What You Should Know Before You Attend Couples Counseling

By Pat Skeats


Sometimes a relationship can suffer strain if there are stressful life events happening. This may be due to financial difficulties, such as a job loss, a breakdown of communication or someone suffering from an illness. This may also be due to insecure attachments, jealousy, anger or interference from third parties. These are just some of the problems that couples counseling tries to tackle.

When there are changes in a family such as financial difficulties, physical health, or problems with other family members, this can have a serious and negative influence on the way that individuals respond in a relationship. In many cases it is not just one person who is at fault. One principle that is taught in relationship therapy is that it takes both people to create a problem and so both must try to manage the problem.

Relationship therapy first originated in Germany during the 1920s with the eugenics movement. After that, institutes for marriage therapy began cropping up in the USA starting in the 1930s. This was due in part to the racial purification centers from Germany. Eugenicists such as Paul Popenoe and Robert Dickinson promoted it in the USA. It was also supported by birth control advocates like Abraham and Hannah Stone, two of the founders of Planned Parenthood.

In the 1950s, therapists began dealing with psychological problems in the family context. Relationship therapy as a professional service is still fairly recent. Before that time, relationship help was informally conducted by friends, family members, or religious leaders. In some less advanced cultures, village leaders and group elders fulfill the role of relationship mentor.

A licensed relationship therapist may rely on psychiatrists, social workers and pastoral counsellors for help in treating married people. The duty of a relationship therapist is to listen to and respect their clients. The therapist must understand them and seek to facilitate a better functioning relationship between the partners. They must provide confidential dialogue which is sensitive to the feelings of each person. They should enable each individual to be heard and speak about their feelings.

The ideal relationship is when both individuals are neither too dependent nor too independent of each other. This balance is part of what relationship therapy tries to achieve. Both partners must learn to satisfy their needs for intimacy and autonomy in order to achieve stability in the relationship. This depends a lot on the specific duties of each partner in their life phases and stages of maturity.

Some methods of relationship therapy focus on the process of communication. The method most commonly used is called active listening, developed by Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir. This helps each partner to learn how to communicate in a way that creates a safe environment for each individual to express their feelings.

Before a relationship can be improved between two people so that they can understand each other, it is important to first acknowledge that each person is unique and has their own personality and set of values that influences them. People may adhere to their different value systems without examining them. The nature of a person may be shaped by social and religious groups, among other things, which is why this must be considered during the process of therapy.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment