and now you're not known not to touch the stove or what is the impact of age and then I want to talk about training, like specific training. Like can you learn the skill, like get a graduate degree in complex studies and have that matter.

The core finding on age is that yes, people do get better at conflict. Older adults report fewer conflicts and then younger adults and they report less reactive, less negative emotions than younger adults. And the mechanism here is SST. Anyone knows that SST is, SST is socio-emotional selectivity theory. This is why older people, this is the mechanism they think why older people are better at conflict. It's not that they age, but it's that as you age and you're older, your time horizon shrinks. That is when you look out into your rest of your life, you see less time. And that gap when you perceive that you have less time alive, you then prioritize, like good vibes people and good vibes basically.

You're like, oh shit, I don't have very much time left here. I want to make it count with the people that I love, with experiences that I love and with the vibes that I love. And you don't want bullshit, so you cut the bullshit. So it's not the age itself, but it's, nor is it the passage of time and sort of an accumulation of wisdom, but it's an actual perspective shift. And this is reproducible and been reproduced in lab and in studies when younger adults are experimentally primed to perceive time as more limited, they behave like older adults.

So that's really cool. So what makes us better at communication is thinking we have less time on earth, basically. Now there's some wrinkles here and there's some caveats. So we talked about fewer conflicts and less duration, the, another interesting wrinkles that older adults have less accuracy and acuity in perceiving the emotions of others than younger adults. And they're also less skilled in confrontation, meaning they're much more avoided and inclined to be passive and just to let things go or ignore behavior. Whereas younger people are more directly engaged.

So it's a difference in strategy between older adults and younger adults. Older adults are more likely to use avoidant denial strategies in interpersonal stuff. And younger adults are more likely to actively engage and directly approach. So it's a fundamentally different and age reflective, right? It's a fundamentally different way of approaching conflict between younger and older people.

So does that cover that for age? I think so. So what's the summary of age? Yes, we get better at conflict with age, yes, it decreases, but it's also largely influenced by SST, that's only to remember, that's something to share with a friend, socio-emotional selectivity theory. And then the question for us is, how can we operationalize SST outside of an experiment for ourselves? Like Komi say, you know, what if today was today is it? Today is the day I have. I'm going to live for today. Does that sufficiently shrink the time horizon?

So that our perspective is more limited and we can be more inclined to this positive overall emotional well-being state that characterizes adults? I think so. Let's try it. Let's run an experiment of N of 1. Okay. Last question is, does training make you better at conflict? Can we train this stuff? That's the premise of the podcast, after all. The anatomy of conflict is to get better at conflict, right? That's why we're studying the anatomy of conflict so that we can get better at it.

So the first principle is, we can get better if we study. Is that true? What is this data show? Really interesting stuff. The basic gist I'll give you guys is that, yes, you can get better at the skill. And there's a decay, there's a decay of the skill. There's a half life. There's a period in which once you've learned the skill, once you've been trained, once you've had that exposure, and you're then tested again, your efficacy will decrease over time, right? And that's the decay time. And that the longest efficacy, the highest efficacy, the best bang for your buck is negotiation training, followed by couples communication programs, followed by couples therapy and debuffs.

So couples therapy produces little bit of gains that erode rapidly over time. That's worst. Worst is couples therapy. We could talk about why it's because it feels like from my experience and from reading the research, it's more event processing and less skill training. Whereas couples communication programs show real improvement.

But again, there's a real decline in their efficacy over time. They deteriorate the gains that you make in a couples communication class deteriorate over time. And I think that's because like anything, like going to the gym, if you're not working out, your muscles are, if you stop working out, your muscles are going to act like an atrophy. Where this is, the least true is negotiation training. And I think this is really, really fascinating. That negotiation training outperforms couples communication programs and couples therapy. In terms of asking the participants later whether they're still using and benefiting from skills that they learned during that time.

So negotiation training is not couples therapy, it's not, it's not couples communication. It is specific training on individual performance in negotiations. And the survey data shows that over 80% of the people who took the negotiation class, over 80% of the people who took the negotiation class, 10 years later, still use the skill that they learned in that classroom. That is what I hope for this podcast, that this is a negotiation training. And that it produces large short-term effects, large midterm effects, and large long-term effects.

So in 10 years, we could have an 80% or better rate of saying, hey, when you listen to the anatomy of the complex progress, are you still learning skills that you learn there? Are you still using the leveraging? Yes. The other thing to point out is that not all practice is equal.

So you could learn the skills here, for example, bilateral tapping, or the butterfly hug where you take your left hand and tap it on your right shoulder and you take your right hand and tap it on your left shoulder and you can take deep breaths to calm your body out of a panic state. That's a really good example. This is, like, for us to get better in the moment at our argumentation, at our negotiation, at our communication, it's really helpful to have a neutral third party or a third party evaluator, give us feedback on our game. Just like if we were going to play Ultimate Frisbee and we were going to play a live session for two hours, it's nice then to have somebody come in.

We could get better if we just practice, practice the game, practice the throws or forehand or backhand or cuts or inside or outside. But it's better if we have someone coach us, right, and so that's what the data shows as well. That's a wrap, guys. It's an interesting wrap and what I, oh, there's one more note. Being better at conflict doesn't mean you fight less. This is one last note. And this is from the Gottman's, Gottman's wrote a book on this called Fight, right? And their data here is helpful. Fighting well doesn't mean fighting not at all, it doesn't mean fighting less. It doesn't mean having fewer conflicts.

What it basically means is having fewer shitty conflicts, explosive conflicts, toxic conflicts, where there's rank, resentment, contempt, conflict where there's no repair attempts, conflicts that are dominated by emotional flooding or you're always activated in this sort of rage moment. This is, that's bad, that's bad, but the fact that the thing that we're going to, as we adopt these learnings from the anatomy of conflict podcasts, as we age and put in time perspective and reduce our time horizon in this SST, everyone remember what SST is. I don't, let's go back and look, SST, socio-emotional selectivity theory, socio-emotional selectivity theory.

So it's not that we're hoping to eliminate conflict, it's that we're hoping to do it better because the gotmins whole point here is that when you do it before and after of, of, of couples, even happy couples, 69% of relationships, conflicts remain, 69% of the things that you fight about will remain.

So that's, we could round up and say it's almost everything, right? That it's about how we handle the disagreements about how we manage the conflict. That's why to bring this all back home, this is the field properly known as conflict management, managing conflict, handling conflict, rather than what is like the Western American paradigm of winning a binary, a better, worse, good, bad, of resolving conflict and conflict resolution.

So the, the name for the field is ADR alternative dispute resolution, but it should be alternative dispute management and conflict management. I think we take that lens into our own self and our own psyche, the one in which we view the world and assess our own relationships. It will give us more realistic frames for how we see ourselves and others.

So I forgot to say this podcast was brought to you by a final people mediation, which is a virtual mediation practice for predominantly divorced mediation, but also increasingly we are doing international commercial mediation, national commercial mediation for construction for landlord tenant for employment for employer employee franchise, or co founder, founder, community sweep business stuff. If you have a conflict and you wish to manage that conflict well to toward and to and toward a resolution, right, uh, final people mediation.com, get your free 30 minute console there.

Guys, this is a banger again, I keep saying that because I, I really do think these topics are so interesting, and if you find them interesting too, I'd love for you to text message me 7-6-3-3-1-6-8-3-2-3- 7-6-3-3-1-6-8-3-2-3. Text message me, this was cool, this is what I learned, here's what SST is, let's see if we can get it one more time, SST, socio-economic selectivity theory, is that it? Socioeconomic, socio-emotional selectivity theory, it's when you shrink the temper as an SST, not SST, socio-economic, socio-emotional selectivity theory, we guys do well, see you next time.