Friday, March 14, 2014

Reasons Why People Choose To Attend Couples Counseling

By Pat Skeats


Many relationships become strained sometimes for different reasons. This could be because of financial troubles, lack of communication or illness in the family. When this happens, working through the problems in a positive way is important to preserve the relationship. Many people have found that couples counseling has been helpful in working through some of these difficulties.

This is also known as relationship therapy. It may be either short term, lasting between one to three sessions, or it may be long term, lasting for several months or even years. The length of time varies for each couple, depending on different factors such as how much progress is being made and whether they can afford to continue the sessions.

Relationship therapy first originated in Germany during the 1920s with the eugenics movement. After that, institutes for marriage therapy began cropping up in the USA starting in the 1930s. This was due in part to the racial purification centers from Germany. Eugenicists such as Paul Popenoe and Robert Dickinson promoted it in the USA. It was also supported by birth control advocates like Abraham and Hannah Stone, two of the founders of Planned Parenthood.

In the 1950s, therapists began dealing with psychological problems in the family context. Relationship therapy as a professional service is still fairly recent. Before that time, relationship help was informally conducted by friends, family members, or religious leaders. In some less advanced cultures, village leaders and group elders fulfill the role of relationship mentor.

A licensed relationship therapist may rely on psychiatrists, social workers and pastoral counsellors for help in treating married people. The duty of a relationship therapist is to listen to and respect their clients. The therapist must understand them and seek to facilitate a better functioning relationship between the partners. They must provide confidential dialogue which is sensitive to the feelings of each person. They should enable each individual to be heard and speak about their feelings.

The ideal relationship is when both individuals are neither too dependent nor too independent of each other. This balance is part of what relationship therapy tries to achieve. Both partners must learn to satisfy their needs for intimacy and autonomy in order to achieve stability in the relationship. This depends a lot on the specific duties of each partner in their life phases and stages of maturity.

Some methods of relationship therapy focus on the process of communication. The method most commonly used is called active listening, developed by Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir. This helps each partner to learn how to communicate in a way that creates a safe environment for each individual to express their feelings.

Before a relationship can be improved between two people so that they can understand each other, it is important to first acknowledge that each person is unique and has their own personality and set of values that influences them. People may adhere to their different value systems without examining them. The nature of a person may be shaped by social and religious groups, among other things, which is why this must be considered during the process of therapy.




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