Couples experience both highs and lows as they travel through the journey of life together. A commonly misheld belief is that happy couples never argue or disagree. This is entirely untrue. Conflict is a natural part of being sharing your life with someone. What is important is whether you manage the conflict in a positive or negative way. This involves skills such as learning how to calm down, communicating your needs to your partner, developing the discernment to detect when is the right time to say something, and other valuable tools.
Couples therapy aims to help couples learn positive and healthy ways to manage the inevitable conflicts that will arise between partners, all with the aim of helping to enhance the bond that brought the couple together in the first place. Through engaging in exercises in therapy that encourage acceptance between partners, couples learn to trust and be vulnerable with each other outside of the therapy room.
Some of the specific issues that can be treated through couple’s therapy include:
- Communication
- Conflict resolution
- Difficult family dynamics
- The decision to stay together or part
- How to divorce well
- Infidelity
- Premarital counseling
- Co-parenting
- Rebuilding the couple’s friendship and bond
- Sexual and/or intimacy issues
- Infertility
- The transition to becoming new parents
- Rebuilding the couple relationship after children move out of the home
- Forgiveness
- Rebuilding trust
- Past individual trauma/issues currently affecting the couple relationship