Is Couples Therapy Right for You?

Struggling with Conflict?

Have you considered couples therapy for a while? Struggling with conflict can be a long and painful road before couples decide to do something about it. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re experiencing conflict in your relationship. All couples go through conflict.

You have different experiences and different triggers than your partner has. Perhaps when growing up you developed different expectations of how life should be. Or maybe your idea of how relationships worked is different than your partner’s. You’re bound to clash at some point. However, disagreeing isn’t necessary a bad thing.

Granted, in a perfect world, there wouldn’t be any conflict. But the truth is that real life is full of conflict. Given that fact, the goal of couples therapy is learning how to better deal with conflict, to resolve matters more easily and more quickly. What counseling can do for you is provide some effective tools. With these tools, you can survive the conflict and come out the other side having grown as a person. You’ll acquire an approach to life that can make it better.

A Step by Step Approach to Counseling

Counseling determines what your obstacles are. From your perspective, what problems are most pressing in your relationship? Also, what are your needs? And your triggers? What are your partner’s most pressing problems, needs and triggers? Can you tell us what dynamics arise when you interact with each other? Are there unhelpful behaviors that arise?

As a first step, to get a sense of your relationship as a couple, we’ll talk about your history—how you met, your dating experiences and how you view your successes and difficulties together. After that, we’ll ask you to talk about a specific problem you’ve had trouble solving. That may feel difficult at first. If so, that’s okay. But the more you open up, the better we’ll be able to address the issues.

You’ll each have the chance to talk with your therapist alone. This way you can vent your emotions without worrying about badly affecting your partner. Your side of the story can come out, and you can help your therapist fully understand your perspective.

By the way, your therapist won’t take sides. Therapists remain neutral. But a deep understanding of the issues helps us provide couples with the right tools.

A Roadmap for a Better Relationship

The treatment plan your therapist devises is your roadmap to creating a more satisfying relationship. You’ve been honest and laid it all out. So has your partner. The roadmap helps you implement different behaviors and use specific tools to resolve the problems you’ve struggled with.

You see—your problem never was—that you had problems. Everyone has problems. Your problem was finding the right tools to resolve them. And that’s where we come in.

Find out more about couples therapy

We’re glad to answer your questions. Reach out to us and take the first step.