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Top 5 Important Reasons You Should Start Couples Therapy

VWB Blog 2 years ago 1

If you’re experiencing marital or relationship problems, you’re not alone. Everyone experiences those bumps in the road — what matters is what you do about it and how you work through it.

Studies have found that couples’ therapy helps 70% of couples who get it. Having professional help to navigate your relationship and open up communication with each other can be hugely beneficial in solving your problems and working against them as a team.

If you’re not convinced, here are all of the reasons that therapy with your partner might help you both.

1. Better Communication

The primary reason for marriage counseling is better communication between you and your partner. For those who’ve never had any sort of therapy (let alone marriage therapy), you may not be sure of the best way to interact with your partner when things are getting heated or you’re discussing something emotionally charged.

Your therapist can help you find ways to navigate the communication that will prevent defensiveness and keep the conversation open. They’ll teach you strategies for opening up when you have a problem you need to discuss which means the conversation will stay healthy and productive rather than turn into a fight.

If you’ve struggled to communicate with your partner in the past or the conversations always get too heated, there’s no shame in it. Many people don’t know the communication tips and tricks that keep a relationship thriving.

However, learning them can even be the difference between a good marriage and a great one.

2. Reduce Stress

No one goes through life without ever experiencing stress, and that’s especially true in a long-term relationship. There are many events that may cause things to become increasingly stressful, including:

  • Moving home
  • Having children
  • Mental health
  • Family problems
  • Career changes

When one person in the relationship is stressed, the other one may feed off of that energy or be unsure of how to handle it which leads to problems. It can cause couples to snap at each other and make the issue worse rather than help.

This is very common in a long-term relationship where people become increasingly comfortable saying exactly how they feel without a filter or consideration for how it may make the other person feel.

One of the great marriage counseling benefits is that you can learn not only how to reduce your own stress, but work together to reduce each other’s. It can help you deal with issues like career changes that may be causing tension or the challenges that come with raising a child.

It can even be a good idea to search for “marriage counseling near me” before you get to the point of being stressed. If you know a major life change is coming up that will affect you both, get ahead of the curve and book some therapy to ensure you never get close to a breaking point.

3. Improve Intimacy

After a while, it can be easy to forget about being intimate in marriage — whether that’s sexually, physically, or emotionally. Other things take priority and two people forget to make time for each other, which can result in them drifting apart or simply feeling less close than they used to.

A relationship counselor can help you find ways to stay connected to each other and talk about how you’re feeling, which can lead to more intimacy at home. This can also open up the conversation between you two, to find if one of you is craving intimacy that you’re not getting.

Doing this can prevent resentment, which can be crucial to keeping your relationship healthy and communication open — circling back to all of the other things that marriage counseling can help with.

4. You Need Help With a Touchy Topic

If you have a problem that’s difficult to bring up with your partner, then you might want a therapist’s help. Perhaps you suspect their mental health isn’t the best but they aren’t open to help or you have an insecurity that you feel you need to talk about but can’t get the words out.

Regardless of what the issue is, a counselor can help you touch on topics that you may be unable to bring up on your own. They can navigate it carefully with you both and help to keep the conversation productive and progressive, ensuring that you’re working towards a solution and keeping any friction to a minimum.

5. Help to Rebuild Trust

No relationship is perfect and sometimes, something will happen that causes a breakdown of trust. This might be:

  • Cheating (emotional or otherwise)
  • Hiding something from one partner
  • Doing something that hurts a partner, whether intentional or not

If you’ve experienced something like this in your marriage and you’re struggling to regain trust, it might be time to ask for a professional’s help.

Sometimes the thing that happened is so severe that the trust can’t be rebuilt. If this is the case, then at least you’ve had a professional’s help and did everything you could before deciding that the relationship is at the end of its journey.

Couples’ Therapy Is Key to a Happy Marriage

Whether you have a problem that you need to address in your relationship or you just want to be preventative, couples’ therapy can help you get to a healthy and happy place where you and your partner can both thrive. It can open up communication, improve intimacy, and help to address those touchy topics you find difficult to bring up on your own.

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