Reasons Why People Choose To Attend Couples Counseling

By Pat Skeats


Sometimes a relationship can suffer strain if there are stressful life events happening. This may be due to financial difficulties, such as a job loss, a breakdown of communication or someone suffering from an illness. This may also be due to insecure attachments, jealousy, anger or interference from third parties. These are just some of the problems that couples counseling tries to tackle.

John Gottman is a well-known relationship therapist who researched marriage for more than thirty years. His finding lead him to believe that healthy couples do not listen to and echo the feelings of their partner naturally. Instead, whether they were happy or sad, their partner always responded in a reciprocal manner.

Relationship therapy first originated in Germany during the 1920s with the eugenics movement. After that, institutes for marriage therapy began cropping up in the USA starting in the 1930s. This was due in part to the racial purification centers from Germany. Eugenicists such as Paul Popenoe and Robert Dickinson promoted it in the USA. It was also supported by birth control advocates like Abraham and Hannah Stone, two of the founders of Planned Parenthood.

The purpose of using love maps is to illustrate the idea that that each person must take responsibility for awareness of the problems in the relationship. Each person must be aware of how they contribute to the problem and start to make changes in how they think and feel about things.

As cultures modernized and the western world saw nuclear families become more prevalent, there was a shift towards training people to become accredited relationship counselors or therapists. Volunteers can be trained by a Government agency or a social service group in order to help those in need of family therapy. Some communities have their own groups of volunteers who can help others.

Rather than trying to make decisions for the couple, the relationship therapist should seek to empower them. They must feel confident enough to take control of their lives and make important decisions on their own. The end goal is simply to improve communication so that they learn how to do this.

The basic job of a therapist includes identifying any repetitive, negative cycles of behavior in the relationship. They must strive to understand what the source of the negative emotions is that consistently shows up. Ultimately, the therapist should seek to foster a secure attachment between the individuals to help maintain intimacy in the relationship. Some of the core principles of relationship therapy are respect and empathy for each person and tactful behavior at all times.

Some therapists are increasingly using modern technologies like voip conferencing to interact with clients. This is becoming popular because of the added accessibility that it gives to busy clients, as well as breaking down any geographic barriers if one partner is in a different city or town. However, there are concerns regarding the privacy levels of these new technologies, despite their convenience. Many clients and therapists still prefer the comfort of having in-person sessions.




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