Tip One: How to Improve Your Marriage

In my marriage counseling practice, I work with couples and individuals who are struggling in their relationship skills, looking to improve their marriage and their relationships with themselves or learn how to be happier and healthier.

Wake Forest counseling can help you learn how to bring your partner closer instead of pushing them away and turning against their emotional bids for connection. Individuals and couples in couples counseling Raleigh NC are often looking for tools to improve their communication, feel safe, and rekindle closeness with their partner.

Nevertheless, there are some issues that particularly come up a lot in my therapy with couples. So I want to delve into them here to start reflecting back on them individually or together with your partner and hopefully feel better.

So, here is the tip on how to improve your relationship.

Couples Counseling Raleigh NC Tip One: Shifting from Individual Gratification to Relationship Joy

So, what does exactly mean to shift personal satisfaction for relationship joy? For example, choosing individual gratification over relationship joy takes place when you argue with your partner and your end goal is to be right.

In my marriage counseling practice, I always advise couples that it doesn’t really matter who is right and who is wrong. For example, does it really matter if you feel happy at the end of the argument and your partner is unhappy? Of course not.

What matters is that you reach this beautiful, safe place in your relationship where you both feel connected and happy.

It is strongly advised that you consider individual or couples counseling if “winning” the argument is important to you.

A skilled counselor can help you:

·       Develop communication skills

·       Learn to really listen

·       Learn how to negotiate in a relationship

·       Work through the grieving process over not getting what you want in your relationship

·       Improve the relationship with yourself and with your partner

Those are skills that anyone can learn and benefit from. However, every relationship is a process that requires hard work and commitment. So, unpacking many layers that these communication skills contain can help your relationship flourish. 

Couples who can move beyond the “I-statements” and relying on logic in their communication are more likely to have a positive relationship. If you can look deeply into your heart and be vulnerable with your partner, you will be able to really connect with each other.

Having this goal in your mind to be shifting from your own satisfaction to relationship satisfaction can help you tap into empathy and realize that you are a team. A team who is struggling with the outside factors that keep you stuck and unhappy but who make it.

Sex Life and Relationship Joy

Another situation where you can shift personal satisfaction into relationship joy involves intimacy and sex life.

When it comes to our sexual life, many of us tend to base our sexual life on an old model of arousal-intercourse-orgasm. In couples counseling Raleigh NC, I work with couples who have different sexual needs, which often becomes an obstacle in their relationship.

However, enjoying each other sexually can involve different things. You can be intimate without having sex, so don’t limit yourself to old models you’ve been accustomed to. If you try not to have an orgasm as your main goal, you will be able to enjoy one another and truly connect.

Nevertheless, when you feel that you can’t openly discuss your sex life issues with each other, I suggest you consider seeking couples counseling or couples intensive.

Counseling intensives can help you address your problems, work out the roots of your sex issues, and understand one another’s point of view.

A skilled couples counselor can help you reach helpful insights and develop a plan for switching individual gratification for relationship joy. 

Summary

Many couples feel stuck in unproductive behavior patterns that prevent them from truly connecting and being authentic with themselves and one another.

An ability to shift your perspective from personal satisfaction to mutual fulfillment can go a long way in improving your communication and relationship skills.

I hope this information was helpful. If you have any questions or would like to book your free 15 min phone consultation, click here https://www.irinabaechlecounselingllc.com/book-a-consult