If your marriage is a mess, or perhaps just less than you were hoping for, and you feel you need marriage counseling where can you start?

You can go straight to a face-to-face marriage counseling service or you can find on-line marriage counseling through joining a forum or by email. Some people are fortunate to have friends or family who are helpful, though too often they are partisan - they have often made up their minds as to who is at fault.

I have a strong suggestion here - forget the idea of finding who is at fault.

If you focus on fault then either you or your partner will feel bad, and feeling bad is often not conducive to sharing what is important to each of you. More to the point it can get in the way of having a good relationship and going forward together.

If you are considering counseling in all probability you have a clear understanding of what you think your problem is. In addition you probably have some very strong emotions surrounding it all.

“She spends and spends without concern for our bigger goals.”
“He’s not responsive, we haven’t had sex for over two years now.”
“She couldn’t care about the mess the house is in. We both agreed she should to stay at home with the children but I can’t cope with the mess.”
“He seems to think that just because I agreed to stay at home with the children that he doesn’t have to do anything in the house. He treats the place like a hotel.”

Whichever sort of counseling you go to you might like to think through some issues first to clarify your understanding. This can both speed up the process and make your direction clearer for when you start sharing your concerns with another person.

One of the most common things when it comes to counseling is that the reason someone goes to counseling may have little to do with the big problem they might need to work on. The presenting problem, as it were, might just be a symptom of something much larger.

There are a number of key areas in your life that you will want to think about and a number of approaches you can use to get one-on-one marriage counseling advice.

Think about your relationship and your problems and how they affect:
• Staying or becoming connected to each other
• Building shared values (and also developing a respect for your partner and the places where their values differ from yours)
• Understanding and agreeing what you expect from each other in the way of roles - and also a way to negotiate new roles as you change and develop and as circumstances around you change
• Understanding what your personal and shared goals are
• The need for and desirability of family and couple rituals

Very frequently partners do not wish to go to counseling for a whole multitude of reasons. So what do you do then?

Accept it, respect where they are coming from and go and work on some aspect of your relationship alone. Gain insights into how you function and what you could do differently including considering the long and short term consequences of any changes you might want to undertake.

Learn to ask yourself questions, better questions than you have before. Too often we get stuck in our own understanding about how to interpret something. Questions help us to find out different ways of thinking which affect what we think our options and choices are.

If you go down the counseling track then be aware that what you think you are hearing from your counselor might not be what your counselor intended.

I remember clearly one client who, when asked if they had ever thought of separating, immediately thought that the counselor was recommending that they separate, which wasn’t the case at all. So if you feel yourself being driven down a track you don’t want to go, then check it out. And even if you do like the track, check it out - they might not have been recommending anything at all!

Counselors should be encouraging you to find things out about yourself, not making recommendations for action. So learn to listen to your own body and your own mind and get to know yourself and what you want. Counselors can be excellent in helping you work through the baggage that you have. However your life is yours and only you know what is important and why things are the way they are.

If you don’t like the counselor you find then go find another one you do like, one who makes sure you feel respected as you explore the uncomfortable bits of your life. If face to face counseling doesn’t work then go exploring online. And vice versa.

In the meantime before going to a counselor purchase Lee Boucom’s book "Save The Marriage" because in his first chapter he gives out some really excellent advice on choosing a counselor that could save you both your marriage and a lot of money.

In the meantime sign up for the free mini-series on relationships.

HP
22 Jan 2009

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