5 Reasons Why You Should Go to Marriage Counseling
There seems to be a myth that to go to marriage counseling, your marriage really must be on the brink of divorce or that it’s a couple’s last-ditch effort to save their marriage. This isn’t actually accurate or even helpful for any of us to believe.
Marriage counseling isn’t just for failing relationships
Marriage counseling can be helpful for anyone regardless of where they’re at in their relationship or how long they’ve been married. Whether you are in serious committed relationships or engaged, are newly married, or have been married 10 years, you can benefit from going to therapy together. Marriage counseling is for anyone that wants to have a happy relationship.
You’re two individuals trying to figure out how to be a couple. You only have your past experiences to learn from on how to be in a relationship. The unfortunate part for most of us is those are drawn from past relationships that haven’t worked out. You may only have examples from your parents and siblings, and they may not have the type of relationship you want for yourself or even what is healthy.
Marriage counseling can help you communicate better
Most of us haven’t been taught to communicate well, or not get fired up as soon as conflict arises. We haven’t learned how to not react negatively to a partner’s anxiety or anger. We only know the ways we have responded in relationships before, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The things you’ve learned in these relationships have been beneficial, and have helped you get to be where you are. Those feelings of being unfulfilled in your relationship are just signs that your old ways of doing things might not be enough.
If you want your relationship to be better, it can help to go to couple’s therapy and learn from a relationship expert on what to do is more helpful long term. Here are some reasons to go to marriage counseling.
1. Marriage counseling can help improve your relationship
It’s easy to get stuck in the ways you do things in your relationship. It’s a couple’s therapist’s job to provide an outside perspective. They don’t have the same involvement or biases that other people in your life might have. Having an outside perspective that’s not involved in the relationship like your mom or best friend would be, can help you be more aware. If you don’t know that something you are doing isn’t helpful or isn’t healthy, you are probably going to keep doing it. A couple’s therapist can help you learn new skills that may work better, such as how to calm down when you are feeling pissed off about something your partner does. It can also provide a safe place to go into deeper things.
2. Marriage counseling offers a safe place to talk about hard things and overcome challenges
Marriage counseling is more than about learning how to communicate. It’s about looking at deeper issues that may have happened in your relationship. Some couples come to therapy because they’ve experienced betrayal and infidelity and need to learn to rebuild and repair the relationship. Some people have been through grief and loss as a couple and need help knowing how to work through it together. Therapy is a safe place to really look at those wounds, fears, and anxieties that show up when your partner looks at someone else or says something in a certain tone. Therapy can help you learn to trust your partner with these fears and how to develop an even deeper and more meaningful relationship when it’s done in a safe way.
3. Marriage counseling helps you learn to trust your partner more
Every couple experiences hard things in their relationship. It can be physical illness, finances, parenting, or job stress. All of these things can have an impact on the relationship. When you are feeling greater stress as an individual, it may influence how you talk and interact with your partner. You may be prone to isolate and withdraw rather than relying on your partner for support or comfort. It may stop you from doing things that you’ve always done, and you try to solve them yourself. Marriage counseling can teach you how to open up and be more honest about the stress you are feeling. It can help you learn to rely on and trust your partner on a deeper emotional level than you have before now.
4.Marriage counseling can help you learn skills to avoid future problems
Some people come from families whose parents have been divorced and have feared the same thing will happen to them. You may have been a single parent and are now introducing a future partner to your children. This can be a scary and difficult experience. Both you and your partner may be starting the relationship after a divorce or separation and might be afraid of the same things happening that happened in your previous relationship. Marriage counseling can explore how these past relationships make the current relationship feel scary. It can help couples learn to try something different from the beginning. Marriage counseling can help build upon what you do well in a relationship and continue using what works well for you. Therapy can help heal past wounds from a divorce or separation, so it doesn’t impact the current relationship so negatively.
5. Marriage counseling will help you feel more connected to your partner
You may not have noticed that you are stuck in a rut or that you are feeling more dissatisfied in your relationship. You may not realize why you are arguing more and why it seems to hurt more. You may have noticed that you don’t know your partner as well as you like or how to really trust them. Even the demands of life have caused your love life to be put on the back burner. Marriage counseling can help sort out how you got in this position in this position and how to grow closer as a couple. It can also help explore past things you’ve done to feel connected but have forgotten.
There are many benefits to attending marriage counseling, even when things aren’t as bad as you think they could be. The best work can be done in a relationship when you aren’t on the verge of relationship failure. Marriage counseling can help avoid potential hurt from not knowing any better in the relationship. One of the key things to help a couple connect is through the sharing of emotions, and marriage counseling can teach you how to do this better.
Online Marriage Counseling in Utah
If you feel ambivalent about starting marriage counseling because of your schedule, I totally get it. I wish I could offer you a nanny or a personal assistant, but I can’t. What I can offer you is online therapy in Utah. This allows couples not to have to worry about traveling and commuting to therapy but about navigating it from home.
Online therapy also means that if you are located in St. George, Logan, or Cedar City, I can still work with you and help you improve your relationship.
Looking to start working with a couples therapist in the Provo Utah area?
It can be hard to work on your relationship alone. It’s hard to know what to change when you don’t have all the tools. You are committed to your partner and want to make it work but maybe you just don’t know how. This Utah Counseling Center has a couples therapist passionate about helping couples improve their relationship through marriage counseling. I can help get your relationship to a happy and healthier place. To begin therapy, follow these steps.
Schedule a first session with a relationship expert and complete online forms
Begin marriage counseling
Other mental health services offered by Marcus Hunt Therapy
Marriage Counseling isn’t the only service I offer at this Utah County Counseling clinic. Other mental health services offered by Marcus Hunt Therapy include marriage counseling for LDS couples, premarital counseling, anxiety treatment, PTSD treatment, therapy for men, and EMDR and Trauma Therapy.
About the Author
Marcus Hunt is an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist in Spanish Fork, Utah, at Marcus Hunt Therapy. Marcus graduated from Utah Valley University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Behavior Science and graduated from Abilene Christian University with Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy. Marcus specializes in working with couples with relationship difficulties by providing: marriage counseling, couples counseling, and premarital counseling. As a couples therapist, Marcus can provide couples counseling to couples all throughout Utah through online therapy. Marcus has received training for emotionally focused therapy and utilizes this approach with couples.