Do You Feel Alone In Your Relationship?
Are you and your partner in a rut and struggling to connect after years of marriage? As your children grow older and prepare to leave the nest, have you reached a new stage in your relationship where you feel more like adversaries than partners? Have you stopped communicating effectively with each other and feel unheard and misunderstood?
Even though you want to solve the recurring problems in your marriage, nothing you do seems to help. Perhaps when you try to communicate your feelings with each other, it falls on deaf ears. Rather than reaching any resolution, you’re stuck in a pattern you cannot change, seemingly having different versions of the same fight over and over. As a result, you might be holding onto bitterness when you don’t forgive each other after arguments, becoming lonely and alienated when feelings get hurt.
Arguments Become More Frequent When You’re Both Under Stress
If one or both of you are overloaded by stress or anxiety, it might correspond with the sense that your relationship is in jeopardy. The insecurity and uncertainty caused by the stressors of life you might face—such as finances, jobs, raising children, or issues with in-laws—could be negatively impacting your relationship.
Or, conversely, the tension in your relationship could be spilling over into other parts of your life, making your daily obligations more difficult to manage.
You might initially conclude these problems are all your partner’s fault, but, when you give it more consideration, you can acknowledge the disconnect that has developed cannot be solely blamed on them. Setting blame aside, couples therapy can help you repair the bond that has weakened between you and get your relationship back to a place where each of you feels heard and valued by the other.
Life Transitions Can Cause Our Relationships To Falter
Although we enter into relationships with the hope that we have found our “happily ever after”, the fact remains that marriages are difficult to maintain over time. According to recent studies, “there is an increasing divorce rate of more than 50 percent in most developed countries.”[1] The reality is that while love and commitment are all well and good, life’s daily stressors don’t disappear just because we’ve found our partner.
Significant events, such as having kids or a death in the family, cause big emotions that often go unexpressed between partners. And when we reach certain life transitions—such as becoming empty nesters—we may experience an unexpected shift in our dynamic that leaves us feeling vulnerable and alone.
How each of us deals with change can test our relationship. Many of us were not taught how to communicate effectively as children which impacts how we behave toward and express ourselves to our primary partner.
In Many Ways, Technology Has Worsened Our Communication
Surprisingly, technological advancements in communication, like DMs and texting, have served to exacerbate our communication problems—not improve them. These shortcuts in communication often lead to greater misunderstanding, especially when we never learned how to communicate well in the first place.
Sometimes we avoid seeking marital counseling as a preventative measure and, instead, utilize it as a last-ditch effort once we already realize our differences are irreconcilable. Sadly, the stigma that couples counseling is reserved for “broken” relationships contributes to needless separation and divorce.
Even if you think your issues aren’t significant enough to warrant counseling, couples therapy can be beneficial for anyone in a committed relationship. By setting time aside to focus on each other, couples counseling can help improve your communication issues, foster intimacy, and appreciate your relationship.
Couples Therapy Can Strengthen Your Bond
Therapy is most successful when couples don’t come to “fix” each other, but rather are willing to take ownership and consider how their actions and expectations are negatively impacting their relationship. When you are both open to feedback, you are much more likely to make positive changes and improve how your relationship functions.
After being paired with a therapist well-suited to your specific needs, couples counseling offers you a chance to discuss difficult topics in a safe environment. If things get heated, your counselor can intervene when necessary to constructively guide the conversation without bias or judgment. As you begin to view your partner as a resource rather than a challenge to be overcome, couples counseling can help you positively shift your perspective and bring you closer together.
What To Expect In Sessions
During the first two sessions, your couples counselor will gather information about your shared history, identifying what aspects of your relationship have been strengths up to this point that can be further fostered. After finding out about the current issues you are experiencing, you will determine your goals for therapy together.
With some modalities such as Gottman, you will each have an individual breakout session with your therapist to talk about your family history and gain an understanding of how what you learned in childhood may impact the dynamics within your relationship. If they determine that one of you may benefit from individual counseling, they will refer you to another therapist.
Your marriage therapist will work collaboratively with you, helping you discern the difference between problems that can be solved from what cannot be changed and should be accepted. You will also learn how to identify the problems and patterns that arise in your marriage while also focusing on solutions and practical methods of addressing these patterns. Practicing these techniques and behavior skills in between sessions will benefit the work you’re doing in couples therapy.
The Modalities We Use
Your marriage counselor will utilize modalities specifically geared for couples, such as Gottman Method Couples Counseling, Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), and attachment-based therapy. The Gottman Method is among the most empirically-based modalities of couples therapy. Its objectives are to “disarm conflicting verbal communication; increase intimacy, respect, and affection; remove barriers that create a feeling of stagnancy, and create a heightened sense of empathy and understanding within the context of the relationship.”[2]
SFBT is a results-driven approach where you will confront problems head-on by utilizing simple and innovative strategies to improve communication. And attachment-based therapy will help you avoid codependency and controlling behavior within the relationship, striving instead toward becoming grounded and healthy individuals.
Couples therapy will teach you how to listen to one another with the goal of resolving, not winning, an argument. By creating a heightened sense of empathy and learning to express fondness and admiration, you will grow more deeply connected moving forward.
But You May Wonder Whether Couples Therapy Is Right For You…
Isn’t going to couples therapy an admission that our relationship is failing?
A common fear for couples contemplating counseling is that by admitting you need help, you are somehow invalidating your relationship altogether. However, when you acknowledge your relationship has room for improvement and ask for help, it’s not a weakness, but rather a sign of resiliency. Some people think that if you ignore a problem, it will eventually go away by itself. However, it takes a brave person to address the problem head-on and be open enough to admit that perhaps a different approach will improve things.
Isn’t marriage counseling only for big problems like infidelity?
You may think that therapy is only for couples dealing with affairs or other “big issues”, not for the average couple struggling to communicate effectively. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Getting couples counseling is like maintaining your health or weight. You work out regularly and eat well to feel better and avoid future health problems. Similarly, couples counseling helps address the little issues before they become bigger ones. By setting intentional time aside for your relationship each week, it will become a routine that continues outside of couples therapy.
Marriage therapy isn’t covered by insurance so we can’t afford it.
While it is true that most health insurance does not cover marriage counseling, there are still ways to use your insurance. One way is to use either yourself or your partner as the Identified Client. This means the session will be billed under only one of you. Another way is to utilize one of our MFT interns at a lower cost. Although they are still in training, most have been practicing for some time and have lots of experience helping couples.
All Couples Can Benefit From Counseling
If your relationship could use a tune-up, there’s no reason to put off getting compassionate, unbiased support. If you would like to find out more about couples therapy with us, you may 513-770-1705 or visit our contact page.
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