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Marriage and Couples TherapyAll couples enter a relationship with love and hope. They see this relationship as promising both adult independence and interdependence as they join with partners who will enrich their lives and fulfill their emotional needs. Loneliness will be a thing of the past, loving companionship the promise of the future. When things go wrong how can the promise be regained? The task of the couple’s therapist is to help the couple restore their emotional bond and, at the same time, build a new, more mature relationship. Couples often bring intense conflicts and feelings of being abused and misunderstood to therapy. They may bring their earlier life experiences to this relationship resulting in old needs and conflicts reemerging in the present. These issues include the daily problems of living, loss of romantic dreams, worry about emotional and sexual abandonment, disappointment and anger. There are a many people in every relationship: the couple, their children and their respective parents, and often grandparents and the extended family as well. In addition, each partner brings the emotional patterns, memories and experiences from his or her earlier life into the new relationship. These emotional "ghosts" from the past may emerge as the couple builds their life together, triggered by major life events that range from pregnancy and child raising to financial and relationship stress. The couple's life becomes more like that of their parents as their days are preoccupied with work, bills, obligations, or life with children. Furthermore, each partner has a personal agenda based on his or her unconscious needs. Marital reality has turned out to be very different from the hopes and dreams with which the relationship started. What can the marital therapist - psychotherapist do? He or she can re-activate some of the positive emotional knowledge that each partner has of the other. This understanding opens the conflicts between them to resolution through practical solutions. There can be a clarification of the deep hurts that the couple may have inflicted upon each other. And the negative agenda that each partner, individually and together, has been replaying can be laid to rest. As mentioned above, some issues derive from earlier life experience, are shared by both partners, and enacted in the couple's relationship. By helping the partners be aware of each other's needs, three adults, the therapist and the couple, can effectively address them. Couple's therapy can be a rewarding experience for both parties, and may offer new insights and more fruitful ways of interacting that go well beyond solving the original issues that brought the couple to the therapist's door. |
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