3 Reasons Why Marriage Counseling Is Helpful
If you think you have had enough of dealing with your marriage problems, you might have already waited too long before considering professional help. While the resistance towards opening up about your personal problems in front of someone you know is understandable, it is healthy to get help from external sources when things seem to be getting out of hand.
Evaluate marriage counseling against its advantages on your mental health. Here are three reasons that will help you understand why marriage counseling is helpful in resolving conflicts in marriage.
Improved Connection
Conflict in a marriage is not a sign of a dying relationship. In fact, it is inevitable when two people spend a significant time around each other. What makes a conflict the deal breaker is when couples are not equipped with efficient communication tools.
Conversations tend to derail from the main point, and segue into other things that are not relevant. In such a situation, having an outsider’s perspective in navigating and guiding a conversation is crucial.
What marriage counseling does is that it makes a couple more likely to really listen to each other. They can change their old and unhealthy patterns of communication. In any couple’s therapy, you are likely to develop a skill set that helps you in conversing with your partner in the long run.
Enhancing Individual Empathy
Feeling empathic towards your partner is an integral part of a relationship. If that is missing, then our partner is more likely to feel unheard, isolated, and distant in future. This is a common response when partners hear anything that puts them at fault, which results in damaging the relationship.
Reacting in a defensive manner or silent treatment seems a normalized response in such situations. Marriage counseling helps couples in this regard by changing this behavior from turning away to “turning towards”, a phrase coined by Gottam.
It means to view our partner’s comments positively and feeling emphatic towards how they must have felt.
It Takes an EFT Approach
Marriage counseling is helpful because it adopts an emotionally-focused couple’s therapy (EFT) approach. One of the main advantages of this approach is its long-lasting impact. It influences a couple’s behavioral pattern and focuses on patterns that go unnoticed otherwise. EFT consists of three steps. The first step requires recognizing their negative cycle.
The second is about learning the way this cycle could be changed. Lastly, the third step highlights the reason why a client became a part of this cycle in the first place and how they could avoid similar patterns in future. This makes EFT a holistic approach that deals with a negative behavior in its entirety.
Considering all of the above mentioned benefits, marriage counseling is an option that you should consider if you and your partner are willing to meet halfway to resolve your respective issues. It does not work in cases where partners show no willingness to improve their current equation. Couple’s therapy is a joint effort, so one-sided effort will not give you the desired result. Through therapy, couples built a solid foundation on which their relationship could flourish in the long-run.