Can You Save A Marriage With Counseling?
Does going to therapy or couples counseling really help solve all the issues that are tearing apart a relationship? This is the question most people are pondering as they grow desperate to save a marriage they really are not ready to let go of. The big question is whether talk sessions with someone else can really work for two people in crisis.
Before you go into a counseling session with your spouse, both of you need to understand that it is not the definite cure to all of your problems. You cannot hire someone else to do the dirty work and make things all better, no matter how skilled they may be.
Yet, counseling or therapy can really work if both of you go into it with the right mindset. The problem is that most go into it with the attitude that this third party will see that they are right and their spouse is wrong. They want validation, not objectivity.
This is not what a therapist is there to do. They are not going to take sides, mainly because there is no one person who is right in a marriage. Problems are a collective mess and both people have some things they are doing wrong and some things they are doing completely right.
The issues that must eventually be brought to light during therapy are the ones that lie beneath all the petty squabbling. A husband may argue to death that his wife never cleans the house but the real issue is likely that he feels she does not love and value him enough to keep the house clean for when he comes home from work. That is the issue the therapist cares about.
If you don’t fix the deeper issues the marriage will only continue to unravel.
Couples who go into therapy knowing that finger pointing is useless and they both have their own flaws have a higher chance of success. Both people have to be willing to put their own defensiveness aside and just listen to one another.
Let’s consider an example. A man goes into a session and hears his wife saying how lonely she is. He feels this is an attack on him for not being home and he starts saying how he is the one always working and she just sits at home. She is now defensive as well. Yet, what would have happened if he just heard that she was lonely and did not make it about his work pattern? What if he just simply listened?
If you want to save a marriage through therapy sessions then you can’t automatically feel blamed by your spouse’s problems. It’s extremely difficult to hear that the other is lonely without blaming yourself, but that is what must be done to make this approach work.
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