Absolutely, but expecting your partner not to cheat on you is not asking for perfection hence the legitimacy of demonizing them.
One of the most troubling things to me about modern therapy is an implicit general paradigm of "whatever works to make a client feel better is good."
Introducing morality into therapy is also a very dangerous thing, so I don't want to quite advocate that either, but sometimes I feel like therapy in the US adopts this implicit competitive-individualist worldview that makes me uncomfortable.
This article evoked similar feelings in me, that I almost never feel comfortable with a client demonizing an ex, regardless of how bad the relationship was. Even when a relationship is abusive and a client definitely needs to get out, I try to frame it in terms of safety or self-love or something like that.
There's many reasons for this. Often even in bad relationships a client bears some responsibility, and I feel like encouraging demonizing kind of ends up avoiding their own problematic patterns of behavior. Also, I think demonizing implicitly assumes this flawed view of people as static and unchanging, which can be problematic itself later. Finally, I think that dwelling on negative feelings is probably unhelpful in the long run, and sometimes can cause people to deny very real positive feelings, or genuine benefits they received.
This study--or at least the article is framed very much in terms of "how do I get over this person." Framed that way, you get one answer. But really in the long term, that's not the most important question with regard to a person's mental wellness or health. It's relatively easy to just "get over someone." It's much harder to come up with an understanding of a relationship that is truly healthy, in a way that improves yourself and your future relationships. I worry that modern therapy is too focused on pragmatic, short-term goals without an awareness of the implicit paradigm that it's operating in.
In the longer term, I'm waiting for empirically-supported therapeutic techniques coming from other cultural milieus that will challenge some of these implicit value assumptions.
That's very sad to hear because that's what actually works. You seem to approach this as if you were responsible for some long term balance of humans and their relationships in general and also carefully accounting who was at fault and how much to use it as motivational tool.
I have personal expeirience of successfully "getting over someone". I got rid of seven years of pretty much unconditional (but mostly unrequited) love in roughly six months.
For me love felt just like an addiction but not to a specific substance but to a specific person. Person you are addicted to is burnt into your neurons. All roads (thoughts) lead to Rome (her). You need to cut those and the best way to do that, I found, was to whenever I noticed I'm thinkig of her, curse her with as much negativity as I could muster, conciously knowing that it was nearly completely undeserved and dishonest. Still it helped me to teach my brain that drifting towards her is a path of thought that ends quickly and unpleasantly. This negativity was completely safe because of the first rule I imposed on myself. Strictly no contact. I kept it for many years till a brief random encounter on the street in company of our respective partners that ended with polite exchange of typical platitudes. I don't hate her and I'd even help her if the problem was serious enough, so negativity didn't leave lasting impact.
I get that you are interested in improving you patient's long term outlook same way as addiction therapist wants to improve life of their patients. But you need to get them roughly clean first.
I hope you try the negativity with some of your patients. It won't make your clients feel good but it will help speed up recovery to a point where they might be receptive to introspection of their approach to relationships.
Another thing that helped me was talking to anonymous people on internet chat and telling them negative parts of my story over and over till I got bored with my story.
I also blindly dated few people until I got bored with that too.
Then I, alone with myself, felt finally happy, first time in many years.
Then I felt ready and met another girl and I built with her much healthier relationship. I learned with her a lot.
... and now she's in prolonged process of dying because of brain cancer ... so I guess don't stress so much about you clients long term well being because life will give them whatever despite your best efforts. And when in doubt, always go with science.
I think that the cultural expectation that a relationship isn't valid or meaningful unless it results in marriage is part of the issue, but for those that really want to get married I'd hope they realize that not everyone shares that desire.
It's sad to me that in the article's circumstance that the contentious marriage issue would cause the woman to rearrange her opinion of her ex because he didn't want the same thing she did. Helpful for her maybe, but sucks that this is the proscribed method of dealing with people.
It’s really not that bad.
What kind of relationship do you have with someone if you can't even be honest with the other?
I see humans as fallible. So, i am ok with my girlfriend sleeping with other guys.
She isn't my prisoner anyway, I've no right to to restrict her from fulfilling her fantasy as long as she isn't hurting anyone, i am fine with it.