You’re probably reading this because you’re wondering if your relationship could use some support. You might be feeling disconnected, unfulfilled, and tired. Perhaps you are fighting more than you’d like or you are going to bed angry with one another. Maybe you’re afraid you’ve grown apart and you don’t think you have things to talk about anymore. Has your career, parenthood, grief, or other life events drawn you apart? You might miss the closeness you once had but aren’t sure how to get back to what you had before. Your sex may be less enjoyable but you don’t know how to talk about it.
We are taught that relationships should be easy, effortless, and natural. Yet, we learn nothing about what to do when they aren’t feeling easy.
Couples Counseling
You’ve probably tried things on your own to feel closer to your partner, have more fun in the relationship, communicate what is important to you, and figure out how to have better sex. Unfortunately, most of your own efforts and waiting probably have yielded less benefit and growth than the amount of effort you put in. The truth is, you probably don’t have the best examples around you of healthy happy relationships, few of us do. So if you’re going to work so hard towards improvement, it’s time to work more efficiently.
How Couples Therapy Helps
You have a mechanic for your car, a doctor for your physical health, an accountant for your taxes, and a teacher for your kids. We turn to experts (people who are more trained and experienced than we are in a given area) for everything else in our life. Why wouldn’t you have a trained, experienced, and licensed communication and intimacy expert for your relationship?
Couples counseling, marriage therapy, and premarital counseling are all just different words for the same thing: seeking support, information, and new skills to improve the quality of your relationship.
Relationship counseling might include:
- Improving conflict resolution, communication skills, and boundary setting to create more respect and trust
- Changing negative relationship patterns to enhance relationship fullness
- Improving romance, passion, pleasure, and emotional connection
- Finding ways to support each other through times of transition and stress
- Learning new and creative ways to have fun together
- Exploring how to be “me” within “us”
- Recovering from a recent affair
- Finding points of connection and opportunities for shared experiences, as well as ways to feel like a team again
- Engaging in more and better physical affection and sex (including navigating differing desires between partners, low desire, sexual dysfunctions, and sexual pain)
- Processing differences in parenting styles to create a stable and healthy home for the kids
You might seek marriage counseling after a particular hardship, during times of increased conflict or decreased intimacy, or following a big life transition. Sometimes people seek relationship counseling as prevention (such as premarital counseling) and sometimes they seek it to help support them through divorce or separation if they believe their relationship cannot be repaired.
At Kalamazoo Therapy Group, you can trust that your relationship counselor is specifically trained for marriage, couple, and family therapy. Our therapists are experienced and skilled with relationships and want to help support you in improving your own experience as a couple — however that may look for you.
More Info on Couples Therapy
Contact the Kalamazoo Therapy Group
Call us at (269) 225-5148, or send a message.
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