Couple Therapy

“Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.”

Couple therapy, conventionally known as “marital therapy” or “marriage counselling” is an attempt to improve a romantic intimate relationship by reducing relationship-distress and increasing relationship-satisfaction.

This kind of psychotherapy contains a variety of interventions, techniques, strategies, and perspectives intended to help intimate romantic relationship partners. Traditionally this was considered to be a therapeutic approach utilized by married heterosexual couples only, but with changing scenarios today it is being utilized not only by married couples but also with non-married cohabiting and non-cohabiting couples, and with both same-sex and opposite-sex partners. Thus couple therapy may also take the form of pre-marital- therapy and marital therapy.

The difference between individual therapy and couple therapy mainly lies in the fact that, in the individual therapy session, client is the “individual in the session”, but in Couple therapy session, the client is the “relationship between two people”.

Relationships especially the romantic ones are always supposed to go through the ups and down, it is never picture-perfect, it is always a roller-coaster ride. As goes the saying-

“All relationships go through hell, real relationships get through it.”

When people enter into a relationship, they both come with a particular set of beliefs, and assumptions about how life should be after the marriage or after getting into a relationship. Sometimes they have the almost same expectations and sometimes very different and they may be times when they feel and think that they have same expectations but that’s actually not true, because they may have different love languages.

Read More: The Five Love Languages for Lasting Relationships

When people have different love-languages, they have different ways to express their love, for one person it may be spending time together but for the other person may be offering gifts and giving surprises, so the relationship comes to a standstill even when they both love each-other tremendously.

It starts from smaller issues leading to “relationships distress”, which if aren’t worked through properly lead to “relationship-dissatisfaction” which in long-run may turn to separation or divorce.

Moreover, every romantic relationship goes through five different stages and every stage has different challenges to be faced and couple therapy or counselling is also going to have different approaches as per the stage of the relationship. The stages are namely-

• Attraction and Romance Stage– this is the stage of complete euphoria. There is a release of oxytocin, dopamine and norepinephrine in the brain, which helps in emotional bounding at this stage. Everything is too good to be real at this stage.
• Crisis Stage– When two people start getting comfortable with each-other and things start becoming all too clear. Here comes the first argument and relationship anxiety. Few of the relationships end at this stage only, because that fairy tale phase is already over.
• Working Stage– this stage comes when accepts the partner with all their strengths and weakness, positives and negatives. With complete acceptance comes the stronger bounding. Because this stage is so peaceful, people start feeling complacent, which brings the relationship-issues.
• Commitment Stage– After accepting the flaws and weaknesses of the partner, they choose them for life. It’s all about consciously making a decision about the relationship. This stage brings another set of challenges which involves dealing with the increased expectations with each-other.
• Real Love stage-this is a stage where a couple finds a shared meaning of life and common goals like starting a family. Now the relationship in itself is not the centre of attention but other significant aspects of life are, which sometime may lead to being not able to give proper time to each-other.

Read More: The Psychology Behind Rebound Sex

A very prominent couple-therapy with 90% success rate named as “Emotionally focused therapy” mainly focuses on to developing a secure emotional bond between both the partners, through expression and reorganization of key emotional responses. It seeks the key issues of concern at first and then identifies the negative patterns of interaction and related negative emotions coming from unhealthy insecure attachment style between the partners when the key issues arise and lastly the therapist coaches the partners to develop healthy communications styles so that the new solutions could be found out to the key issues.

Read More: How Does Your Attachment Style Affect Your Relationship?

Another one “Imago relationship therapy”, works through improving “Intrapersonal-relationship”, which means by improving their relationship with themselves, increasing the level of self-awareness, resolving their own past emotional issues by resolving the past unresolved emotional business. It uses various behavioural and spiritual techniques to increase the involvement of the romantic-partners with each other. It has three steps of Mirroring, Validation and Empathy.

• Mirroring is done when one of the partners sends a message to the other and then the other partners needs to send the same message back after paraphrasing it, this step gives them a feeling of being heard and also clears out the communication gap and misunderstanding, because they come to know whether their message is received in the same manner or not.

• Validation involves acknowledgement and acceptance of the fact my partner may have different viewpoints regarding various aspects. And that doesn’t essentially make him or her an incompatible partner to me. So coming to the point of “Agree to Disagree”.
• Empathy contains the understanding of each-others’ emotional states. They are encouraged to imagine the emotional state of their partners and their partners need to report back mentioning how well their partners are understanding the emotions of their partners. This helps in creating a better understanding of emotional states of each other which leads to have a better emotional bonds.

The Gottman Method of couples counselling works on the concept of creating “Love Maps”, which runs on the idea of developing greater insight in their partners’ life and their world, constructing love maps actually tells people how well they know their partner because they need to answer the questions like the name of two close friends of their partner, their favourite getaway place, what was the most embarrassing moment for their partners in their life.  They portray their partners’ psychological world by mapping their partner’s worries, stresses, joys, hopes, and history.

Therapeutic work progresses on building up and maintaining two very significant pillars of any romantic relationship namely trust and commitment. This therapy believes in managing conflicts rather than always trying to resolve them, because not the conflicts could be resolved completely. They are few things which could only be accepted, so an attempt to solve the unsolvable problems will only be counterproductive for the relationship.

In brief every couple –therapy works on the single idea presented well in the below given quotation-

“If you want a relationship that looks and feels like the most amazing thing on Earth, you need to treat it like it is the most amazing thing on Earth.”