Category Archives: Counseling for Couples

Premarital Counseling
Marriage and Family Therapy
Couples Counseling
Relationship Coaching
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 How to Get the Most Out Of Couples Counseling

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Couples Therapy What to ExpectCouples Counseling is one of the most important investments you will make in your life. A little preparation can go a long way in making that investment pay off in big ways.

Many couples enter counseling or marriage therapy each year not knowing what to expect. Many times spouses think that choosing  the right Marriage Therapist or Couples Counselor is all that’s needed. But the truth is, while finding a good therapist is important, it’s only part of the equation. Couples therapy is a big  investment of both time, money and energy. It is also one of the most important investments you will make in your life. A little preparation can go a long way in making that investment pay off in big ways in your relationship.

Note: In this article we use couples counseling and marriage counseling to mean the same thing!

Assumptions of Couples Counseling

To prepare, lets look at some of the basic assumptions of couples counseling. Let’s take a look at what makes a healthy relationship. A healthy relationship is based in the following  principles:

  • Mutual respect, fairness, sensitivity, shared power, collaboration, justice, shared vision and a shared purpose that’s based in reality.
  • You can’t change another person, you can only change yourself.
  • Positive changes that you make in your own behavior will positively impact the relationship as a whole.
  • Under stress everyone behaves badly. It’s not your job to placate, punish, demand perfection, shame, criticize, blame or simply accept bad behavior in yourself or in another person.
  • It is your job and your right to take responsibility for your own behavior in the relationship and to make amends or ask for repair from another person when necessary.
  • These principles and actions combined over time build trust and a stronger relationship.

Initial Goals and Vision

The first task of Couple Therapy is to get clear about:

  • The kind of life you want to build together.
  • The kind of partner you aspire to be in order to create the life and the quality of relationship you desire.
  • Your individual blocks to becoming the kind of partner you aspire to be.
  • The skills and knowledge necessary to do the above task.

What’s Needed to Succeed: the four essential ingredients

In order to create sustained improvement in your relationship over time and to work effectively as a couple unit and as a team there will be some trade-offs. Here is what’s needed:

1. Time.

It simply takes time to create a relationship that flourishes. Time that may have been devoted towards other things will need to reallocated if it isn’t already  towards the following priorities:

  • Basic self-care: This includes adequate sleep, nutrition, etc. to maintain the energy and focus necessary to learn new skills.
  • Basic Relationship Care:  Time together to play, relax, recharge, reconnect and refocus and make repairs. This is necessary to maintain the energy, focus and motivation and to practice new skills.  This time will encroach on some other valuable areas – your personal or professional time.
  • Time to Reflect: Review goals, vision and progress together.
2. Energy and Motivation.

You will need motivation to persist. It takes concerted effort to sustain change overtime. This means remembering your vision and purpose at the beginning of this journey together. Maintaining these intentions even on the worse days can make a huge difference. It is the difference between a slight setback (often a normal and necessary part of the change process) and starting all over again.

3.  Vulnerability and Emotional Risk.

You will be asked to gently but persistently expand your comfort zone with yourself and your partner. Creating a healthy relationship means taking a certain amount of emotional risk: to let go of old defensive patterns and test out new ones. This is a necessary part of personal development as well as marital growth. My job is to help you take these necessary risks without too much stress or overwhelm. At times this will actually be fun.

4. Mental Flexibility.

You should expect imperfection in both yourself and your partner.  This can be very difficult for some, but is a necessary skill in improving reactions to problems. Change is non-linear. There will be ups and downs. This is a normal and necessary part of learning. Just as a young child falls down as it is learning to walk, mistakes are often a necessary part of learning and not a sign of failure. For this reason, it can be helpful to embrace the following paradoxes that are often part of couples work:

    • The slower and more careful we are with each other, the faster things shift in a positive direction.
    • The greatest growth often occurs during our ugliest moments together.
    • It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear.
    • Solutions, no matter how perfect, can still lead to an unsolvable problem.
    • But, when we improve our reactions to problems, the problems themselves can become irrelevant.

How to Prepare for and Maximize Couples Counseling Sessions

The main goal of marriage therapy is to expand your knowledge of yourself, the couple of which you are a part, and the patterns of interaction between you.  As you become more aware of these patterns, they will begin to loosen their hold on you and other family members. Therapy becomes effective when you can bring new knowledge to these patterns and effectively change them or develop new ones.

What to Do Just  Before Each Couples Counseling Session:

Before Each Therapy Session It is a Good Idea to:

  1. Reflect on your goals and reasons for being in therapy.
  2. Think about the next step that supports your larger vision or purpose for being together. Ask yourself “What is needed from me personally in order to be the kind of partner I aspire to become?”

Could you Use a Good Couples Counselor or Marriage Therapist?

Contact our office to get connected to an experienced Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists who can help turn your relationship around.

We are located in St Louis, Missouri and serve couples in the both Saint Louis City and Saint Louis County. This includes the following communities: Maplewood, Webster Groves, Kirkwood, Crestwood, Maplewood, Brentwood, Rockhill, Richmond Heights, Clayton, Shrewsbury, Lindenwood, Ladue, Central West End and the surrounding areas.

Give us a call at: (314) 827-5448 or email us at admin@danceofchange.com

We offer in person sessions in our office in Saint Louis, MO in Webster Groves as well as video (Telehealth) session for anyone located in the state of Missouri

What to Expect in Premarital Counseling:

Counseling for Couples, , ,

Premarital CounselingCongratulations! You have decided to invest in one of the most important aspects of your life: your relationship. According to a longitudinal Harvard study on aging the single most important factor to long-term health and happiness is not good genes, IQ, money, social status, career success, health, or number of relationships, but rather, the quality of our most intimate relationships.

By investing in your marriage now, and throughout your lives together you will be protecting yourself and your partner from life’s discontents, boosting each other’s mental as well as physical health and insuring long term happiness and satisfaction in life.

If this sounds like a tall order, it is. Many people are aware of the high divorce rate in the U.S., which is currently around 50%. Often, role models for a strong and healthy marriage are few and far between. The good news is that even if you or your partner had less than stellar examples of marriage growing up or in your friends circle, many of the skills and elements of a healthy marriage can be taught and learned at any point. The sooner the better!

How  Premarital Counseling can help you build a better marriage.

There are five steps to building a healthy marriage.

Let’s look at each one and what premarital counseling can do for your future together.

  1. Create a Vision Together in Premarital Counseling

One of the key tasks of premarital counseling is to increasing your clarity about the kind of life you want to build together. Many couples have not seriously considered this beyond the basics (Where to live, jobs, # of kids, etc.) and then end up with uncomfortable surprises later on down the road. But this will not be you! That is because many of these surprises can be avoided with a clear, and honest vision.

We will also look at the latest research findings, behaviors and practices that lead to a healthy marriage  vs. those that end in divorce or discontent ( yes, this has been researched) and what that means for your lives together.

  1. Identify Your Path (s)

In order to support this vision you will both get clear on the kind of partner you aspire to be in order to build the kind of life and relationship you want to create.

This involves looking at the relationship as a whole but also the individual strengths and contributions of each person.

We will also look at the long term trajectory of your relationship, the stages of a marriage and the tasks and goals of each stage. You will identify where you and your partner currently stand on your path as couple and what the tasks are of your current life stage. We will also identify the stage you will be heading towards next and what’s needed for success.

  1. Strengthening the Foundation: Communication and Resources

Next we will look at how you and your partner prefer to be loved. This includes love languages but also the “magic ratio” that your marriage needs to stay healthy on a daily basis. Naming your values, attitude and skills is also key. We will look at and practice the essential communication skills that all couples need to feel loved and appreciated. I will actively coach you and give you feedback so you know when you are on the right track. Good communication is much more difficult than most people think. Effective negotiation is even harder. The three most important qualities for effective communication are respect, openness and persistence. We will practice these together and also identify supports and strengths in your relationship (both internal and external). We’ll also look at potential barriers to good communication in your marriage and address them before they become a real problem.

Premarital Counseling

  1. The Zen of Relationships: Dealing with Conflict and Stress

Since stress is an inevitable part of both life and marriage, it’s important to look at how you and your partner’s unique stress physiology play out under stress. This is an element that most traditional couples therapist leave out, yet it is so important! We will look at how to tell when you and your partner are “going over threshold” and what they need from you in those moments. You will also get to know your own “threshold” and “window of tolerance” for handling stress and how to communicate with your partner at these critical times. This is important not only for trauma healing but also trauma prevention as a couple.

Marriage also comes with some built in contradictions (for example: speak up or keep the peace. And also, solutions, no matter how perfect often set the stage for new problems. Knowing this, we will look at how to embrace the paradox and also avoid the usual marriage traps (there are four of them). We look at how to use conflict to actually strengthen a relationship and the steps needed to make a good repair. Finally, we will practice the art of repair together.  This skill is so essential that it can actually save a marriage!

  1. Premarital Counseling helps you create a Resilient Marriage now and  in the  Future

A healthy marriage is like a healthy ecosystem. With the right combination of care and attention it becomes a life-giving place you can live and depend on for sustenance on a regular basis. In this last step we will review all the elements of healthy marriage, the skills you learned, and your commitments to yourself and each other.  We’ll address what it takes to keep your marital “ecosystem” healthy and sustain growth in the long run. Here is what you will need:

  • A vision of the life you want to build together and individually
  • The appropriate attitudes and skills to work as a team along this path
  • The motivation and ability to put the “magic ratio” into practice on a daily basis
  • The skills and motivation to persist and grow even in times of stress
  • Time to review progress, recharge and celebrate your lives together.
How to get the most out of Premarital Counseling:

The major aim of counseling is to increase your knowledge about yourself, your partner and the

patterns of interaction between you in order to create a strong foundation for your lives together. This requires some courage and emotional risk taking on both of your parts.  Counseling works best if you have more goals for yourself than for your partner or the relationship itself.

Unlike regular couples therapy where the focus is on fixing difficult problems, in premarital counseling the focus is on growth and prevention. We won’t be dredging up issues from your past and analyzing them. Rather, I work best when I help you reach objectives you set for yourself in the context of your relationship. A powerful approach to our time together is for each person to do the following before each session:

  1. Reflect on your objectives for marriage
  2. Think about your next step that supports or relates to your larger objectives for the kind of Marriage you wish to co-create, or the partner you aspire to become. Then, please share this with your partner at the beginning of our next session.
About to get Married? Need a Premarital counselor or Marriage and Family Therapist in Missouri?

Are you interested in starting marriage boot camp in order to lay the best foundation for your marriage?

Give us a call at : (314) 827-5448 or email us at Danielle@danceofchange.com

We offer in person sessions in our office in Saint Louis, MO in Webster Groves as well as video (Telehealth) session for anyone located in the state of Missouri