Couples therapy is a powerful tool to help get a relationship back on track, break out of fear patterns, and move on to love and safety. By setting a shared goal of resolving conflicts and treating specific problems, both partners can work together to build a better relationship. The main purpose of marriage counseling is to hone communication skills. Not only will this address current issues, such as boredom or complacency in a relationship, but it's a skill that will always be useful in your married life - and even in your interactions with other people.
Good listening skills are essential in any form of communication. Couples seek therapy to achieve better communication, increase trust, and improve intimacy, among other reasons. Surprisingly, nearly half of couples who enter couples therapy do so with the goal of determining if the relationship is viable enough to continue. Jesse Owen, from the Department of Educational and Counseling Psychology at the University of Louisville, conducted a study that specifically analyzed how the treatment objectives expressed at the beginning of therapy affected the final outcome in terms of maintaining the relationship. During the first session, expect to talk about your relationship's heartbreak story. The therapist will want to know the main problems you are experiencing and what causes most of your stress within the relationship.
Premarital counseling helps couples strengthen the foundations of their relationship, improve their communication skills, and learn to handle disagreements in a healthy way. These goals are practiced and preached by venerable psychologists to help couples overcome their problems. The overall goal is to achieve self-confidence individually and, as a couple, to move forward in the relationship. Using data collected from 249 couples treated by various therapists, Owen analyzed the objectives of improving the relationship compared to the objectives of clarifying the viability of the relationship. Individual sessions are an option, but no couples therapy is successful without sessions that are both individual and joint.
However, some couples in healthy relationships attend therapy regularly to continue to improve their bond and interactions with each other. The goal of starting couples therapy is to learn problem-solving skills to better cope with your relationship. Relationship counselors reveal that different couples face different problems, so they have their own unique short-term goals for therapy. Even with the encouraging success rate of marriage therapy, some couples may not improve their relationship after working with a marriage counselor. Therapists helped couples improve their friendship and romantic relationship, but the improvements tended to be short-lived. There are certain common things that couples seek to achieve through therapy: better communication, acquiring problem-solving skills, or learning to handle arguments in a healthy way.
Once you have made an appointment with the couples counselor of your choice, you and your partner should prepare for your first therapy session. Realizing that this could pose a major problem is one of the most important goals of couples therapy.
