The Tip One: Consider Doing Individual Therapy Too

Individuals and couples who struggle to connect or want to feel happier, more grounded, and peaceful in their relationships typically come for marriage counseling.

Marriage counseling Wake Forest NC can help you reconnect with your partners, understand feel more secure in your relationship while honoring yourself and being who you are.

However, to really understand the roots of the marriage issues, you need to do a thorough inner work on yourself. Therefore, I strongly suggest to all of my clients in marriage counseling Wake Forest NC to consider doing individual psychotherapy in addition to their marriage therapy.

Working with an individual therapist can help you connect to yourself on a deeper level, in addition to connecting to your partner.

In other words, individual therapy can help you make even more out of the marriage counseling that you are doing every week.

The Importance of Inner Child Work

Most of our relationship and marriage problems stem from unhealthy and unproductive thinking and behavior patterns that we adopted or learned in childhood. Changing our thoughts and behavior is a long process as it takes time and personal effort to embed new patterns in our psyche.

However, if you are already in marriage counseling or planning to seek counseling, consider doing individual therapy. Although it may seem a lot of work, money, energy, and time, individual counseling is highly recommended because most of us unfortunately still operate from a very undeveloped place in psychology known as an inner child.

Although adults, most of our interactions are still happening from this place where two children are talking to each other instead of two adults.

Your inner child represents your way of being. It is the sum of your past experiences and childhood memories. These experiences and memories can significantly affect our development, psychological well-being, and relationships.

In other words, your inner child can be either a supply of strength, positivity and wellness or a source of great suffering.

Your childhood experiences may have caused mental health issues, low self-esteem, codependency issues, compulsive behaviors, or other personal issues. So, the comprehensive inner child work can help you process your childhood experiences, heal your potential attachment wounds, and learn how to love yourself.

Individual therapy can help you learn how to get in touch with your inner child, comfort them and give them permission to finally let go of false beliefs and values you formed while growing up.

 Unless you’ve done a whole ton of inner work (that most of us haven’t yet), you have a lot to do in terms of reconnecting with your inner child, learning about its old inherited patterns, and helping it grow.

Inner child work can help you learn how to undo unproductive patterns we inherited and learned from our parents, peer groups, and culture. In individual therapy, you can learn a lot about yourself because, the truth is, we sometimes don’t know who we really are due to all conditioning, labels, and other things that shaped us as individuals.

Your inner child work can help you understand your emotions, needs, and fears. Then, you can learn how to communicate them to your partner in the atmosphere of vulnerability and acceptance in marriage counseling Wake Forest NC.

When you learn to communicate your needs with a place of profound self-understanding and self-acceptance, your partner will be able to hear the message and respond to it positively, instead of feeling pushed away, withdrawing, or becoming offensive.

 Summary

I highly recommend that all my clients in marriage counseling Wake Forest NC seek individual psychotherapy while doing marriage counseling Wake Forest NC.

Individual psychotherapy can help you get in touch with your inner child and start working on your internal struggles that cause distress in your relationship.

You can do individual therapy at the same time as marriage counseling, or you can do it before marriage counseling. There’s no right or wrong way is doing it as long as you are doing the inner work, evolving, and progressing.

If you have any questions or would like to schedule an appointment in my Wake Forest or virtual office, do not hesitate to book your free 15 min phone consultation online by clicking here.