Couples and Marriage Counseling

These are seven common reasons couples seek relationship help.

1. You’ve grown apart

After years of marriage, some couples no longer engage with each other and merely coexist as roommates.

Couples often forget what brought them together in the first place, why they fell in love.  If you’ve been with somebody for a long time, you’ve built a life narrative, memories and a history that you can’t recoup with someone else. Couples therapy can help reignite that.

2. You clash about money

Money has always been a contentious issue for couples but throw in additional life stressors and you’ve got an atmosphere ripe for financial friction. In a Harris Interactive poll, 36 percent of married couples said money matters cause arguments with spouses.

Clashes may stem from differing spending styles or disagreements on how to save for, and spend, for wants and needs.  There may be stress about not having enough money, or inequalities in the way your earnings are being managed. Therapy helps people understand their relationship with money and the way that it shapes their thoughts about themselves and about other people.  Often, the way we view and handle finances is linked to past experiences.

3. Someone has been unfaithful

One of the most common reasons for going to couples therapy: attempting to repair a breach of trust — in less delicate terms, cheating. The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy has found that 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men report having had an extramarital affair.

But, to be sure, cheating doesn’t only mean physical infidelity. “Hiding something and being secretive is an emotional betrayal, “You might reconnect with an old flame through Facebook and think, We’re just catching up; it’s harmless. Then, all of a sudden, it’s more than that.”

How to tell when you’ve crossed the line? That’s tricky. “Infidelity means a lot of things to a lot of different people. What’s important is that partners build a shared, agreed-upon definition of fidelity within their own relationship.

If you’re tempted to stray, it’s better to try counseling now than face the fallout later. And if one partner has already had an affair, there’s definitely a way back. About a third of married couples survive an affair, but generally, they’re the ones who go for treatment and make every effort to save the union. In fact, an affair is often the impetus for dealing with things that have been avoided for years.

We all have different ways of handling conflict. Some of us thrive on confrontation; others shut down when things get heated. And then there are the passive-aggressive types. Big blowouts can leave behind tears and hurt feelings, but frequent bickering can be just as destructive.

An argument is not in and of itself a bad thing; rather, it’s the way people handle the conflict that can make it unhealthy.   It’s not necessarily what you say but how you say it. It could be criticism or complaints, jabs or unkind words, or verbal abuse, like name-calling or yelling.

Couples therapy teaches you how to diffuse disagreements in a healthy way — reasonably and respectfully. So instead of throwing out something inflammatory like, “Why did you do this?” try a more encouraging tone, such as, “Help me to understand why you feel this way.” Swap pronouns, trading “you” (as in, You always do this), which puts the other person in a defense mode, for the first person (I feel like you’re not hearing what I’m saying).

Stay away from always and never. And don’t pull out the past.   Recent events are what you want to talk about.