Is Couple Therapy The Right Approach To Save Your Marriage?

Couple therapy, marriage guidance, and family therapy and counseling have been one of the relative success stories of the recent past. Although divorce rates remain at a staggeringly high level, and family breakdowns the cause of great concern, there is no doubting the evidence and the hard facts it reveals. The numbers of marriages which are saved from those who go to counseling greatly exceeds those which are saved who do not. You might think that that is obvious, as the only ones going to counseling are the ones who want to save their marriage in the first place, but there is a lot more to it than that.

In trying to establish why therapy and counseling work so well in saving marriages, it is necessary to go right back to the fundamental building blocks of our society. Marriage and the family unit have been the way most of the population of the Western world has lived throughout history, and while there have been many people who have not been able to fit in to this pattern, it has worked better than any alternative would have done for the majority. Now, we are at a point where the lifestyle the family has served well is changing beyond recognition.

The new challenge is both to help those who cannot fit into the traditional family model, as well as to find out how the family can evolve into the new era when so much of the way we used to live has changed forever. One fact is clear, and that is that we cannot make society go back to where it was, and few of us would truly want to. What we need to do is help the family unit, and the institution of marriage evolve to the level where they are compatible again with the aims and lifestyles of today.

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It is scarcely surprising that many individual couples and families find it impossible to adjust to the new demands. Try as you like you cannot create extra hours in the day for long term meaningful family interaction, and unless there is the opportunity for lifestyle adjustment this will always be the case. If there is less time to make family life or a relationship work, it will just have to be made to work in that lesser time period. If you are feeling overwhelmed and frustrated, you may need the help of a relationship professional to get you started with this.

Relationship counseling and couple therapy are really two entirely different approaches to solving the same problem. It is encouraging to know at the start of your quest that you will be able to try several approaches in your quest for success, and that you are not gambling everything on the one and only technology which can save your life. Deciding which to try first may not be easy, depending on how clear an assessment you can make of the condition you find yourself in. If there are many differences between you, you may need to start with a relationship counseling session.

The main focus of the couple therapy approach is anything which has been a long term difficulty for the relationship over many years, especially those which relate to the emotions. Emotions will be the focus of this entire course of treatment, and they will also be the tool through which the intended healing will take place. This is a complex therapy, and the therapist needs to be able to go right back in time to whenever these problems began to occur. This will take at least ten sessions of therapy, probably many more.

This style of marriage therapy is strictly for those who can commit to the entire program of therapy sessions, as there is no way you can predict how far you will need to go back to identify the cause of the problem, nor any way to predict how long it will take to resolve these issues once they are discovered. Once they are discovered, the therapist will work to release the negative emotions which are attached to the memory, and then try to create new emotions to take their place. Any difficulty can be released of emotional charge and the event can have a totally different feeling.

If you have type of difficulty which couple therapy can help, you will know because you will have been up against emotional blocks for many years. You will have felt that there was something in the way of the relationship working, even though you couldn't quantify or identify it. It may even be possible to talk this through with your partner with no anguish or difficulty, as the problem will remain buried. If you can do this, it will help you to at least have a degree of harmony as you try to find the right therapist for couple therapy.