When Should You Consider Marriage Counseling?

In my work as a psychologist who provides marriage counseling in Houston Texas, I often get asked by people: When should couples consider marriage counseling?

 

As most therapist who provide marriage counseling know, too many married couples wait until their marriage is already failing before they see a couples therapist.

 

Couples have often tried everything else by the time they book their appointment, and often view marriage counseling as their last ditch effort to make their marriage work.

 

But is this really the best approach to take to your marriage? Should marriage counseling be a method of last resort?

 

Of course the answer is “no”. Waiting till the last moment to work on your marriage, is like waiting till your car has already broken down before you get an oil change or decide to rotate your tires.

 

As anyone knows who is in a marriage, being married is hard work and requires ongoing attention and focus in order for your relationship to remain in tip-top shape.

 

When Is the Best Time to Go to Marriage Counseling?

 

The best time to go to marriage counseling is not when you are at your wits end trying to make things work, but much earlier, when you still have enough love and respect for each other, to allow necessary adjustments to bring you closer again.

 

Marriage counseling is really best utilized, when you begin to notice the first signs that something isn’t going as well as it used to. You may have tried “fixing” things on your own, but you notice that you keep having arguments about the same old issues, or you notice that you don’t share your feelings or thoughts with each other as much as you used to.

 

This early stage of discord between partners is often a crucial window of time in a marriage to intervene and make some adjustments. It is at these early stages that the faith of a marriage is often determined.

 

If left unaddressed, the dissatisfactions and disagreements between partners, may increasingly lead to anger and contempt, or increased loneliness and distance. Before you know it, you might end up leading parallel lives, or you may get into a vicious pattern of criticism and defensiveness that will slowly corrode your love and affection for each other over time.

 

How Can Marriage Counseling Help You?

 

Marriage counseling help both you and your partner finds ways to be more intentional and conscious about how to cultivate the strength of your relationship.

 

Contrary to popular belief, marriage counseling is not about blaming either of you for the ways in which you fall short, but is about increasing the understanding each of you have of the deeper longings, needs, and anxieties each of you carry around.

 

Rather than being a threat to your individuality or asking you to make compromises or change something about yourself, marriage counseling helps you be more fully yourself and to bring more of yourself into your marriage.

 

You learn how to express yourself in such a way that you naturally make your partner feel open to you, rather than in a way that leads your partner to feel criticized, inadequate, or annoyed.

 

At the end of the day, marriage counseling provides you with a set of skills that increases your emotional intelligence, and increases your ability to communicate about your true thoughts and feelings.

 

A Good Marriage Requires Skills:

 

Research done by couples researcher, John Gottman, shows that a good marriage is less about personality fit, and more about the skillful handling of inevitable differences and disagreements. When we marry, John Gottman says, we marry a set of problems. The trick therefore, is not to try to change each other, but to learn to communicate better about our differences, and to make room for both partners to be more fully who they really are.

 

When married couples are left to find these solutions on their own, they often end up in a power struggle about who needs to change, but in marriage counseling, they learn ways honor the wishes and dreams of their partner, while also getting their own needs and feelings heard and respected.

 

Marriage counseling should not be reserved for when you are almost about to divorce, but should be an early investment in relationship satisfaction, and a preventative measure to preserve the health and strength of your love connection.

 

For more valuable tips on improving your marriage, please visit my relationship blog: Couples Insight, where you read more blog posts about common relationship issues.

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About Me: I am Rune Moelbak, Ph.D., a psychologist and emotionally-focused couples therapist who provides marriage counseling in Houston Texas for a variety of relationship concerns.  

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