Why Marriage Counseling?
You may want your engagement or marriage to get the best start. Or, you think your marriage is no longer working. Marriage counseling helps you find the answers, together. Being married takes constant work so that you can be the best support for your spouse.
Marriage counseling provides a safe space where couples can work through challenging marital issues with an objective, licensed professional. This safe space allows you to be completely honest so no stone goes unturned to help your marriage. During counseling, you build greater trust in yourself and each other. This creates a deeper capacity for mutual appreciation, understanding and empathy.
The All-Consuming Effects of Marital Struggles
A struggling marriage can be all-consuming, draining you of energy and coloring all your thoughts and actions. Your well-being, ability to work, and enjoyment of friends and family suffer. While you love one another, recurring fights leave you angry, resentful, dissatisfied, and even despairing. If there are financial issues, infidelity or children are involved, the stakes can be higher.
How Psychotherapy Helps Marriages
Therapy is not just for discussing the negatives of a situation. When we first meet, we’ll assess the severity of your problems. However, we will also reflect on the positives that brought you together. After all, we can forget what made us want to marry our partners after so much arguing and conflict.
With a firm understanding of individual and shared strengths, values, and history, we can explore how your relationship went astray. In the safety of my practice, I will uncover some of the historical patterns that play a role in your current struggles. I will encourage you to become acutely aware of these patterns so that you can work to change the destructive ones. You will notice an improved ability to listen to and empathize with your partner.
Building Communication that Works
Effective communication is one of the major keys to a fruitful marriage. Building on listening and understanding we will discuss more ways to relate to each other with honesty and vulnerability. In this process, we will discover:
- How to listen with empathy and understanding
- How to rebuild trust in yourselves and each other
- How to better appreciate your partner for who they really are and not who you want them to be
- How to productively resolve conflict
- How to manage hurt feelings
- How to fight fair leading to a positive outcome
- How to rebuild a better relationship with your children
By acquiring these skills in our sessions and your own work, you will develop a more deeply satisfying relationship.
What If We Cannot Make It Work?
We may find irreconcilable differences, little progress, or an unwillingness to do the work. If so, I will help you move forward amicably. We will create a plan so that your well-being and that of spouse, children, friends and family do not suffer.
Getting Started
Starting on the phone, and during the initial consultation, I will learn a good deal about what has led to your decision to seek marriage counseling. I will get a beginning sense of if, and how I can be of help. I will share with you any observations and opinions I already have. Most important, you will get a sense of me and how I work. If, at the end of the consultation, it seems a good fit, we will decide about how to go forward.
