Wednesday 12 March 2014

What You Should Know Before You Attend Couples Counseling

By Pat Skeats


Relationship counseling is a process by which the parties in a relationship seek outside help in order to recognize and manage problems within the relationship. Every marriage experiences troubles at some time for a variety of reasons. Many people choose to go to couples counseling in order to prevent the marriage from breaking down.

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.

Many psychologists believe that instead of learning how to argue better and analyze past mistakes, it is more productive for both people to recognize and admit that they are emotionally attached to their partner and dependent on them the same way that a child is dependent on a parent. The basis of this dependence is a need for nurturing protection from another person.

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.

The ideal relationship is when both individuals are neither too dependent nor too independent of each other. This balance is part of what relationship therapy tries to achieve. Both partners must learn to satisfy their needs for intimacy and autonomy in order to achieve stability in the relationship. This depends a lot on the specific duties of each partner in their life phases and stages of maturity.

Today, it has become more common to require these individuals to have professional certifications before they offer therapist services. There has also been a move toward the Government registering these services. This is partly due to the fact that therapists have a duty of care to those whom they counsel, and there may be consequences if the therapist is not careful to preserve a proper fiduciary relationship with their client.

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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