Maintaining a healthy and mutually satisfying relationship requires dedication, commitment, and effort. However, many couples grow apart under the pressure of everyday life, different expectations, or baggage from their past.

It can be difficult to keep your passion and commitment alive when you have to navigate daily challenges or deal with unresolved issues from your past that impact your current relationship and well-being.

Marriage counseling Wake Forest NC can help you and your partner gain essential skills such as communication, empathy, and self-management to improve your relationship.

Normally, when you go to marriage counseling, you want your therapy to work and help sort things out in your life and your marriage. However, answering "Will marriage counseling help?" is not that simple. Whether or not your marriage counseling helps will depend on several factors.

Some of them include:

Your openness and vulnerability

To use what you've learned in psychotherapy in your daily life, you must be willing to dig deep and discuss your most intimate experiences, feelings, and thoughts. Mostly, the success of your marriage counseling will depend on how much you love your movie. Every one of us has our own stories, narratives, or perceptions of every situation in our lives (I like to call them "movies").

These narratives are frequently developed in childhood; they are messages we internalize about ourselves and others as children. They linger with us for the rest of our lives, and we act on them as if they were true, even though they are merely our perceived or interpreted reality.

How attached you are to your narrative or your movie will dictate how much progress you will make in marriage counseling. So, if you are emotionally open and vulnerable, your marriage counseling is more likely to be effective.

Your access to your emotions

Some people have difficulty identifying, understanding, and expressing their emotions, feeling uncomfortable around vulnerability. So, they would rather intellectualize or rationalize their feelings when feeling overwhelmed by anxiety, hurt, anger, or sadness because using logic helps them cope with difficult emotions.

For example, you may use extremely vague or abstract language to express your emotions, resulting in dissatisfaction and confusion in conversation with your partner.

The level to which you trust your therapist

The therapeutic relationship between marriage counselor and their clients significantly determines whether marriage counseling will help. You must also be willing to express your concerns and feelings to your therapist openly and honestly. And to be able to do this, you must trust your therapist, the modality they use, and their expertise on the specific issue you are dealing with.

The level to which you trust your partner

The effectiveness of your marriage counseling depends on how much you trust each other and how open you are with each other. So, you and your spouse must be motivated to attend marriage counseling sessions regularly and actively engage in the process. Marriage counseling is impossible and will yield no results if one or both parties are actively involved in an affair or do not trust each other.

How much you love and care about your partner

Finally, you must genuinely care for and love your partner if you want your marriage counseling Raleigh NC to work. Love for your partner is a prerequisite to couples counseling. You may not like each other because of the distressing pattern your marital dynamic is in. Still, for marriage therapy to succeed, you must love and care for each other.

Summary

Will marriage counseling help or not? The answer to this question may depend on many factors, the most important of which are:

·       Your openness and vulnerability

·       Your excess to your emotions

·       The level to which you trust your therapist

·       The level to which you trust your partner

·       How much you love and care about your partner

I hope this is helpful and that you apply it not only to your relationship with your spouse but also to your relationships with your children, friends, and other significant people in your life. If you have any questions or would like to schedule your free 15-minute phone consultation with me, click here or check out FAQs to learn more.

This is not your typical weekly kind of therapy. I am here to help couples and individuals in relationships do what is proven to work to help them heal their relationships. Through marriage counseling Raleigh NC, marriage retreat in North Carolina, online therapy North Carolina, and individual counseling, there is something for every couple who wants to heal their relationship.

Stop wasting years of your precious life to feel happy. Schedule your free 15-minute consultation with me today by clicking here. During the call you will discover how having a place to heal your relationship with a guide can take you from the hurt to a healthier relationship than the one you grew up with.

Hi, I'm Irina Baechle, LCSW, in Raleigh, NC. I believe in the power of healthy relationships and write on that topic.

Whether you and a partner are co-creating a healthy marriage or you are single and navigating how to have healthy relationships, my content is for you.

Let's make healthy, trustworthy marriages the norm instead of the exception! Topics I write about include marriage, infidelity, roommate marriages, healthy second marriages, and healing after toxic or unfaithful marriages.