What happens to a start full of ilusion and trust to end up in conflicts in a couple? That’s what are wondering many of the couples we see in our office, they also think “How did we got here?”. The decision to start a marriage counseling it’s most of times took as the last chance for the relationship, that’s probably because it’s hard to admit the help of a third person. The goal we set in our office it’s not to save the relationship at any cost, but to work together with common objetives for both of the members of the couple. Sometimes it would be to start a treatment to recover the relationship, and sometimes it would be helping to overcome a separation with the less consequences as possible for both.
The most important think to make an effective marriage counseling it’s that both the members of the couple, cooperate and show an interest to solve their problems.
The causes of the problems in a couple are different from one case to another, frecuently as time goes by the couple falls in routines that damage the relationship, they renounce to the things that brought them together in the start, they leave the displays of affection, they don’t share activities; in other cases the cause it’s there’re unbalance situations in the relationship, other conflicts emerge because there’s no comunication or there’s a lack of skills to express disagreement.
Now divorces are increasing in our society that’s because of the way the couples usually relate: the changes one expect from the other, how they tried to change each one (with menaces, grumbles…), the circunstances that maintain the attitudes they don’t want, the skills each member has for change the behavior of the mate and the individual difficuties they have; all this interferes in a relationship.
All these situations can change if the couple works in a constant way with the therapist, recovering all that join them in the first it’s not an utopy, but a real possibilty focus in the learning of few things:
1) Identifying the positive changes of the mate.
2) Using a new vocabulary between them.
3) Improving the comunication skills.
4) Learning a new way to influencing each other.
5) Developing skills to solve problems.
6) Cognitive restructuration that helps to evalue in a more rational way the relationship
and the expectation about it.
7) Improving in the assertive skills.
8) Adquiring the main principles of human behavior, that will helpa to generalize and
maintain all the changes and also to solve the future problems.