Marriage Counselling
Marriage counselling can help your relationship as often it is our closet relationships that we find most difficult. Interpersonal conflicts can be frustrating, hurtful and confusing. You may find yourself struggling to communicate, or repeating negative patterns that you just don’t know how to break in your marriage. You are not alone. Marriage is an investment.
Whether you are looking to repair a relationship or strengthen one, marriage counselling can help you build the skills needed for a healthy, satisfying, long-lasting connection.
Marriage counselling is the process of counselling people in a relationship to try and understand and manage differences and repeating patterns of distress. It is not only just in marriage relationships that we can run into strife. The relationship involved may be between couples, family members, work colleagues, and friends.
Some common reasons couples engage in marriage counselling include:
- communication break down
- money pressures
- infidelity
- imbalances in power
- difficulties maintaining trust
- living separate lives
- problems with extended family
- adjusting to parenthood
- conflicting ideas on issues including child rearing, lifestyle, friends and finances
Marriage counselling can help individuals to:
- understand the relationship you currently share
- rediscover why you were attracted in the first place
- communicating your wants, needs and frustrations more effectively
- understanding your partners feelings
- cope with unpleasant emotions
- resist the urge to criticise or otherwise behave cruelly toward your partner
- find out what you now want from your relationship and from each other
- understand how you contributed to whatever your relationship has become
- discuss how you feel about each other now
- discuss what you are prepared to do to make this relationship work
How Gestalt therapy can help with Marriage counselling
The Gestalt therapy Cape Cod model is utilised in facilitating and working with families and couples. Optimism is the thread that is woven throughout the Cape Cod Model. It is a belief that one moment can make a tremendous difference; a difference in understanding, in perspective, even in connection. If we are coming from an optimistic stance that says people are always doing the best they can, those moments have the potential to impact greatly on a client’s awareness. Optimism opens up energy, making us available for all kinds of new or newly framed opportunities, whereas pessimism makes us vigilant, tight, narrowly-focused and often times closed.
Here are the steps to the Cape cod Model of Marriage counselling
- Build trust and connection with the client/client system
- Look for what is “well developed” in the client/ client system, rather than looking at what is “right” and deliver this observation to the client
- Look for what is “less developed” in the client/ client system and deliver this observation, using specific data that has been gathered by the Gestalt therapist.
- Do a “Let’s try.” This is often built off of the well developed traits, and is co-created with the client, making sure it is small enough to take on and assimilate.
- Meaning Making – what stood out for the client in #4
- Summarize learning from the session.
The above steps gets to the foundation of the problem by allowing each person time to express their views and issues in a supported environment in order to work toward better awareness and understanding of each other and the relationship in which they have created together.
The counsellor/therapist’s role is not to make judgements or make decisions for their clients; they are there to provide support to their client’s in a mutual environment; facilitate and support effective communication between couples or family members; help each person understand the other’s needs; teach effective coping strategies; practice conflict resolution and anger management strategies.
Seeing clients from Gold Coast to Tweed Coast – Pottsville, Cabarita, Kingscliff, Casuarina, Murwillumbah, Terranora, Banora Point, Tweed Heads, Coolangatta, Tugun, Currumbin, Currumbin Valley, Palm Beach, Elanora, Burleigh Heads, Miami, Robina, Mudgeeraba, Merrimac and Gold Coast.