Marriage Counseling

Marriage therapy is first and foremost about helping the couple. What this means is that no one person is to blame and while both perspectives are important, the emphasis and focus in marital therapy is on the relationship as a whole.

Your licensed marriage and family counselor has one objective and that is to help improve your relationship. 

Research shows that talk therapy combined with making some simple changes to the way you think and talk to each other can improve your marital satisfaction significantly. 

Marriage counseling helps couples build skills for increased connection, communication, and resilience.

What happens during marriage counseling?

First, you will meet your counselor as a couple. Your therapist will work with you to diagnose the problems ailing your relationship. Once they have a handle on what you and your partner are working with, treatment will begin. 

“Treatment” will mean learning new skills for communicating effectively, increasing intimacy, conflict resolution, and more. 

You may decide to make couples counseling a regular part of your routine or that you only need a few appointments. Be prepared to make a time commitment initially to produce the best result in your relationship.

Our therapists use research based counseling methods to include Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy and the Gottman Method Couples Therapy.

Marriage counseling typically involves exploring and understanding your strengths as a couple as well as your goals and shared vision for your relationship. A therapy session may focus on practicing a specific skill or exploring a common pattern in your relationship.

We like to recommend marriage counseling as a preventative step before distance builds between you both. It’s natural with any two people that you will have conflicts, communication difficulties, and frustration whether it’s spoken or not.

Counseling is about interpersonal skill building, clarifying needs, creating understanding, and establishing connection, safety, and intimacy with your partner. From this standpoint, marriage counseling is about learning skills before significant problems arise.

However, it’s never too late to work on your relationship, even after an affair. Researcher, Dr. John Gottman, a marriage researcher with the Gottman Institute, found that married couples wait six years on average before seeking counseling for marriage problems.

By this point, problems are often deeply ingrained patterns that can be much more difficult to work through. You can certainly improve a troubled relationship at this point, but you might expect to spend a longer time working on skills and rebuilding your connection. Gottman couple therapy focused on building these skills from the ground up. 

Some couples seek marriage counseling right from the beginning, to explore relationship dynamics, and cope with outside influences such as parents, trauma, job and career changes, or co-parenting and blended family concerns.

Consider marriage counseling if major decisions need to be made as well. It can help you both think through the sides clearly with an outside perspective.

Marriage counseling can be utilized at any time in your relationship. It can be used to restart your marriage or just to be sure each partner is as satisfied and happy.

We still recommend that you come to explore on your own in individual therapy how you can improve your relationship.

It only takes one change in a system to make a significant impact – just like the pebble in a pond analogy.

We start by helping you understand your needs and how to communicate more effectively with your partner. And we also help you see both perspectives so you can create new ways of interacting in your relationship.

Sometimes it can be useful for you to learn assertive communication or understand relationship patterns in your life. When you spend time learning how to be happier in your relationship, your relationship improves – without you trying so hard. Read more about our relationship counseling services.

Individual relationship counseling has been shown to lead to improvement in couple relationships as much as couples counseling in some cases. 

Whether in couples or individual relationship therapy, you ultimately can only change yourself, not your partner. However, when one partner changes and focuses on being happier, the negative pattern in the relationship changes.

And, when your partner sees you taking an active role in the betterment of the relationship, that often leads to a place where they are more open to counseling.

• Yes, marriage counseling can be effective for recovering from infidelity. In fact, we recommend that couples try marriage counseling first before making any major decisions after infidelity. Working through an affair is tough, but can help you restore trust and deepen your relationship.

  Marriage counseling can help you identify new skills and ways of communicating and connecting to build a stronger relationship foundation.

• Your experience will mostly depend on the state of your relationship.

  Generally, you will meet with the therapist together and discuss issues. There may be times when each person meets with the therapist individually. 

  You and your partner can expect a neutral third party that safely guides you through difficult conversations. At its core, each marriage counseling session will teach you how to communicate, discover the real causes of stress, and deal with conflict in constructive ways. 

  Though it may seem like common sense, we promise, it’s not. In your own relationship, do you disarm conflict by acting as if it never happened or do you work through it until each party feels understood and soothed? You will learn to do so in counseling.

• Many people wonder how long marriage counseling takes to make the desired changes in their relationship. The average time varies, with the most important factor being the couple’s goals for the relationship. If the goals are coaching or solution oriented such as resolving issues around parenting or day to day responsibilities, the amount of time for relationship coaching could be 4-8 sessions.

  However, more frequently couples are dealing with long-standing relationship patterns, complex issues such as infidelity or an affair, or individual issues such as depression or anxiety.

  We offer effective methods of couples therapy including Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy and The Gottman Method to help couples create lasting change in their relationships.

  On average, successful marriage counseling is 12-16 sessions.

  Other factors that contribute to a successful couples therapy outcome are consistency (participating regularly in couples therapy), active participation (practicing skills in between sessions at home with your partner) and motivation. It can be harder to change when one partner is evaluating whether to leave the relationship.

  Typically, couples meet weekly to begin learning new skills. Once they have begun implementing skills, sessions decrease to less frequently allowing time for more practice in between. It is well-worth the effort to invest in your relationship, the earlier the better.

• If there has been unfaithfulness in your relationship or if one partner is trying to decide whether to stay or leave, you might prefer to schedule a marital therapy intensive session, which is an extended session.

  This provides you and your partner with enough time to get to the heart of the issue and begin working on healing your relationship. In these situations, you may prefer to get more accomplished in a shorter period of time. These intensives can last 2 or 3 hours or even longer but a marriage counseling intensive is a great way to save a marriage.

• Yes, for scheduling convenience online marriage counseling is available in multiple states throughout the US. You and your partner can join the online session together on one computer or at the same time on different computers in different locations.

  Online marriage counseling works just the same way as face to face marriage counseling with the exception of the location.

  Many partners find it easier to coordinate their busy schedules by using the online marriage counseling option.