How Marital Counseling Can Help Save Your Marriage

1. How Marital Counseling Can Help Save Your Marriage Marital counseling really can work - but it's all about how you approach it. Therapists can help you target the real issues with your marriage. It's a process that needs both people to be involved, committed, and willing to change. As long as that's the case, marital counseling can save your marriage. Ready to learn how it works? In this guide, we'll break down the top ways marriage counseling can help. Keep reading so you can make the best decision for your relationship! 1. Get Your Connection Back Relationships are all about connection, but it's all too easy for the problems of daily life to get in the way of feeling connected to your partner. If you feel that you need to get that spark back, counseling can help you regain your intimacy. When relationships begin, there's the famous "honeymoon period." It's easy to feel connected and warm towards your partner when everything is new and exciting. But once you're deep into a marriage, those feelings can get lost - and it's easy to feel like you'll never be able to get them back. It's natural to feel the desire to separate a bit once the initial excitement wears off. But if you start to lose connection, marital counseling can help you find it again. 2. Make a Commitment When you got married, you made a commitment to each other. However, committing to a person is one thing. Marital counseling often focuses on committing not just to your spouse, but to future growth and building together. Marriage counseling is a bit like going to the gym. It's an investment that might not feel fun at first, but you're doing it for the future results. Your counselor will help you focus on the future and do the work that's needed to commit to growing together. 3. Avoid Future Problems This commitment to growth, and the work you do now, can help you work through your current problems. But maybe even better is the fact that counseling can also help prevent future problems from coming up in your marriage. Of course, the same situations and frustrations of life will still arise. But avoiding serious relationship problems is all about how you and your spouse handle things, both as individuals and as a couple. Going to counseling helps you get the tools you need to work on things in a healthier way. These tools will help you no matter what future problems the two of you need to face. 4. Improve Communication

2. All too many problems in a relationship come down to issues with communication. If you need to improve your ability to communicate with your spouse, counseling will help. And chances are good that you do need to improve in that area - even if you don't realize it. Each individual has their own communication style and ways of understanding things. When we talk or communicate in non-verbal ways, there's always a bit of translation needed to account for our differences. However, things can easily get lost in translation, creating problems out of nowhere. Learning to communicate, discuss, and negotiate in healthy ways will make an amazing difference in how your marriage works. You can practice your new communication skills with your therapist, and soon you'll feel comfortable using them all the time. 5. See How You Can Change Professional counselors often see people coming to therapy with the idea that their partner is the one who needs to change. But one of the best things marital counseling can do for you is to help you see the ways you can change, too. Most of the time, both people can improve on something. Counseling isn't about placing the blame for relationship problems on one person. It's about finding ways you both can work things out, both on your own and together. Your therapist might help you find ways to change that you would never have thought of on your own. Although you might feel frustrated at first, you'll soon be thankful that they encouraged you to improve. The results are worth it. 6. Speak Your Truth Chances are, there are some marriage issues that you've held back on discussing with your partner. They might seem too volatile or hard to discuss. But when you work with a counselor, you have a space to discuss these things without fear. Therapy can also help you find the communication tools you need to approach more difficult topics gracefully. Bringing up the things you've been holding in is one of the first steps to healing your relationship, and couples therapy gives you the space to do it. 7. Recognize Underlying Issues Oftentimes, the things you argue with your partner about are just superficial issues. It might seem like you're constantly arguing about things that don't matter. But these fights are often hiding underlying issues that need to be uncovered. Since you're in the relationship, you're too close to the situation to see what these issues are. But a therapist can help you uncover those problems and start to address them. The seemingly inexplicable problems you've had will start to make more sense once you can see what's going on beneath the surface.

3. 8. Break Bad Habits Sometimes, relationships fall into unhealthy patterns. These habits might be so ingrained that you don't even realize what you're doing. But in a counseling session, your therapist will help you and your partner recognize toxic habit loops and replace them with better alternatives. Will You Give Marital Counseling a Try? Signing up for marital counseling is often the hardest part of the whole process. Making that choice might feel like it's the beginning of the end. But in reality, this can actually be a new beginning for your marriage. It's time to take away the stress of your marriage and start enjoying it again. Wondering how to tell if your relationship needs therapy? Read my guide to relationships here.