How Can Marriage Counseling Help My Marriage?

Are you wondering if marriage counseling can save your marriage? The answer is: It depends.

As a licensed marriage and family counselor who has worked with hundreds of couples and families, I’ve found that marriage counseling works best when each spouse:

1) Is at least willing to work on the marriage. 2) Is coachable. 3) Is willing to take 100% responsibility for his/her own feelings, emotions, actions and thoughts. 4) Knows what they want to get out of marriage counseling.

It is important to know what your goals are for marriage counseling.

* Do you want your spouse to stop berating you? * Do you want your children to behave? * Do you want your partner to agree with you? * Do you want him/her to stop working late and spend more time with the family? * OR do you want to be a better husband, wife, mother or father?

A professional marriage counselor can help both partners in a marriage:

1) Get clear about your needs and what you really want from your marriage and your partner. 2) Identify behaviors in your partner and yourself that trigger unhappiness or undermine the marriage. 3) Learn and practice new behaviors that bring you closer together 4) Gain insight into your own communication patterns and how they’re helping or hurting the marriage.

Let’s proceed with this content page. Marriage counseling can help you specify your goals and focus on what you really want. If you’re just not happy because your spouse is not being what you want or need in a relationship, you’re not taking responsibility for your own happiness. If you leave your happiness in the hands of someone else, then you lose control over your own life.

On the other hand, marriage counseling can help you clarify and speak your needs in a way that your spouse can hear and understand. This is important because it minimizes “global” arguing such as “you always”… Or “you never…”

Even “I’ll do anything to make you happy” needs to be clarified. Anything? Really?

Marriage counseling gets you focused on your needs and helps you communicate those needs effectively in a less emotional way. Once you’re clear about what you want, and what you’re actually willing to do, you do not have to scream, whine, pout, nag or create a chilly silence. You can clearly state your need and ask for what you want. Then your partner can hear you and choose to respond in a direct, clear way.

Counseling can also help you identify the behaviors that trigger you and assist in finding the reason for those triggers. Looking for long held beliefs about yourself, family, relationships, and roles can help uncover thoughts and beliefs that are no longer true or helpful for you. Once discovered, those beliefs can be changed to ones that are more effective and powerful for your present situation.

By examining your beliefs, you find out where they come from and you can consciously choose to keep those beliefs or change them. You can then take the reins of your own life and steer yourself and your relationship in the direction that works best for you.

Recalling the reasons you got together in the first place and appreciating the things your partner does well, are important aspects of marriage counseling. It’s much easier to agree to try to make changes if you feel that what you’re already doing is noticed and appreciated.

One more way that you can benefit from marriage counseling is that you’ll have an unbiased third party listening to your communication patterns, watching the way you come across relationally, and listening to your stated desires and needs. This can help because you have an outside opinion and perspective that perhaps you hadn’t thought of before. It can shake you out of a rut or pattern that you never recognized before.

So to answer your question, “Can marriage counseling save my marriage?”, it can help you clarify your needs, goals and desires and learn to communicate them clearly.

If you and your spouse are open to feedback and willing to learn and grow, you’ll both come out of the experience wiser, stronger, more effective in your communication skills. Then you may to be able to let go of the past and move forward in a way that works for both of you, and perhaps rekindle the affection that has been smothered or dormant.

If you want a marriage therapist to change your wife/husband so that you can stay in your comfort zone and not have to grow or take responsibility, chances are the answer is no.

Marianne Clyde is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Warrenton, VA, helping you overcome anxiety, depression, trauma, eating disorders and other addictions. She offers powerful, practical ways to heal your relationships and your life. 540-347-3797 http://www.marianneclyde.com