Deciding On Marriage Counseling

By Margarita Nahapetyan

Marriage counseling is becoming more and more popular these days. Many couples going through a tough time in their marriage automatically consider marriage therapy as a possible way to help the relationship survive.

Institution of marriage is something special that has become a part of every society since the beginning of human race. Marriage is a social, spiritual, or legal union of two individuals who usually start the life together with the intentions of spending the rest of their lives together. People marry for many reasons, but mostly for the formation of a family unit, and for procreation, education and nurturing of children.

However, things do not always go as planned and intended, and many married couples eventually find themselves in a situation when there is no escape from the fact that the marriage is in trouble. This is the time when those who believe in the marriage counseling, or therapy, start thinking of it as a last resort.

Marriage counseling is the process of counseling the couples in an effort to recognize and to better manage or reconcile troublesome differences and repeating patterns of distress. The counseling as a discrete, professional service is a recent phenomenon. The idea of the therapy was established as an accepted practice in the 1950s. Until that time the work of relationship counseling was informally fulfilled by close friends or family members.

Today, the counselor professionals believe that it is not right for a married couple to abandon their vows and forget the love that once had connected them together, just because of some character differences and human weaknesses. They try to do everything they can in order to change the stuck situation for the best.

If couples have made up their mind to pursue marriage counseling, they must also understand that it can be either good or bad for them. In spite of numerous advantages of counseling, some people still find some fault with this kind of psychological strategy. Opinions differ and no family members or friends should interfere with the decision making, it is only couples themselves who have to take the final word.

The first thing to start with before referring to professional help is to make sure if both individuals are willing to make the marriage work. It is very important because if it is only one of the spouses who wants the marriage to survive, then the idea is doomed to failure from the very beginning. Before you consider marriage counseling, you should ask your partner if they are willing to collaborate at working the things out.

The primary advantage of the marriage counseling is that psychologists do not work with you according to some set of certain riles. It is a therapy based on each individual case, resolving different issues of every particular family. Very often, having someone from the outside, especially a professional, will help you identify problems that you and your spouse failed to see. Therefore, both of you can learn better communication and you can really work toward fixing the problems.

Counseling can not only help you with the minor everyday problems, but also may reveal the unspoken, and possibly unrealized, problems lying deep inside the conflict. When the underlying problems come out to the surface, it will be much easier to deal with them and solve the smaller issues.

Always remember that you should not hide any details from your marriage counselor. You should be prepared to answer difficult and personal questions. Without this information, the counselor will not be able to help you resolve your problems and make your marriage successful. The questions can range from personal habits to private life, as well as your preferences and dislikes. There might be things that you will be uncomfortable to share with, but it is very important that you open up and do share.

Marriage counseling can take months, and in some cases even years, therefore it is essential that you have patience, and make sure that you both are prepared to sacrifice an extra time in order to save your marriage. In addition, the counseling can turn out to be very expensive depending on the duration of the therapy. But if spouses understand that they genuinely want to make their relationship work, then the sooner they start a counseling process, the more chances of success they have.

Marriage is all about compromise. Compromise is always hard. No matter what the couples decide about marriage counseling, they need to know, first of all, how to deal with their problems. Fixing marriage is a huge task and could be one of the most important ones in the entire life. Counseling can be a place to learn and understand how to do that, but should never be the last and only thing to count on in hope to save a failed marriage.