Many people enter marriage with unreasonable expectations of living a dream life that popular movies and songs influence. But sooner than they expect, those dreams get shattered, and their new lives get ruined before they even take off.
Ideally, newlyweds should seek couples counseling before they start their marriage. Unfortunately, some newlyweds wait until they start having issues to seek the services of a couple’s therapist.
As a couple, you need to consider the help of a couple’s therapist like Relationshipsandmore.com in Westchester, NY, even when you don’t have issues, to improve your marriage life.
What Couples Therapy Is
It is the type of psychotherapy focused on helping couples like you and your significant other improve their relationship. If you have had relationship issues lately, you may seek therapy to help rebuild your failing relationship.
Couples therapy addresses a vast range of issues, including sex matters, disconnection feelings, affairs, recurring conflicts, or difficulties because of external stressors. It can be in different forms, including:
- Ellen Wachtel’ method
- Gottman approach
- Behavioral therapy
- CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy)
- EFT (emotionally focused therapy)
How Couples Therapy Works
Couples therapy doesn’t entail finger-pointing or blaming one another. Instead, it provides couples the tools to openly communicate and ask each other what they need for their union to work.
It often encourages couples to discuss existing issues and explore several solutions that can help mend their relationships and even end their conflicts.
A couple’s therapist steers conversations to concentrate on helping couples talk about their existing tension.
In addition, the therapist won’t turn spouses on each other or take sides. Instead, the expert will improve the couples’ understanding and guide them to work out their differences.
Signs Newlyweds Require Couples Counseling
A marriage relationship is like a fingerprint – they are different. Each spouse brings personality quirks, dreams, and hopes to the marriage. When you mix these aspects, they bring a firestorm, fireworks, or even both.
This is why experts say that no one-size-fits-all approach can help determine the right time to get assistance. Generally, the earlier we seek help, the better. However, the relationship dynamics of couples determine when to seek couples therapy.
Usually, therapist availability, cultural/societal variables, and finances play important in spouses’ decision to go for therapy. By paying more attention to the following signs, you and your partner can put off the fire before the house completely burns down:
- Struggling to communicate
- Not talking anymore in the house
- Porn, drugs, and alcohol addiction
- Lack of trust
- Trouble with the children
- Keeping secrets or lying
- Lacking intimacy
- Becoming indifferent
- Depression or anxiety
How a Couples Therapist Helps
Every couple, including newlyweds, benefit a lot from the services of a couple’s therapist. Here are some of the best couples can get from visiting a couples therapist:
-
Keep Stress Levels Down
High-stress levels affect marriage relationships negatively. With the help of a couple’s therapist, you may lower the levels of stress that you experience in your marriage relationship.
Lower stress levels have a lot of benefits. These include improving emotional, mental, and physical well-being. As a couple, you may benefit from all these.
-
Create a Safer Space
When we attend therapy, we enter a very safe haven. We know that everything we share with our therapists will be confidential.
We can also rest assured that our therapist will be neutral throughout the therapy session and will not take sides. This will give us an opportunity to express ourselves during therapy.
-
Understanding the Dynamics of Your Relationship
One of the major benefits of therapy is that we start to understand the dynamics of our relationships. Who has the say? Is the power balanced? Do we fall into a specific communication pattern? Do we have common points of conflict that we disagree about most of the time? How do we handle conflicts?
Finding answers to all these questions and understanding our relationships’ patterns, both in difficult and good times, can help to heal our relationships and strengthen the bond even more.
-
Fight Less and Communicate Better
Although couples don’t always agree on everything, it would be best to see a therapist if arguments happen more often and cause distress in your relationship.
A couple’s therapist may help to address any underlying relationship issues. The expert will help you to practice newer ways to connect more, especially when you have disagreements. This, in turn, will result in higher relationship satisfaction and fewer fights.
-
Avoid Future Issues
Some published reports show that the best thing we may do for our new marriage relationship is to visit a couple’s therapist several times a year. The same studies also tell us that the sooner we see a therapist, the better.
Unfortunately, some of us wait until our marriage is on ‘life support.’ We hope that a therapist will save our marriage.
The truth is that this is not a couple’s therapist’s job. We shouldn’t expect a therapist to use a magic wand to help us do away with our marital conflicts.
If we wish to enjoy the benefits of couple’s therapy, we need to approach a therapist the moment we suspect that our marriage is starting to fall apart. A therapist has the tools to save our marriages and avoid future issues.
-
Learn Effective and Strategic Coping Skills
Source: supportingwellness.com
Every relationship is created differently, and there will always be times that we should learn to navigate. Learning effective and strategic coping skills will help us as a couple get through those challenging times.
By learning the couple’s therapy approaches and coping mechanisms that can help deal with sadness, anger, or stress that interferes with our relationships, we will be setting up a good foundation for a better tomorrow.
Effective and strategic coping skills don’t just help with immediate marriage issues. They also serve as roadmaps to deal with the next difficult times in our marriages.
In conclusion, every couple, including newlyweds, experiences conflicts. For some, the conflict is about money, while for others, it is about lacking intimacy. Whatever the reason, it is important to see a couple’s therapist.
We won’t just learn coping skills and create a safer space with a therapist. We will also avoid future issues, communicate better, fight less, and understand our relationship dynamics.
