Will Marriage Counseling Help?
This is one of the top searches on google. Most people want to know if something will work before they invest their time and energy into it. It’s the reason sites like Yelp are so popular and customer reviews are the most read part of product information.
Marriage counseling absolutely does help but under certain conditions.
Here are 3 things that will give you much better results from marriage counseling:
1. Seeing a therapist that is an actual marriage specialist.
Finding a couples therapist in Rancho Cucamonga, CA can be tough - it’s hard to find the right therapist in any area (I’m speaking from personal experience - it took me 6 months to find my therapist and I”m a therapist who knows what to look for!).
But if you wanted an eye exam you would see an ophthalmologist, not a podiatrist. You also wouldn’t see a generalist.
In our practice we have one main focus: couples. Through our education and training we have worked with many individual clients and even some children, but have come to find that working with couples is our forte, and it’s what we are most passionate about. Because we have dedicated our practice to working with couples it means that all of our continuing education is focused on honing those skills, on learning all that we can in this subject area, and we have attended many, many trainings that can help us be better clinicians in this exact area.
This is what you want to look for, not Suzy Save’em-all who specializes in everything A-Z and takes a new training every other month based on whatever she needs to learn to help clients she’s feeling stuck with.
2. You attend sessions frequently and for an optimal amount of time.
At Rancho Counseling we recommend weekly therapy, and tell couples to plan to be in therapy for at least 6 months.
Developing the skills that are necessary to create lasting change takes time. Think about how long you and your partner have been together, and how long you’ve been stuck in the same relational patterns. When you become accustomed to these patterns over time, it takes time to learn a new way, and to implement those things you are learning.
Couples therapy isn’t like a regular doctor’s appointment. You don’t go in once, get a prescription, and then take it and move on. Therapy is a process, and in order for that process to work, you must invest the time.
Another common issue is with the frequency of sessions. If you are seeing a therapist once a month you are literally spending one hour, out of the 730 hours focused on your relationship - think about that ratio. That is truly not enough time or energy to create change.
3. You and your partner show up and are ready to work. Many people make the mistake of thinking the therapist is going to do the work for them, and that just by showing up their relationship will be fixed.
A couple’s therapist is like a guide. If you were to hire a guide to take you through a hike in a national forest, you would expect that guide to show you all of the amazing points of interest along that trek, point out areas you should avoid, and help you find your way.
You would not expect that guide to move your feet for you - it is expected that you walk and climb alongside that guide, follow what he/she has to say, and do the work that it takes to get you to the peak, so that you can enjoy the amazing scenery. This is the same with therapy.
If you discover in therapy that you often become critical of your partner, and that has become detrimental to your relationship because of the hurt it is causing your partner, then it is up to you to change that pattern when you are outside the office. That process may be slow, and you might slip up from time to time, but ultimately you are the one who must create that change.
If you have any questions about how couples therapy can help, or just general questions about therapy, ask away! I LOVE hearing from you! Leave a comment below or schedule a free 15-minute phone consultation here.
