Relationship Building

Relationship Building

The Benefits of Premarital Counseling

Should You Get Pre-Marital Counseling Before Marriage?

Premarital counseling is a form of counseling that can benefit any couple that is planning to become wed to one another. Premarital counseling is also called premarital preparation.

It is important to remember that the word “counseling” can sometimes be misleading. Premarital counseling is not a form of therapy. Premarital counseling is educational and will help couples learn the skills they will need to support them in having a happy, healthy and lasting marriage.

Premarital counseling will help a couple to identify and communicate about their fears, desires, beliefs, values, dreams, needs, and other issues and baggage that was previously avoided or denied, never discussed before.

Half of all marriages fail. Research has shown that premarital counseling helps to decrease the incidence of divorce by as much as 30 percent.
The belief behind premarital counseling is that it is necessary to encourage the strength of a marriage before it takes place and to prepare and anticipate challenges and conflicts that could arise in the marriage in the future.

Research into the benefits of pre-marital counseling has found that there is a window of opportunity that exists during the year that precedes the wedding as well as the first six months after the wedding when the most benefits from pre-marital education can be gleaned. As time passes and more stress comes into the relationship, a couple can find that negative habits and unhealthy relationship patterns can develop that can become well established and very hard to break.

Research has illuminated seven areas of knowledge and relationship skills that help contribute to the development, success and lasting quality of a happy, loving marriage. Pre-marital counseling sessions should address each and every one of these areas in order to be of the greatest help to couples. These seven areas include compatibility, expectations, personalities as well as families of origin, communication, conflict resolution, intimacy and sexuality and lastly, long-term goals.

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Relationship Building For Couples

Maintaining a successful marriage can be very difficult. Because people change over time, so do relationships. When two people initially get together there is the excitement and passion of a new relationship. During this time of early commitment, each person has the expectation that things will feel wonderful forever. After a few of years the couple begins to notice that there are differences in beliefs and how each would like to handle various situations.

During this period of discovery, many couples experience disagreements and differences of opinion, but they don’t talk about it. They tend to hold back, fearing an increase in disagreements. They are struggling to find a way to go beyond being two people in a relationship to two people who are truly sharing their lives together. Unfortunately, avoiding conflicts doesn’t make them go away. In fact, if issues are being talked about a lot but are not accompanied by problem solving, there can be increased frustration and distancing from one another. With this drifting, many couples choose one of two courses of action: (1) they become disillusioned and pull away from one another more, ending in an emotional or complete separation, or (2) they recognize that they have not been making the necessary commitment to invest in creating a successful partnership.

Below are a few suggestions on how couples can begin to ensure that they are making the necessary investment in their commitment :

Each person must validate the other. Listen without interrupting when the partner is talking. Each party must accept and acknowledge how his or her spouse feels.
Since life is hectic, the couples should see to it that they are spending adequate time together. During this time, they should be focusing on one another and their relationship.
Couples must make a good faith effort to genuinely share their lives cooperatively.
Each person must have positive thoughts about their partner in their hearts and in their heads. This can be achieved by creating a list of positive attributes and reminding each of these attributes on a regular bases.

Many couples find that with recommitment to each other they feel as if they have found the excitement that they originally experienced. Some couples find that they need professional help to truly reconnect. Whatever the approach, reconnection may be possible.

LaSandra L. McGrew is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a private practice in Brandon. If you have any questions or comments about this article or you have a topic that you would like to hear more about, please contact LaSandra at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Individual Counseling

Often a person enters therapy when they are feeling overwhelmed by the stressors of their life. This crisis or stressor presents an opportunity for changes which are beneficial to the person’s overall ability to cope effectively. During a period of crisis a person’s normal defenses are down and emotional distress is high. The person feels an urgency to decrease the level of emotional distress. Because they are motivated toward alleviating emotional distress they are open to new ways of thinking and behaving.

Some people have little awareness of the role that negative stress or too much stress plays in physical ailments Oftentimes, these complaints that they are reporting are reactions to the pressures and circumstances in their lives. The body generally offers several opportunities for the person to intervene in some method to decrease distress. If ignored these signals often lead to emotional problems and physical ailments.

Change is stressful, even when it is beneficial. Change requires effort and conscious awareness. In preparing to engage someone in the process of change, it is important to understand how they normally interact with their environment. In individual counseling , a stress assessment is completed which includes a review of life events occurring in the last year, personality characteristics, and a review of significant historical life stressors which have not been resolved and/or have contributed to how the person currently copes. Life stressors include but are not limited to: divorce, chronic illness, sickness and death of a love one, major life transitions, difficulties at work, relationship issues, and chronic feelings of inadequacy and low self-worth.

The responses to stress are numerous, and so are the approaches for dealing with it. What works for one person many not work for another, therefore it is necessary to be prepared with number strategies for handling stress.

The mind plays a powerful role in the way we handle stress. A goal of individual counseling is to assist clients in understanding how to develop coping strategies and taking responsibility for their thoughts and behaviors. In order for individual counseling to be successful, the person must be open to the possibility of change and be willing to work towards developing the skills necessary for change to occur.

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