What is couple therapy?

Are you considering couple therapy but not sure what it’s about? Whether it will help? If it’s worth your time and money? You are at the right place. We all know that romantic relationships require a lot of effort. They are like any appliance in our house that requires proper care and servicing by a technician occasionally for them to function optimally. The couple therapist is the technician that helps your relationship function better.

Couples therapy is a type of psychotherapy that helps couples recognize and resolve conflicts thereby gaining an insight into their relationship. Couples therapy is not just for married people, it can help couples in all types of intimate relationships — regardless of sexual orientation or marriage status. The therapist helps people involved in a romantic relationship to make thoughtful decisions about rebuilding and strengthening their relationship or going their separate ways.

How does couples therapy help? What do you do in couple therapy?

Couples therapy starts with an interview of the couple by the therapist. He/she asks some standard questions regarding the relationship history while simultaneously exploring the client’s family-of-origin, values and cultural background. Usually both partners take couples therapy, however, sometimes one or both partners choose to work with the therapist alone in individual sessions.

After the initial interview the therapist assists the couple in identifying the issue that will be the focus of treatment and how this will be worked along the sessions.

During the treatment, the therapist helps the couple gain insight into the problem, while helping both partners understand each of their roles in what is causing the issue. This helps them change the way they perceive each other and their relationship.

The most crucial aspect of therapy is changing behaviours and ways of interacting with each other. Most couples gain awareness into their relationship, they learn better ways of emotional expression and develop the skills required to communicate in an effective manner and learn essential problem-solving skills to be implemented in their daily lives. Thus, leading to better relationship dynamics and mental well-being.

When is the right time to seek couple therapy?

The right time to seek therapy is long before couples think they “need” to. Most of the times, couple’s issues are initially very small, however they grow over a period of time into relationship threatening issues as couples don’t seek help. This is where therapy can help, by providing the necessary tools and techniques to improve conflict resolution and communication skills.

Therapy can help partners to improve mutual understanding and is considered an effective tool in managing a relationship and leading to better emotional health. Couples should take preventive measures to maintain the health of the relationship, thereby strengthening the bond which might be tested over the course of time.

How long should you go for couple therapy?

Couples therapy is often short term; however, there’s no one-size-fits-all in answer to this question. It usually depends on the couple and the issues they’re working through. Some couples may require only a few sessions to mend their relationship, while others may remain in therapy much longer.

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 Nest syndrome.

Married couples and living together couples face several problems, such as relationship conflicts that occur once children have left home. This farewell is very painful for parents; but it also creates the possibility of uncovering unfinished business or unresolved issues between the parents.

It is important that the couples know how to cultivate moments to share together. Source: Joydip Dutt / CC BY-SA

Couples therapy proves to be the key to address relationship problems associated with familiar crisis, for example, when adult children leave the familiar home. We note that the “empty nest syndrome” is a relatively popular term, it is the outcome when children become independent from their parents’ home, this leads to the parents feeling sadness and loneliness. But the fact of the offspring leaving home, goes beyond disrupting parent’s roles. This departure can expose a number of relationship issues, which many times before the couple preferred to avoid, or they weren’t aware of the issue or struggle.

The avoidance of relationship problems

When parents see themselves alone at home, when children are no longer a “distraction” to their reality as a couple, they might become a couple again or realize that something is not working.

Couples might confront issues that appear after the departure of their adult children, usually, they have been dragging them along for several years, even some beginning as unresolved premarital problems and have been latent during the family life. Many times if the couple’s members have started to note some issues and chose to overlook the situation as well as avoiding consulting a couple therapist or family counselor, the relationship has suffered, creating couples’ conflicts and other kinds of family issues.

It´s necessary to consider that when a couple has their first child, they are no longer just a couple, they become parents, a family.

Becoming parents brings all kind of changes and the appearance of new challenging roles.   Many things are established for the sake of their kids, everything in their daily lives revolves around them. Parenthood might become an absorbent task. The relationship members could lose their own identity as Individuals. At the same time the couple might suffer after giving all their attention and effort to the family’s wellbeing. They become careless with their own couple spaces, they don’t take enough time for themselves to enjoy and grow the relationship. In some cases, kids are “used”, consciously or unconsciously, to escape from some conflicts between the parents, arguing things like: “there´s no time for that” “I do not want to hurt my kids with that.”

Because facing all these problematics is overwhelming and anxiety provoking, couples tend to avoid family counseling, and other therapeutic options, that can help with their issues. Therefore, it is not surprising that at some point, couple’s problems appear as a huge unstoppable rolling snowball of personal, relationship and unresolved family issues.

Couples therapy as a priceless option

There are many resources for couples, some of them have a preventive aspect, oriented to new relationships just like premarital counseling. This kind of therapy helps the couple to understand their dynamics and solve conscious or unconscious issues revealed by the couple or either of the couple’s members. Individual therapy is part of the treatment, many times as a fundamental tool to work on personal issues that are affecting the relationship greatly.

Some of the topics in couple therapy will focus specifically on a group of objectives. Such as the following ones:

• Helps people in order to make them aware of their problem and how this affects their couple’s dynamic.
• Establishing and improving dialogue with each other for good communication is the key to developing a better relationship dynamic.
• Define the objectives that partners wish to achieve individually and as a couple.
• Design strategies to solve these relationship problems.
• Facilitate the process of “re-discovering” themselves as a couple.
• Support the creation of spaces and activities which are exclusive to the couple.

In conclusion: a farewell is a couple’s new beginning

While it is true that saying goodbye to kids is painful, it is necessary to remember that this event represents an excellent opportunity to begin something new and take care of all the needs that have been ignored or postponed until now; unfinished business can cut off the full development of a person and a relationship with a life partner.

With regards to couples counseling, it is an invaluable resource in cases of empty nest syndrome and helps couples to accept problems and work them out, to enjoy and re-discover a romantic relationship or decide on a separation if they do not have the desire to continue together or work on their problems.

Gabriela R. Giuggioloni MA, LCSW-R

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