Couple Counselling: Navigating Challenges and Strengthening Relationship

Couple counselling plays a crucial role in addressing unique relationship challenges, such as when a woman decides to divorce her husband because he seems “too perfect.” These situations highlight the underlying complexities that can arise in the relationship, often stemming from misunderstandings or differing expectations. Through counselling, couples can navigate these issues by gaining deeper insights into each other’s behaviours, emotions, and needs. By fostering open communication and mutual understanding, counselling not only resolves conflicts but also strengthens the foundation of their relationships. This proactive approach not only helps prevent future misunderstandings but also cultivates a healthier and more fulfilling partnership for both individuals involved.

According to Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Psychology Dr Ridhima Shukla, a couple of counselling sessions can be effective. In many countries, counselling is an integral part of life and is viewed positively. However, here, counselling is often not considered in the same light. It is sometimes seen as a sign that a person cannot deal with their surroundings on their own, but that’s not the case. When a couple is in distress, counselling can be incredibly beneficial. Often, individuals may start seeking advice from friends, family, or other third parties. For example, if a wife is facing difficulties in her relationship, she might share her concerns with friends, sisters, or her mother. Involving third parties can sometimes create further complications, as these people might have different perspectives on the relationships and the issues at hand.

In contrast, seeing a counsellor provides a safe space for the couple to share their thoughts and emotions freely. This environment allows them to express their feelings and look at their situation from a fresh perspective. Counselling helps them work through their problems together and find solutions on their own, without the biased opinions of others. Therefore, seeking couples counselling is a better option than relying on advice from friends or family. Counselling offers a safe space for the couple to discuss their deepest concerns and desires. The guidance they receive in counselling is unbiased and focused on helping them work through their issues together. In conclusion, couples counselling is often the best course of action when facing relationships challenges.

Couple Counselling  

Couple counselling, also called couple therapy or marriage counselling, is a type of counselling for intimate partners. Couple counselling identifies the conflicts between the two partners, and improves the communication and interaction among them, helping to strengthen the relationships. Couple counselling can help to identify negative patterns within the relationships. Couples counsellors help the partners in many ways, they may always monitor the progress. 

According to Counseling Psychologist Dr Sumathi Chandrasekaran, The primary reason for the issues in the relationships is a lack of compatibility. Each partner has their own set of expectations that aren’t being met, which leads to emotional suffering for both of them. These unmet expectations and emotional blocks prevent them from connecting, resulting in their emotional needs—such as being loved, accepted, and valued—not being fulfilled. This is critical because the purpose of a relationship, especially marriage, is to evolve and become better individuals together.

When there is incompatibility and dissatisfaction, conflicts arise and spill over into the family, causing further suffering. Often, one partner becomes conscious of this discord and seeks help. Typically, it’s either the husband or the wife who approaches me initially. Once they start to see positive changes, the other partner may join the process. However, it’s rare for both partners to seek help together from the beginning. Usually, one person is significantly more affected and takes the initiative to address the issues.

Why a couple needs counselling? 

Early years, divorce cases were low in India, but now, they have increased. What are the reasons behind the divorce? Most divorces are caused by misunderstandings and improper communication. Couple counselling can aid in improving the communication between the partners. Apart from communication and misunderstanding, couples may seek counselling for various reasons like anger, financial challenges, parenting conflicts, substance abuse, unemployment etc.  

Read More: Psychology Behind Commitment in Relationships

How does the couple counselling help couples? 

Couple counselling helps in several ways: understanding the roles partners play in their relationship, recognizing interpersonal differences, identifying unhealthy relationship patterns, and pinpointing unrealistic expectations one partner may have of the other. Couple counselling also helps the partners to address the beliefs and values that create conflicts. Couple counselling is beneficial for couples in all stages of their relationship, including married and unmarried couples, senior couples, and LGBTQ+ couples alike. The objectives of the couple counselling are the following; 

• To provide a private setting for the couples to have a conversation about their issues and find solutions by themselves
• To provide equal opportunity to each spouse to speak and listen to the other partner, which promotes understanding
• To help the partners understand their side of the fault and make awareness to avoid the behaviour that caused the problems
• Learning to accept each other’s beliefs and values is crucial in reducing misunderstandings between partners.
• To help the couples identify the trouble spots, like unreal expectations and miscommunication

What happens in couple counselling? 

1. Improved the Communication process between the Couples: 

Miscommunication is a major reason for disputes. Miscommunication occurs when there is a failure to understand or accurately interpret the point of view, intentions, or messages of your partner. It can result from answering questions incorrectly or not grasping your partner’s perspective effectively. Essentially, it stems from a lack of understanding of your partner’s viewpoint. Couple counselling provides a supportive and secure environment to improve the communication skills of the couples. With the counsellor, couples can learn to clearly express themselves and listen to their partner’s needs and wishes.

Read More: 15 of the Best Couples Therapy Techniques to try

2. Help to Identify the Individual needs of the partner: 

Every individual has a different need; it is important to understand your partner’s. Without a proper understanding of your partner’s needs the relationship can’t work healthily. If your partner expresses a need for quality time together but you respond by giving lots of gifts instead, it might not satisfy their actual need and could potentially create new reasons for conflicts. As a spouse, it’s crucial to understand and prioritize your partner’s needs to nurture a harmonious relationship. Understanding what truly matters to your partner can help avoid misunderstandings and strengthen your connection. The couple’s counselling helps the couple properly understand each other’s needs through effective techniques and skills.

Read More: Emotional Validation as a tool to improve Relationship

3. Resolve the conflicts between the Couples: 

In every relationship, conflict is a natural part of the journey, but at times it can escalate and become more challenging for the couple to manage on their own. Couple counselling offers effective strategies to identify and resolve conflicts stemming from misunderstanding and miscommunication. By learning proper conflict resolution techniques, couples can minimize the triggers of conflicts and cultivate a stronger, healthier relationship together. 

4. Builds Trust and Intimacy between the couple: 

Trust and intimacy are important things for maintaining a strong and healthy relationship. Couple counselling plays a crucial role in helping couples build trust in each other. This trust forms the foundation for a strong emotional connection between partners. In couple counselling the counselors offer the couples plenty of trust-building exercises, which help them to build trust. The open, honest, and deep conversation between the couples helps to improve their intimacy. 

5. Improves the emotional bond between the couples:

The emotional bond is the strong base for a healthy relationship. The process of couple counselling helps the couples to explore their emotional bond. In couple counselling, the couples are trained with effective skills that help to improve the emotional bond between them. The skills help to improve the empathetic view of each couple, which promotes a healthy emotional bond. 

Read more: Role of Empathy in Building a Meaningful Relationship

6. Help the couple to adjust to changes together:  

In our lives changes are constant; every individual faces lots of changes in their life span.  Some changes made our life into trouble, and that caused many difficulties for us. In a relationship, we face lots of troubles and difficulties caused by changes in our lives. The couple counselling helps us to adjust to the changes in our lives. Each partner has to understand the changes in their life and try to adjust to them. The counselling process helps the couples adjust to the changes together. 

Couples need to understand each other to prevent unwanted and silly conflicts and problems between them. The couple counselling process helps the couples to provide valuable insights and awareness to them, which helps to avoid those conflicts. This article provides how couple counselling helps couples.