Couple Therapy
Couple Therapy
Making the choice to go to couple counselling is tough. Acknowledging that things are not perfect in your relationship can feel like a very big step. It is difficult, even scary, to admit. And if you’re not familiar with how therapy works, the process can seem mysterious, confusing, intimidating or even potentially embarrassing. But relationships are a lot of work, and no relationship is without its issues. And sometimes, when working on those issues, you need help finding your way forward.
Counselling can help couple of all types recognize and resolve conflicts and improve their relationships. For many couple, counselling serves as the remedy they need to save their ailing partnership. For others, it may make the conclusion of a relationship—one that isn’t working, and can’t be repaired—much less painful and more positive. Through couple counselling, you can make thoughtful decisions about rebuilding and strengthening your relationship or going your separate ways.
Why do couple go to therapy? While no two situations are the same, there are some commons issues that couple seek to address with therapy, including:
- Rebuilding broken trust (romantic, financial, emotional, etc.)
Reduction of conflict and arguments - Improving communication
- Renewing and rebuilding emotional or physical intimacy
- Escaping negative behaviour patterns
- Addressing a challenge or trauma that has changed the way they connect with each other
- Ending a relationship in a positive way
Initial therapy sessions are spent in understanding what brought the couple together, and what they appreciated about each other.
The focus is on generating some good will between partners, and finding small ways to connect with each other, so they can tolerate difficult discussions. In this fashion, couple therapy starts slowly, working forward to a place where the therapist can facilitate the more difficult conversations. And throughout the process, the therapist is a 100% neutral party, only seeing partners together, in order to maintain a neutral stance. At Your Therapy, we address relationship challenges via several proven therapeutic methods.
Narrative therapy views problems as separate from the couple, and uses the technique of externalization to distinguish this separation.
The oft-quoted maxim of narrative therapy is: “The person is not the problem; the problem is the problem.” That is, couple often see problems as an inherent part of their relational identities. These problems have been internalized, and embedded in the stories that couple tell about themselves. Externalization allows couple to uncover the positive stories that are hidden beneath problems such as conflict and disconnection.
Emotionally Focused Therapy is a short-term, structured approach to couple’ therapy developed the 1980s. It’s grounded in research, and focuses on negative communication patterns, and love as an attachment bond. The goal is helping couple form more appropriate reactions to their emotions, while also building empathy to become more aware of the emotions of their partner. This helps couple recognize their needs clearly, and express these needs in a way that helps their partner understand and respond.
Attachment-Based Therapy explores how early relationships with a primary caregiver, most commonly a parent, creates our life-long expectations and patterns of behaviour and emotions. In adult relationships, this attachment system is triggered by our romantic partners. For example, some people tend to recreate unhealthy relationship patterns from our childhood into adulthood. Try as they might to escape these patterns, the familiarity is comforting. As couple come to understand their own attachment styles, then learn how to develop themselves as individuals, and now to better relate to one another. By facing these deep-seated fears about love, couple can build new styles of attachment to sustain a satisfying, loving relationship.