Couples counselling: When can it help?
Considering couples counselling, but don’t know whether it’s worth it? There’s still a lot of stigma around accessing counselling support, and that’s not just for individual counselling, it’s for couples too. But couples counselling can have a lot of benefits, not just for helping couples manage conflicts, but also to learn to better support and connect with each other through the range of challenges you will inevitably endure in a long-term relationship.
Pre-marital counselling
In the words of Brene Brown, “trust is not built in big, sweeping moments. It’s built in tiny moments everyday”. Engaging in pre-marital counselling serves many benefits, such as refining communication skills, aligning long-term dreams and goals and building a solid foundation to help you last the long-haul. It’s normal to feel you don’t need pre-marital counselling, but there are always areas for improvement. The aim of pre-marital counselling is to try to improve the tiny moments everyday, to make difficult times easier to handle down the line. Pre-marital counselling is usually brief, and very practical, tailored to the topics that you may not have thought about talking to your partner about before speaking with a couples therapist.
Navigating change
Struggling to adjust to parenthood, or a big move or partners career change? Big changes can put stress on relationships and sometimes, couples need assistance improving their sense of connection and intimacy with each other so the relationship is felt to be a bigger priority than the change. Especially with families expanding and roles and responsibilities changing, time for romance can be put on the backburner. Couples counselling can be very beneficial when one or both partners feel emotionally disconnected or neglected and are struggling to prioritise the relationship without a third party.
Navigating conflicts
Have you noticed unhealthy patterns in your relationship? For example, frequent struggles to compromise, defensiveness or over-dependency? Different factors, such as our attachment style, love languages and apology languages, can impact how we deal with conflict in intimate relationships. This is important if you and your partner have different conflict management styles and are struggling to understand each others point of view. And it’s especially important if arguments lead to actions that damage trust, such as criticisms and stonewalling. We need to learn to change negative relationship patterns to more constructive ones, in order to establish and sustain genuine trust and a healthy connection.
Overcoming resentment
When we keep giving into our partners needs, whilst neglecting our own, we often build up resentment. Often this is due to struggles managing conflict, but sometimes it’s because someone’s given in to things perceived as ‘small’ and not worth arguing over. But this occurring repeatedly damages the relationships foundation. As the saying goes, “conflict avoided is conflict multiplied”. If you or your relationship is being impacted by resentment, you may need some support enhancing your communication skills and emotional regulation skills.
Still unsure on whether you think you and your partner would benefit from couples counselling? Or do you want more information on how couples counselling works? Give Mind Connect Health a call and we’ll happy to guide you in the right direction, even if that direction is not in our doorway. Always happy to help!
