That’s a good question and one we often asked, especially when we reached an impasse, or a rough time in our marriage. The truth is almost any marriage would benefit from good counseling at various stages of their relationship. It’s important before you get married to clarify strengths and weakness, values, goals, learn communication skill, and so much more. In the best of relationships, it’s crucial to reach out again after you have your first child because of the difficult challenges it presents, then again when you are empty nesters, and maybe again when you approach retirement. Each stage requires growth and adjustments. But you still may ask what specifically are we learning?

What’s the goal of counseling? If we are “doing fine” isn’t that good enough? During nearly 48 years of marriage, we saw 9 counselors, and like most couples, it was when we were not in a good place with each other. To be honest, many of the counselors we saw left us empty or confused and we still felt stuck, but it was partly because we didn’t know what we needed.

As a counselor now, most couples I meet with come to me believing their partner is the one who needs to change. They have spent years denying or ignoring the major problems in their marriage and unsuccessfully trying to change their partner. This was true of us as well. I was sure my husband was the problem, and he thought the same of me, but this was a big mistake because it prevented us from seeing our individual parts in our relationship struggle. We each needed to clean up our side of the street and stop waiting for the other person to get their act together. When it comes to improving your relationship, the first step is your attitude toward change. Being open and willing to see your blind spots is crucial to your success.

As one who has been helped herself, and now helping others, I see the primary goal of couples counseling is to increase your understanding of yourself, your partner, the patterns of interactions that have become detrimental to the relationship, and to understand where these patterns began.

The past is not the past if it invades the present. The past repeatedly raised its ugly head in our relationship, but we didn’t recognize it, or what to do about it. Once the impact of your history is explored and understood, you are in a better position to identify your feelings and connect how they influence your thoughts and actions. The goal is to change ineffective or destructive beliefs and behaviors into positive ones that will enhance your relationship.

“Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other” – Dr. Bruce Perry, Child Psychologist

I have often heard the quote, “awareness is easy, but real change is hard.” Identifying what to do and how to do it is the easiest part of couple’s work. The real work is being honest with yourself, figuring out what holds each of you back from becoming the partner you want to be in the relationship. We found the key was hidden in our histories. It’s a combination of the false or wrong ways of coping we learned growing up, as well as the things we didn’t learn about how to relate well, trust, bond, communicate, forgive, connect emotionally, and so much more.

Thus, the need for counseling…

Here are some of the essential skills we didn’t know we were missing, and wish we had learned sooner than we did.