How To Find A Good Marriage Counsellor?

By Author: James Walsh
Total Articles: 68
Comment this article

Who Are Marriage Counsellors? What Role Do They Play?

Marriage counsellors are professionals who are specially trained in family systems theory and marriage therapy skills. When couples are trying to resolve their differences, they may get too involved with each other's emotional reactions and lose their focus while trying to resolve their issues. A marriage counsellor can help the couples find their innermost issues and sort them out in a way that enables the couple to learn from the issues and focus on their ‘togetherness' goals.

What Are The Advantages of Opting for a Marriage Counsellor?

Endless fights can create bitterness and misunderstandings between a couple. These misunderstandings and bitter feelings can greatly hamper their communication process. Due to the breakdown of communication process, couples may not know how to communicate their feelings to each other. Therefore, at this time of a crisis, a marriage counsellor can help the couples understand and respect each other feelings while rebuilding the bridges of communication. Let us analyse the various advantages of opting ...
... for a marriage counsellor.

Neutral Perspective

Marriage counsellors can provide a neutral perspective to your problems. Most of the time, people tend to feel that the other partner does not understand his or her perspective. Marriage counsellors can help couples understand each other's perspectives because they are able to look at the marital problem from a different angle altogether.

Techniques Used Can Help Rebuild Your Relationship

Marriage counsellors have the requisite experience and training to understand the dynamics of a marital relationship, especially when it is in trouble. Most marriage counsellors will be able to suggest effective techniques that you can use to resolve your issues. These techniques can be practised with the counsellor and then applied in real-life situations when you are back home. Feedback can be shared with the counsellor later to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques.

Suggest Solutions

Many couples tend to think that they have tried all possible tricks and tactics to handle various kinds of troubling issues in their marriage. However, marriage counsellors are able to suggest solutions that may not have occurred to you. On the other hand, the solution may have occurred to you but you may not have known how to implement this solution. A marriage counsellor can help you in implementing the new solution effectively as well.

Increased Self-Awareness

Often people tend to gain more insight to their behaviour, feelings and issues when they start going for marriage counselling. This self-awareness plays a very important role in rebuilding the marriage. Self-awareness translated into increased sense of well-being and mental peace, which can have an extremely positive effective in a marriage.

How Do You Choose a Marriage Counsellor?

Marriage counsellors should be chosen very carefully. Most importantly, you will have to analyse your needs before choosing a counsellor. Do you want the counsellor to help you in special issues such as anger management or substance abuse? Or, do you want a counsellor that specialises in marital problems related to sex? If you have special issues, it would be best to choose the counsellor who specialise in those areas.

While going through a referral from friends and family may be a good idea, make sure that you do your own research on this issue as well, especially if you have special issues you need to deal with. Contact counsellors and ask for their qualifications, experience, licensing, and education. In addition, ask for a brief description of the techniques used for conflict resolution. This will give you a fair idea about the knowledge of the marriage counsellor. You can find marriage counsellors online as well. In this case, it would be a good idea to explore their websites and find out about their success rates.

What Are The Qualities of a Good Marriage Counsellor?

It is very important that your marriage counsellor portray the following qualities for you to draw maximum benefits out of your therapy sessions.

Understanding and Pleasing Personality

When you are your partner are done with the day's fighting and leaving to meet your marriage counsellor, the last thing you would want is to be in a room with a grumpy and unsympathetic person. Therefore, your marriage counsellor should be a pleasing personality who also displays the qualities of an understanding individual.

Patience

The fights and misunderstandings of a couple may occur even within the premises of a marriage counsellor's office. Therefore, it is important for the counsellor to be extremely patient. If the counsellor displays signs of irritability or impatience, the couple may start feeling uncomfortable and may not be able to discuss their issues with the counsellor in an open manner.

Trust

It is extremely important for you to trust your marriage counsellor. The counselling may be the last chance to save your marriage and you would want to place your trust to the most worthy person. Therefore, it is important for the marriage counsellor to help you feel that you and your partner can trust him or her. Marriage counselling involves sharing the most intimate issues. Therefore, it is important for the counsellor to maintain confidentiality at all times.

James Walsh is a freelance writer and copy editor. If you would like more information on how to get a quickie Divorce see http://www.quickie-divorce.com