Your relationship doesn’t have to be nearing divorce for you to consider couples counseling. In fact, seeking counseling early on can prevent problems from becoming increasingly intractable and painful.
Couples counseling can not only help both of you build a deeper understanding of each other but also of your individual selves. Building greater interpersonal skills can bring so much to your relationship. Through my years as a therapist, I have found that couples commonly bring the following issues to therapy:
Disagreements
Sharing our life with another person involves a lot of communication and sometimes, compromise. Often, finding our way to compromise involves necessary conflict and disagreement along the way.
1. Finances
Working together to budget expenses often leads to conflict. Often, there is a deeper underlying cause for some of your disagreement. How each of you wants to spend money tends to reflect your values and what’s important to you. Perhaps one of you wants to stay home with young children but the other disagrees. Maybe one of you wants to spend money on travel now but your partner wants to pad your retirement fund.
A therapist can help you examine your monetary issues and help you find resolutions.
2. Child Rearing
Raising children is an intensive process. There are lots of decisions to be made. Normal developmental behavior and stages require adaptation and sensitivity to your child’s personality. Parenting is stressful and often influenced heavily by your own backgrounds. It’s normal for this to create conflict in a relationship. Counseling can help you work together during these sometimes exhausting years.
3. Responsibilities at Home
Dirty dishes and other household chores can become a big issue in marriages! Yet, that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Home responsibilities—and how to divide them— can lead to many arguments. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, home repairs, and more demand time and attention. Often, one person does the bulk of them. This can lead to resentment.
As with financial issues, deeper interpersonal issues and miscommunication often underlie the outer symptoms. The outside perspective of a counselor can help you work through perceived imbalances in your relationship.
4. In-laws
Adapting to the role of in-laws in our lives is a frequent hot button topic for many couples. Your partner’s parents, or your own, often have expectations that can interfere with your relationship. Or perhaps your in-laws aren’t as involved as you’d like them to be. Moreover, you may feel your partner resists standing up to their parents.
Whatever the circumstances, extended family is important. Learning to navigate the issues gracefully can be aided by a therapist’s support.
Intimacy
Sexual struggles are very common in long-term relationships. Sometimes there is a physical reason, but often there are emotional issues that can interfere with your intimate life. Perhaps you’re dealing with differing libidos, loss of libido, or other sexual struggles. Maybe one of you has become addicted to pornography.
A therapist can help you work together to root out obstacles to your sex life. Exploring the problems, causes, and desires for this part of your union will help you find ways to restore this part of your relationship.
Life Transitions
Often major changes in your life, even good ones, create upheaval in relationships. When a child arrives, demands and priorities shift. New stressors and responsibilities are added. Likewise, moving can create relationship problems. So can the death of loved ones or the changing needs of aging parents.
Finding the support and guidance of a counselor is important during these times to foster acceptance, teamwork, and growth as a couple.
Individual Emotional Problems
When one partner struggles with individual emotional issues, such as depression, anxiety, or substance abuse, the relationship also suffers. Anxiety can make it difficult for you to enjoy things together as a couple. If a partner has social anxiety, attending group events together may be an area of conflict. Flight phobia can limit what vacations you take together. The symptoms of depression (fatigue, withdrawal, lack of interest) also wear on a relationship.
A couples counselor can work with both of you to navigate these unique issues and how they impact your relationship. They can also work individually with the partner who needs help addressing their own issues.
Communication problems
Let’s face it: communication problems are often at the root of a couple’s issues. It can be so easy to misunderstand what someone else is saying and for neither of you to even realize a miscommunication has happened. Counseling can be invaluable for finding a way to communicate effectively, thereby reducing the underlying cause of other conflicts.
I specialize in helping couples restore their relationships. Whether your issues seem big or small, addressing them early on is vital to your relationship success. Please do not hesitate to reach out for help. I’d be honored to work with you.
Read more about couples counseling with me to see if we’d be a good match.