Relationship Enhancement for Couples and Families
Learn how to effectively express thoughts, feelings, expectations and hopes, along with how to validate one another, and work through conflict. You will develop skills that will help you and your partner and/or family grow in love, feel more connected and understood, and work through even the most difficult issues with compassion.
Premarital and Newlywed: Premarital and Newlywed therapy can help you build a strong healthy foundation. Giving you a better chance for a satisfying and stable marriage. Premarital counseling can help you to set healthy expectations, practice effective communication, reduce toxic resentments, and constructively discuss heavy topics. Couples with premarital education tend to report higher levels of marital satisfaction and according to a survey published in the Journal of Family Psychology, experienced a 30 percent decline in the likelihood of divorce over five years. Even the "happiest" well adjusted engaged or newlywed couples can often benefit from couples therapy especially if they have not yet done premarital therapy. Couples who are in crisis and on the brink of divorce or who follow through with divorce often share that at one point they too were happy in their relationship and admit that they waited too long to seek help and wish they would have sought couples counseling earlier in their relationship.
Couples Tune Up: Does your marriage need a tune up? Couples therapy can help a couple reconnect, improve their communication, assess their strengths and areas for growth, grow closer together instead of further apart.
Discernment Counseling for Couples On The Brink: What is Discernment Counseling? If you or your spouse are considering divorce but are not completely sure that’s the best path, you are in a tough spot and Discernment Counseling is designed for you. It’s a chance to slow down, take a breath, and look at your options for your marriage. Discernment Counseling is a new way of helping couples where one person is “leaning out” of the relationship—and not sure that regular marriage counseling would help--and the other is “leaning in”—that is, interested in rebuilding the marriage. The counselor will help you decide whether to try to restore your marriage to health, move toward divorce, or take a time out and decide later.
The counselor respects your reasons for divorce while trying to open up the possibility of restoring the marriage to health. The counselor emphasizes the importance of each of you seeing your own contributions to the problems and the possible solutions. This will be useful in future relationships even if this one ends.
You will come in as a couple but the most important work occurs in the one-to-one conversations with the counselor. Why? Because you are starting out in different places.
The goal is not to solve your marital problems but to see if they are solvable. You will each be treated with compassion and respect no matter how you are feeling about your marriage at the moment. No bad guys and good guys.
The goal is for you to gain clarity and confidence about a direction, based on a deeper understanding of your relationship and its possibilities for the future.
Number of Sessions: A maximum of five counseling sessions. The first session is usually two hours while subsequent sessions are one and a half to two hours.
Discernment Counseling is not Suited for these situations:
When one spouse has already made a final decision to divorce
When one spouse is coercing the other to participate
When there is danger of domestic violence