Couples Therapy Explained

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Doable, but challenging

Forming and maintaining a peaceful, well-balanced, healthy relationship between you and your partner is challenging. Doable, but challenging. It’s normal to experience some hiccups with your partner and luckily if a shared goal between both individuals is to work on these hurdles, then couples’ therapy is a great option.

What is Couples' Therapy

Couples therapy is a form of psychotherapy that helps improve the relationship between partners/ spouses/ significant others in intimate relationships. It works on rebuilding a couple’s bond that either have been exposed to difficulties or for those who are seeking to grow tighter.Common issues that arise include:

Issues regarding past affairs/ cheating
Issues related to sex and intimacy
Different views on life-altering matters
You feel like you’re speaking different languages

External factors causing stress in your lives ex: work
Issues surrounding different beliefs and core values
Communication styles and love languages
Familial relationships, and challenging in-laws

These examples also apply as benefits for couples therapy where you get to work on all of these issues to form a better, more secure relationship with your partner.

Different from marriage counseling

It’s important to point out that couples’ therapy differs from marriage counseling. You can still go to couples’ therapy if you are unmarried. It’s for any two adults who have difficulties in their relationship regardless of their living arrangement, length of their relationship, sexual orientation, or marital status.

What to Expect in Couples Therapy

It’s safe to say that couples’ therapy requires most sessions to be attended together, apart from one or two individual sessions a therapist may ask for. The purpose of this is to have a better understanding of the individual’s personal needs and receive some background into how each individual thinks individually. This usually happens at the beginning of the process as it will set the stage for what you can expect during future sessions.The therapist would want to know the main challenges you are experiencing and what causes most of your stress within the relationship. Here, it is vital to be open and honest about the history of relationship with your therapist because it will serve as the basis of setting new goals in upcoming sessions. By time, you will all work together to find ways to improvethose areas of distress that were highlighted within your relationship.

Techniques to Improve Areas in Relationship Difficulties

Techniques are chosen in couples’ therapy based on the new shared goals for the relationship, agreed upon by the therapist and the couple, collectively. Below are common approaches used in couples’ therapy.

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‍Emotion-Focused Therapy

‍In Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), the goal is to explore underlying emotions the couples might be experiencing. The therapist typically starts off by having each partner share specific, problematic events in their relationships. After that, the process of identifying, exploring, and making sense of the underlying emotions that contribute to those situations follow.For example: many couples may find themselves fighting over surface-level things like “not taking the trash out”, while in fact there might be other underlying reasons that drive their emotional response. “Perhaps it’s not particularly about not taking the trash out but, more-so about not listening to me”.It can be difficult for us to express more vulnerable emotions when we’re stuck in anger, resentment, or apathy. That is why access into deeper emotions such as sadness, fear, or hurt aids the revelation into underlying, more intimate emotions. That is also why EFT can be very effective in couples’ therapy.

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‍Solution-Focused Therapy

‍In Solution-Focused Therapy (SFT), the goal is to focus on a specific problem that needs resolving. If the couple’s main concern in seeking therapy revolves around a narrowly-defined difficult situation, then solution-focused therapy can help overcome that.For example: A couple comes in with a specific communication problem. They can’t seem to properly understand each other, or get on the same page. This is a specific concern that was presented by the couple, hence a tailored specific plan that only focuses on resolving that specific issue can be an approach to take.

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‍The Gottman Method

In the Gottman Method, the goal is to neutralize conflicting verbal communication, increase respect, affection, and intimacy, remove barriers that create a feeling of stagnancy, and finally form a heightened sense of empathy and understanding in the relationship.This method entails a focus on destructive behaviors such as the “four horsemen”

Criticism
Contempt
Defensiveness
Stonewalling

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While focusing on areas that include:

Identifying triggers
Exploring disagreements
Discovering values
Sharing relationship histories

Acquiring specific tools to help manage conflict

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Narrative Therapy

In Narrative Therapy, the goal is to help couples learn how to understand the stories they tell themselves and write new ones if needed about their relationship. Sometimes, we can catch ourselves telling stories that guide our behavior and decisions. We do this because we want to make sense of the world around us. In couples therapy, a spotlight of the stories couples use is broken down to explore if it needs a little tweaking. Narrative Therapy helps address the needs of each partner while fostering greater intimacy and connection in the process.

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A Word from O7therapy

These are just a few methods that therapists can use when approaching couples therapy. If you’d like to know about some successful tips to take into couples’ therapy if you ever decided to do so, watch this short video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9pR_Rz70XgIt’s also important to note that couples therapy isn’t only for challenges and struggles experienced in couples’ relationships, it can also simply be a tool/platform/space to grow more intimately together.

Couples Therapy Explained

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