Couple Counselling

1) Gottman Method

Gottman Method Couples Therapy has the benefit of three decades of research and practice in clinical settings with more than three thousand couples.These techniques help you resolve conflict when you feel like you’re at an impasse. The Gottman Method uses couples counseling techniques to increase affection, closeness, and respect. You and your partner learn to understand one another and to discuss problems calmly.

The Gottman Method helps couples strengthen their relationship through key practices. You learn to build love maps—a way to understand your partner’s inner world, including their worries, hopes, joys, and past. It encourages fondness and admiration by showing respect and appreciation. Instead of trying to resolve every conflict, the method focuses on managing differences in a healthy way. You also learn to express your needs clearly and talk openly about your goals and beliefs. Trust and commitment grow stronger through honest communication.

2) Narrative Therapy

Narrative therapy seeks to separate the problem from the person by externalizing issues of concern. A therapist will ask you to describe your problems in narrative form, and then help you to rewrite the negative parts of the story. By acknowledging a problem doesn’t define a person but is something a person has, you gain new perspective on the situation. Narrative therapy helps you view your problem from different angles: culturally, politically, and socially. The dynamic has the ability to change the story. By stating negative issues in the narrative form, you become the dynamic in the story.

Narrative therapy allows you to explore the past to bring to light negativities that otherwise remain hidden. By exploring conceptions and behaviors, you gain insight into facts that have been troubling you and your partner. Thus, you find new ways to deal with your problems, effectively rewriting the narrative of your relationship.

3) Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy

Emotionally focused therapy was developed by Dr. Susan Johnson. This type of marriage counseling was first developed for couples, but it has proven useful for family counseling as well. Although emotionally focused therapy is helpful in most situations, it especially should be considered if depression is a suspected culprit of relationship woes. Dr. Johnson’s method is used worldwide in hospitals, clinics, private practices, and training centers.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a short-term method with three main goals. It helps you and your partner strengthen emotional connections, build trust, and create healthier patterns of interaction. The therapy reshapes how you respond to emotions and improves the way you relate during difficult moments. It focuses on forming a secure bond between partners. Research shows that EFT helps 70–75% of couples move from distress to recovery. Around 90% report significant improvement in their relationship.

4) Positive Psychology

Positive psychology emphasizes positive emotions, character strengths, and constructive institutions to promote the notion that happiness is derived from various mental and emotional factors. Through this type of therapy, you learn to focus on positive emotions and to live in the present moment. Many couples find positive psychology liberating and joyful.Positive psychology helps you identify happy moments as they happen rather than notice those moments in retrospect. Specialists believe perception dictates happiness from one event to another. Some people can’t identify emotions as they arise but can see them clearly in hindsight. One technique uses beepers or pagers. Clients expand upon these entries in a journal detailing the previous day. This practice conditions you to enjoy moments as they are experienced.The therapist beeps clients to remind them to record the experiences the clients are currently having.

5) Imago Relationship Therapy

Imago Relationship Therapy combines spiritual and behavioral techniques with western psychological techniques of therapy to expose unconscious components that help you choose your mate. In this way, you and your partner are equipped to relate to each other in positive, caring ways. Examination of the conflict is the key to finding a solution to disharmony. The therapist views the couple’s conflict as a solution to the situation rather than the problem.

Emotional discord in a relationship is often expressed as dissatisfaction, criticism, or anger. This forces you to seek comfort from people outside your relationship. Imago Relationship Therapy examines the root of negative emotions and behaviors to find the cause of severed communication between you and your partner. Acknowledgment that each partner is communicating differently helps resolves problems. Partners learn that disagreements aren’t signs of love loss but are normal occurrences in relationships that can be resolved through communication.

6) Analyzing the Ways You Communicate

The inability to communicate in healthy ways is the basis for the majority of problems in a relationship. Conflicts are bound to arise in partnerships, but by learning to communicate your positions clearly, you can turn conflict into constructive discussion. Communication is a skill that requires conscious effort. What may seem clear to you may not always be fully understood by your partner. It’s important for you to speak your mind rather than to expect one another to read moods and body language, which are open to misinterpretation.

Analysis of the methods you and your partner use to communicate offers insight into misinterpretation. Learning new ways to communicate can seem unnatural at first but will help you and your partner to support and nurture each other. A therapist can guide you toward functional forms of communication that alleviate misunderstandings.

7) Exploring Unconscious Roots of Problems

Some counseling techniques take a psychodynamic approach to therapy. The purpose is to bring the unconscious roots of a problem to the surface, whether the problem belongs to one or both partners. The belief of a psychodynamic counselor is that significant life events and childhood experiences shape peoples’ behavioral tendencies. Such experiences may create an unfulfilled need or a distorted view of reality that leads to dysfunctional behavior. This form of couples counseling is most useful when irrational patterns of reacting exist. Insight into these events serves to change perceptions, and functional patterns of behavior are realized.

Situations, such as childhood abuse or an unfaithful parent, can lead to unreasonable expectations in a relationship. Unreasonable expectations sometimes cause irrational distrust or jealousy. During couples counseling, the therapist explores major past experiences in order to change distorted perceptions and eliminate irrational reactions to current events.

8) Enhancing Intimacy to Promote Closeness

Couples therapy is helpful regardless of whether problems exist in your relationship. Counselors help couples enrich their lives by aiding the development of friendship and ways to show affection. Couples therapy isn’t just limited to deflecting or solving problems; it also promotes closeness and intimacy in a partnership. By providing exercises to increase mutual support, therapists teach couples how to overcome existing issues and how to make relationships resilient. Learning how to tackle challenges without the aid of therapy is as important as overcoming any problems you are experiencing presently.

Undergoing this type of counseling before making a major commitment is beneficial to the future of your relationship. Seeking counseling that encourages intimacy is helpful for couples having difficulties in a relationship. Some couples find this sort of therapy helpful in an existing relationship that is devoid of problems.

9) Individual Counseling

Individual counseling is recommended when one partner is unwilling to undergo therapy or as a precursor to couples therapy. If both partners are not able to seek help with methods of communication, couples counseling can be ineffective. A common issue with individual therapy arises with the client’s right to privacy. Some therapists insist their clients waive their rights to privacy before the therapist will work with partners individually. The best outcome can be expected when both partners are committed to counseling, even if they aren’t firmly committed to the relationship. For a counselor to have a good idea of what is causing conflict, each partner should attend sessions together or separately.

10) Marriage Fitness: An Alternative to Couple Counseling

Besides the above types of couples counseling, there’s also Marriage Fitness with Jeetu Jangra, which is an alternative to couples counseling.

The problem with couples counseling is that it requires the couple. But many broken marriages have only one spouse willing to work on the marriage.

Mindx Marriage Fitness Tele-Boot Camp is known for its Lone Ranger Track, which is designed to help one spouse single-handedly turn their marriage around and inspire the obstinate spouse to join in the marriage renewal process.

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