Fulfilled: You are best friends and lovers in every sense of the word. You feel supported by and are supportive of one another. You can’t imagine a sharing your with a different partner.
Friendship: You are a team and may or may not feel like your partner is your best friend. But the passion is gone. It may feel more like you are running a business together than being lovers. There are some simmering resentments underneath that you can’t seem to resolve and your fights may have a repetitive quality to them.
Detached: You feel like two ships passing in the night. While you may each know your roles in keeping the house running there is no sense of teamwork. You have lingering disdain for one another. You are together more out of habit than any sense of passion or love.
One Foot Out the Door: You're planning or fantasizing about your exit.
10 Signs Your Relationship Needs Help
1) Communication seems like it
is going in circles
2) S/he seems unwilling to compromise
3) Our personalities seem incompatible
4) His/Her family gets in the way
5) Fighting is cruel
6) Fighting never seems to reach resolution
7) Your fights become physical
8) You rarely or never have sex
9) You can't agree on how to
raise or discipline your children
10) You have discussed or fantasized about divorce
One of the questions I am most frequently asked is what couples counseling can do to restore a relationship. I can think of a thousand ways marriage counseling can be of use, but then I'm a bit biased and that would make for a mighty long article. So instead here are the top 7 ways couples counseling can benefit you:
If you polled most couples therapists chances are that they would say the number one complaint that people have when they seek a couples therapist is communication. I would estimate that over 90% of couples who contact me for therapy provide this as the reason they need help.
The issues that couples have difficulty communicating with one another may vary from money to how to raise the kids to sex or, worse yet, an inability to agree on anything. On the surface most couples will say that if they just learned how to talk about these issues better then everything in their relationship would improve.
The 3 Secret Ingredients of Successful Marriage Counseling
I am often asked is what makes for successful marriage counseling. Naturally the training and background of the therapist is very important in making for a successful marriage counseling experience. However, I am going to focus on that in a separate article which addresses specifically what you should look for in a marriage counselor.
Just why is it so hard to heal those wounds when you are supposed to be on the same team?
When you make a commitment like marriage or living together somewhere in the back of your head you think to yourself, “oh sure, there will be some challenging times, but we’ll get through them – we’re different.”
But as time goes by life somehow becomes more complicated than you expected.
Things like earning dual incomes, raising children, keeping a house up, and managing finances can leave you feeling more like business partners than lovers.
Then there are those nagging little fights that never seem to go away. Over time they seem to grow bigger and bigger until it gets to the point when you look at your partner and you can't stop yourself from thinking things like:
"Why are we always fighting?"
"I can never count on you"
"We never get to do what I want to do"
"If you really loved me you’d know what I like"
"We never have sex anymore".
"You're just like my mother/father"
"Why am I with you?"
How could something that seemed so wonderful end up being so painful and destructive?
Maryland Marriage Counselor: My Approach
Since 1991 I have been helping couples find new ways to heal old wounds and to rediscover why they fell in love. While in session, I use cutting edge approaches to couples therapy that have been proven to be the most effective to help you heal the old wounds while at the same time providing you with innovative skills to restore your relationship to where you want it to be.
Talking about the problems in session is only half the solution. You may have become so absorbed by their problems that they have forgotten how to have fun. To help you with regain the joy and connection that you used to share I will show you a number of very simple things that take only a few minutes a day that have been proven by research to rebuild your bond to on another.
Marriage Counseling Can:
Show you new ways of communicating…so you can stop the endless cycle of fighting about fighting and talk like you did when you first met
Show you step by step how to reconnect…so you will feel close as you did when you first met
Show you how you stereotype each other...so you will feel loved again
Maryland Marriage Counselor Articles
"Our task now is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future"
Maryland Marriage Counselor: The 5 Deadly Communication Sins
My years as a Maryland marriage counselor have confirmed what researchers discovered several years ago: its not the big fights that cause relationships to struggle or fail. Instead, research shows that it is the small wounds caused by certain ways of responding to one another that are most predictive of whether or not a couple will thrive or fail.
Researchers have identified five types of responses that are particularly destructive which I have seen over and over in my practice. Becoming aware of and changing these communicative styles can help to make your relationship feel safe and whole again.
