When we live with the same person or are attached to a particular person issues will arise over time and that’s natural, normal, and necessary as this helps us understand them better.
Relationship counseling is for couples who are going through a difficult time or would like to further improve upon themselves and their relationship. Couple counseling does work and it has proved over the years however with any type of counseling here too the willingness to work upon yourself is required. Unless both the parties are invested it would not be as efficient as you’d like it to be.
Couples counseling can help couples get a different perspective and see each other’s perspective from a different lens. Another person will try to give you an unbiased perspective, unlike family and friends who can be biased when it comes to their family members. If there’s miscommunication that could be understood and usually issues are piled up and never resolved which a therapist can help untangle and resolve bit by bit. The therapist can help the partners in adopting healthy coping skills, building trust, trying to understand the other person, communicating in a way that leads to conflict resolution and not escalation, managing anger, building relationship together, defining the roles, adjusting expectations, working through stressful situations successfully together.
Four different types of therapy namely, Behavioral Couples Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy, and Insight-Oriented Marital Therapy have been found to have a positive impact and there are researches for the same.
To understand it better, reflect on how you communicate with your partner when you’re angry. Is it the same way you communicate with others when you’re upset with them? There are limited boundaries with them which makes us have fewer filters but in doing this we might be hurting the person closest to us and who cares for us the most. We have to understand that the way we communicate is as important as what we communicate. In a fight, if things are getting out of hand then take a time out, most often we’re quick to react in anger but if we do this we can harm the other person with our words. However, instead of reacting, we can reflect on our emotions and what made us lose our temper and then convey it to them. If they didn’t do something you wanted them to do then convey this to them instead of using statements like, ‘You never listen to me.’ ‘You never do this.’ Underneath this, there is something you’d like them to do. You want them to understand you and do the thing you asked them to do and they might’ve done it in the past therefore avoid the extreme terms such as ‘always’ and ‘never’ in an argument. Express your wish and desire when they don’t seem to understand as nobody is a mind reader and no matter how close they’re to us, they can’t understand everything if we don’t communicate it with them. Use ‘I’ statements such as ‘I felt hurt when this work wasn’t done as I needed someone to do it because of my other engagement.’ No relationship is perfect because it involves two imperfect people but it depends if you’re ready to give another chance to your relationship?
This was a template that you can maybe next time use in an argument. It might help both of you.
A study in the U.K. showed that those married fathers who reported that their marriages flourished over time had improvements in many cardiovascular disease risk elements, such as cholesterol. They were compared with those who were not consistently happy or were in unhappy marriages. People whose relationships deteriorated over time also found that other risk factors such as their blood pressure became worse.
Over the years it has been found that happier marriages are related to better health outcomes, such as fewer hospitalizations, fewer severe diseases, less physical pain, and an increase in life longevity. All this proves that social support is immensely important for us humans who are rightly termed as social beings for our overall well-being.
Therefore, for the sake of our partner’s health and our health we should consider relationship/couple/marriage counseling to flourish in our relationships as a partner and as a person.
