Relationship counseling
Encyclopedia
Relationship counseling is the process of counseling the parties of a relationship
in an effort to recognize and to better manage or reconcile troublesome differences and repeating patterns of distress. The relationship involved may be between members of a family or a couple (see also family therapy
), employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.
Couple therapy (or relationship therapy) is a related and different process. It may differ from relationship counseling in duration. Short term counseling may be between 1 to 3 sessions whereas long term couples therapy
may be between 12 and 24 sessions. An exception is brief
or solution focused
couples therapy. In addition, counseling tends to be more 'here and now' and new coping strategies the outcome. Couples therapy is more about seemingly intractable problems with a relationship history, where emotions are the target and the agent of change.
Marriage counseling or marital therapy can refer to either or some combination of the above.
The methods may differ in other ways as well, but the differences may indicate more about the counselor/therapist's way of working than the title given to their process. Both methods also can be acquired for no charge, depending on your needs. For more information about getting the care that may be required, one should make a call to a local hospital or healthcare professional.
movement. The first institutes for marriage counseling in the USA began in the 1930s, partly in response to Germany's medically directed, racial purification marriage counseling centres. It was promoted in the USA by both eugenicists such as Paul Popenoe
and Robert Latou Dickinson
and by birth control advocates such as Abraham and Hannah Stone who wrote 'A Marriage Manual' in 1935 and were involved with Planned Parenthood
.. Other founders in USA include Lena Levine
and Margaret Sanger
.
It wasn't until the 1950s that therapists began treating psychological problems in the context of the family. Relationship counseling as a discrete, professional service is thus a recent phenomenon. Until the late 20th century, the work of relationship counseling was informally fulfilled by close friends, family members, or local religious leaders. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and social workers have historically dealt primarily with individual psychological problems in a medical and psychoanalytic framework. In many less technologically advanced cultures around the world today, the institution of family
, the village or group elder
s fulfil the work of relationship counseling. Today marriage mentoring mirrors those cultures.
With increasing modernization or westernization
in many parts of the world and the continuous shift towards isolated nuclear families the trend is towards trained and accredited relationship counselors or couple therapists. Sometimes volunteers are trained by either the Government or social service institutions to help those who are in need of family or marital counseling. Many communities and government departments have their own team of trained voluntary and professional relationship counselors. Similar services are operated by many universities
and colleges, sometimes staffed by volunteers from among the student peer group
. Some large companies maintain a full-time professional counseling staff to facilitate smoother interactions between corporate employees, to minimize the negative effects that personal difficulties might have on work performance.
Increasingly there is a trend toward professional certification and government registration of these services. This is in part due to the presence of duty of care
issues and the consequences of the counselor or therapist's services being provided in a fiduciary relationship. See also alienation of affection.
, perception
, set of values and history. Individuals in the relationship may adhere to different and unexamined value system
s. Institutional and societal variables (like the social, religious
, group and other collective factors) which shape a person's nature, and behavior are considered in the process of counseling and therapy. A tenet of relationship counseling is that it is intrinsically beneficial for all the participants to interact with each other and with society at large with optimal amounts of conflict. A couple's conflict resolution skills seems to predict divorce rates.
Most relationships will get strained at some time, resulting in their not functioning optimally and producing self-reinforcing, maladaptive patterns. These patterns may be called negative interaction cycles. There are many possible reasons for this, including insecure attachment
, ego, arrogance, jealousy
, anger, greed, poor communication/understanding or problem solving
, ill health, third parties and so on.
Changes in situations like financial state, physical health, and the influence of other family members can have a profound influence on the conduct, responses and actions of the individuals in a relationship.
Often it is an interaction between two or more factors, and frequently it is not just one of the people who are involved that exhibit such traits. Relationship influences are reciprocal - it takes each person involved to make and manage problems.
A viable solution to the problem and setting these relationships back on track may be to reorient the individuals' perception
s and emotions - how one looks at or responds to situations and feels about them. Perceptions of and emotional responses to a relationship are contained within an often unexamined mental map of the relationship, also called a love map by John Gottman
. These can be explored collaboratively and discussed openly. The core values they comprise can then be understood and respected or changed when no longer appropriate. This implies that each person takes equal responsibility for awareness of the problem as it arises, awareness of their own contribution to the problem and making some fundamental changes in thought
and feeling
.
The next step is to adopt conscious, structural changes to the inter-personal relationships and evaluate the effectiveness of those changes over time.
Indeed, "typically for those close personal relations there is a certain degree in 'interdependence' - which means that the partners are alternately mutually dependent on each other. As a special aspect of such relations something contradictory is put outside: the need for intimacy and for autonomy."
"The common counterbalancing satisfaction these both needs, intimacy and autonomy, leads to alternately satisfaction in the relationship and stability. But it depends on the specific developing duties of each partner in every life phase and maturity".
, used by the late Carl Rogers
and Virginia Satir
, and recommended by Harville Hendrix in Getting the Love You Want. More recently, a method called Cinematic Immersion has been developed by Warren Farrell
in Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say. Each helps couples learn a method of communicating designed to create a safe environment for each partner to express and hear feelings.
When the Munich Marital Study discovered active listening to not be used in the long run, Warren Farrell
observed that active listening did a better job creating a safe environment for the criticizer to criticize than for the listener to hear the criticism. The listener, often feeling overwhelmed by the criticism, tended to avoid future encounters. He hypothesized that we were biologically programmed to respond defensively to criticism, and therefore the listener needed to be trained in-depth with mental exercises and methods to interpret as love what might otherwise feel abusive. His method is Cinematic Immersion.
After 30 years of research into marriage John Gottman
has found that healthy couples almost never listen and echo each other's feelings naturally. Whether miserable or radiantly happy, couples said what they thought about an issue, and "they got angry or sad, but their partner's response was never anything like what we were training people to do in the listener/speaker exercise, not even close."
By contrast emotionally focused therapy
for couples (EFT-C) is based on attachment theory and uses emotion as the target and agent of change. Emotions bring the past alive in rigid interaction patterns, which create and reflect absorbing emotional states. As one of its founders Sue Johnson says,
. Integrative behavioral couples therapy appears to be effective for 69% of couples in treatment, while the traditional model was effective for 50-60% of couples .
The basic principles for a counselor include:
As well as the above, the basic principles for a couples therapist also include:
Common core principles of relationship counseling and couple's therapy are:
In both methods, the practitioner evaluates the couple's personal and relationship story as it is narrated, interrupts wisely, facilitates both de-escalation of unhelpful conflict and the development of realistic, practical solutions. The practitioner may meet each person individually at first but only if this is beneficial to both, is consensual and is unlikely to cause harm. Individualistic approaches to couple problems can cause harm. The counselor or therapist encourages the participants to give their best efforts to reorienting their relationship with each other. One of the challenges here is for each person to change their own responses to their partner's behaviour. Other challenges to the process are disclosing controversial or shameful events and revealing closely guarded secrets. Not all couples put all of their cards on the table at first. This can take time.
and psychopharmacology
into clinical practice. There has been interest in use of the so-called love hormone – oxytocin
– during therapy sessions, although this is still largely experimental and somewhat controversial.
), numerous attempts at making the methodologies available generally via self help books and other media are available. In the last few years it has become increasingly popular for these self help books to become popularized and published as an e-book
available on the web, or through content articles on blogs and websites. The challenges for individuals utilizing these methods are most commonly associated with that of other self help therapies or self-diagnosis.
Some resources include:
clients additionally have to deal with heteronormativity
, homophobia
and both socio-cultural and legal discrimination
. Individuals may experience relational ambiguity from being in different stages of the coming out
process or having an HIV serodiscordant
relationship. Often, same-sex couples do not have as many role models of successful relationships as opposite-sex couples. In many jurisdictions committed LGBT couples desiring a family are denied access to assisted reproduction, adoption
and fostering, leaving them childless, feeling excluded, other
and bereaved. There may be issues with gender-role socialization that do not affect opposite-sex couples.
A significant number of men and women experience conflict surrounding homosexual expression within a mixed-orientation marriage
. Couple therapy may include helping the clients feel more comfortable and accepting of same-sex feelings and to explore ways of incorporating same-sex and opposite-sex feelings into life patterns. Although a strong homosexual identity was associated with difficulties in marital satisfaction, viewing the same-sex activities as compulsive facilitated commitment to the marriage and to monogamy.
Interpersonal relationship
An interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the...
in an effort to recognize and to better manage or reconcile troublesome differences and repeating patterns of distress. The relationship involved may be between members of a family or a couple (see also family therapy
Family therapy
Family therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of...
), employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.
Couple therapy (or relationship therapy) is a related and different process. It may differ from relationship counseling in duration. Short term counseling may be between 1 to 3 sessions whereas long term couples therapy
Emotionally focused therapy
Emotionally focused therapy is a short term psychotherapy approach to working with couples and more recently with families. It is substantially based on the principles of emotion theory and attachment theory....
may be between 12 and 24 sessions. An exception is brief
Brief therapy
Brief psychotherapy or Brief therapy is an umbrella term for a variety of approaches to psychotherapy. It differs from other schools of therapy in that it emphasises a focus on a specific problem and direct intervention...
or solution focused
Solution focused brief therapy
Solution focused brief therapy , often referred to as simply 'solution focused therapy' or 'brief therapy', is a type of talking therapy that is based upon social constructionist philosophy. It focuses on what clients want to achieve through therapy rather than on the problem that made them seek help...
couples therapy. In addition, counseling tends to be more 'here and now' and new coping strategies the outcome. Couples therapy is more about seemingly intractable problems with a relationship history, where emotions are the target and the agent of change.
Marriage counseling or marital therapy can refer to either or some combination of the above.
The methods may differ in other ways as well, but the differences may indicate more about the counselor/therapist's way of working than the title given to their process. Both methods also can be acquired for no charge, depending on your needs. For more information about getting the care that may be required, one should make a call to a local hospital or healthcare professional.
History
Marriage counseling originated in Germany in the 1920s as part of the eugenicsEugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
movement. The first institutes for marriage counseling in the USA began in the 1930s, partly in response to Germany's medically directed, racial purification marriage counseling centres. It was promoted in the USA by both eugenicists such as Paul Popenoe
Paul Popenoe
Paul Popenoe was an American founding practitioner of marriage counseling. In his early years, he worked as an agricultural explorer and as a scholar of heredity, where he played a prominent role in the Eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.- Biography :Born as Paul Bowman Popenoe in...
and Robert Latou Dickinson
Robert Latou Dickinson
Robert Latou Dickinson was an American obstetrician and gynecologist, surgeon, maternal health educator, artist, sculptor and medical illustrator, and research scientist.-Life:...
and by birth control advocates such as Abraham and Hannah Stone who wrote 'A Marriage Manual' in 1935 and were involved with Planned Parenthood
Planned Parenthood
Planned Parenthood Federation of America , commonly shortened to Planned Parenthood, is the U.S. affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and one of its larger members. PPFA is a non-profit organization providing reproductive health and maternal and child health services. The...
.. Other founders in USA include Lena Levine
Lena Levine
Lena Levine was an American psychiatrist and gynecologist. She was a pioneering figure in the development of both marriage counseling and birth control. She was a close colleague of Margaret Sanger...
and Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American sex educator, nurse, and birth control activist. Sanger coined the term birth control, opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established Planned Parenthood...
.
It wasn't until the 1950s that therapists began treating psychological problems in the context of the family. Relationship counseling as a discrete, professional service is thus a recent phenomenon. Until the late 20th century, the work of relationship counseling was informally fulfilled by close friends, family members, or local religious leaders. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and social workers have historically dealt primarily with individual psychological problems in a medical and psychoanalytic framework. In many less technologically advanced cultures around the world today, the institution of family
Family
In human context, a family is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children...
, the village or group elder
Elder (administrative title)
The term Elder is used in several different countries and organizations to indicate a position of authority...
s fulfil the work of relationship counseling. Today marriage mentoring mirrors those cultures.
With increasing modernization or westernization
Westernization
Westernization or Westernisation , also occidentalization or occidentalisation , is a process whereby societies come under or adopt Western culture in such matters as industry, technology, law, politics, economics, lifestyle, diet, language, alphabet,...
in many parts of the world and the continuous shift towards isolated nuclear families the trend is towards trained and accredited relationship counselors or couple therapists. Sometimes volunteers are trained by either the Government or social service institutions to help those who are in need of family or marital counseling. Many communities and government departments have their own team of trained voluntary and professional relationship counselors. Similar services are operated by many universities
University
A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...
and colleges, sometimes staffed by volunteers from among the student peer group
Peer group
A peer group is a social group consisting of humans. Peer groups are an informal primary group of people who share a similar or equal status and who are usually of roughly the same age, tended to travel around and interact within the social aggregate Members of a particular peer group often have...
. Some large companies maintain a full-time professional counseling staff to facilitate smoother interactions between corporate employees, to minimize the negative effects that personal difficulties might have on work performance.
Increasingly there is a trend toward professional certification and government registration of these services. This is in part due to the presence of duty of care
Duty of care
In tort law, a duty of care is a legal obligation imposed on an individual requiring that they adhere to a standard of reasonable care while performing any acts that could foreseeably harm others. It is the first element that must be established to proceed with an action in negligence. The claimant...
issues and the consequences of the counselor or therapist's services being provided in a fiduciary relationship. See also alienation of affection.
Basic Principles
Before a relationship between individuals can begin to be understood, it is important to recognize and acknowledge that each person, including the counselor, has a unique personalityPersonality type
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of individuals. Personality types are sometimes distinguished from personality traits, with the latter embodying a smaller grouping of behavioral tendencies. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences...
, perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
, set of values and history. Individuals in the relationship may adhere to different and unexamined value system
Value system
A value system is a set of consistent ethic values and measures used for the purpose of ethical or ideological integrity. A well defined value system is a moral code.-Personal and communal:...
s. Institutional and societal variables (like the social, religious
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
, group and other collective factors) which shape a person's nature, and behavior are considered in the process of counseling and therapy. A tenet of relationship counseling is that it is intrinsically beneficial for all the participants to interact with each other and with society at large with optimal amounts of conflict. A couple's conflict resolution skills seems to predict divorce rates.
Most relationships will get strained at some time, resulting in their not functioning optimally and producing self-reinforcing, maladaptive patterns. These patterns may be called negative interaction cycles. There are many possible reasons for this, including insecure attachment
Attachment theory
Attachment theory describes the dynamics of long-term relationships between humans. Its most important tenet is that an infant needs to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for social and emotional development to occur normally. Attachment theory is an interdisciplinary study...
, ego, arrogance, jealousy
Jealousy
Jealousy is a second emotion and typically refers to the negative thoughts and feelings of insecurity, fear, and anxiety over an anticipated loss of something that the person values, particularly in reference to a human connection. Jealousy often consists of a combination of presenting emotions...
, anger, greed, poor communication/understanding or problem solving
Problem solving
Problem solving is a mental process and is part of the larger problem process that includes problem finding and problem shaping. Consideredthe most complex of all intellectual functions, problem solving has been defined as higher-order cognitive process that requires the modulation and control of...
, ill health, third parties and so on.
Changes in situations like financial state, physical health, and the influence of other family members can have a profound influence on the conduct, responses and actions of the individuals in a relationship.
Often it is an interaction between two or more factors, and frequently it is not just one of the people who are involved that exhibit such traits. Relationship influences are reciprocal - it takes each person involved to make and manage problems.
A viable solution to the problem and setting these relationships back on track may be to reorient the individuals' perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
s and emotions - how one looks at or responds to situations and feels about them. Perceptions of and emotional responses to a relationship are contained within an often unexamined mental map of the relationship, also called a love map by John Gottman
John Gottman
John Mordecai Gottman is a Ph.D. psychologist known for his work on marital stability and relationship analysis through scientific direct observations published in peer-reviewed literature...
. These can be explored collaboratively and discussed openly. The core values they comprise can then be understood and respected or changed when no longer appropriate. This implies that each person takes equal responsibility for awareness of the problem as it arises, awareness of their own contribution to the problem and making some fundamental changes in thought
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
and feeling
Feeling
Feeling is the nominalization of the verb to feel. The word was first used in the English language to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe experiences, other than the physical sensation of touch, such as "a feeling of...
.
The next step is to adopt conscious, structural changes to the inter-personal relationships and evaluate the effectiveness of those changes over time.
Indeed, "typically for those close personal relations there is a certain degree in 'interdependence' - which means that the partners are alternately mutually dependent on each other. As a special aspect of such relations something contradictory is put outside: the need for intimacy and for autonomy."
"The common counterbalancing satisfaction these both needs, intimacy and autonomy, leads to alternately satisfaction in the relationship and stability. But it depends on the specific developing duties of each partner in every life phase and maturity".
Basic Practices
Two methods of couples therapy focus primarily on the process of communicating. The most commonly used method is active listeningActive listening
Active listening is a communication technique that requires the listener to understand, interpret, and evaluate what they hear. The ability to listen actively can improve personal relationships through reducing conflicts, strengthening cooperation, and fostering understanding.When interacting,...
, used by the late Carl Rogers
Carl Rogers
Carl Ransom Rogers was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach to psychology...
and Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir
Virginia Satir was an American author and psychotherapist, known especially for her approach to family therapy and her work with Systemic Constellations...
, and recommended by Harville Hendrix in Getting the Love You Want. More recently, a method called Cinematic Immersion has been developed by Warren Farrell
Warren Farrell
Warren Farrell is an American author of seven books on men's and women's issues. His books cover twelve fields: history, law, sociology and politics ; couples’ communication ; economic and career issues ; child psychology and child custody ; and...
in Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say. Each helps couples learn a method of communicating designed to create a safe environment for each partner to express and hear feelings.
When the Munich Marital Study discovered active listening to not be used in the long run, Warren Farrell
Warren Farrell
Warren Farrell is an American author of seven books on men's and women's issues. His books cover twelve fields: history, law, sociology and politics ; couples’ communication ; economic and career issues ; child psychology and child custody ; and...
observed that active listening did a better job creating a safe environment for the criticizer to criticize than for the listener to hear the criticism. The listener, often feeling overwhelmed by the criticism, tended to avoid future encounters. He hypothesized that we were biologically programmed to respond defensively to criticism, and therefore the listener needed to be trained in-depth with mental exercises and methods to interpret as love what might otherwise feel abusive. His method is Cinematic Immersion.
After 30 years of research into marriage John Gottman
John Gottman
John Mordecai Gottman is a Ph.D. psychologist known for his work on marital stability and relationship analysis through scientific direct observations published in peer-reviewed literature...
has found that healthy couples almost never listen and echo each other's feelings naturally. Whether miserable or radiantly happy, couples said what they thought about an issue, and "they got angry or sad, but their partner's response was never anything like what we were training people to do in the listener/speaker exercise, not even close."
Such exchanges occurred in less than 5 percent of marital interactions and they predicted nothing about whether the marriage would do well or badly. What's more, Gottman noted, data from a 1984 Munich study demonstrated that the (reflective listening) exercise itself didn't help couples to improve their marriages. To teach such interactions, whether as a daily tool for couples or as a therapeutic exercise in empathy, was a clinical dead end.
By contrast emotionally focused therapy
Emotionally focused therapy
Emotionally focused therapy is a short term psychotherapy approach to working with couples and more recently with families. It is substantially based on the principles of emotion theory and attachment theory....
for couples (EFT-C) is based on attachment theory and uses emotion as the target and agent of change. Emotions bring the past alive in rigid interaction patterns, which create and reflect absorbing emotional states. As one of its founders Sue Johnson says,
Forget about learning how to argue better, analysing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, recognize and admit that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection.
Research on therapy
The most researched approach to couples therapy is behavioral couples therapy. It is a well established treatment for marital discord This form of therapy has evolved to what is now called integrative behavioral couples therapyIntegrative behavioral couples therapy
Behavioral marital therapy, sometimes called Behavioral couple, or couples, therapy, has its origins in behaviorism and is a form of behavior therapy. The theory is rooted in social learning theory and behavior analysis. As a model, it is constantly being revised as new research...
. Integrative behavioral couples therapy appears to be effective for 69% of couples in treatment, while the traditional model was effective for 50-60% of couples .
Relationship counselor or couple's therapist
Licensed couple therapist may refer to a pyschiatrist, clinical social workers, psychologists,pastoral counsellors, marriage and family therapists, and psychiatric nurses.The duty and function of a relationship counselor or couple's therapist is to listen, respect, understand and facilitate better functioning between those involved.The basic principles for a counselor include:
- Provide a confidential dialogueDialogueDialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people....
, which normalizes feelings - To enable each person to be heard and to hear themselves
- Provide a mirror with expertise to reflect the relationship's difficulties and the potential and direction for change
- Empower the relationship to take control of its own destiny and make vital decisions
- Deliver relevant and appropriate information
As well as the above, the basic principles for a couples therapist also include:
- To identify the repetitive, negative interaction cycle as a patternPatternA pattern, from the French patron, is a type of theme of recurring events or objects, sometimes referred to as elements of a set of objects.These elements repeat in a predictable manner...
. - To understand the source of reactive emotions that drive the pattern.
- To expand and re-organize key emotional responses in the relationship.
- To facilitate a shift in partners' interaction to new patterns of interaction.
- To create new and positively bonding emotional events in the relationship
- To foster a secure attachmentAttachment theoryAttachment theory describes the dynamics of long-term relationships between humans. Its most important tenet is that an infant needs to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for social and emotional development to occur normally. Attachment theory is an interdisciplinary study...
between partners.
Common core principles of relationship counseling and couple's therapy are:
- RespectRespectRespect denotes both a positive feeling of esteem for a person or other entity , and also specific actions and conduct representative of that esteem. Respect can be a specific feeling of regard for the actual qualities of the one respected...
- EmpathyEmpathyEmpathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B...
- TactTactTact may refer to:* Tact , a term used by B. F. Skinner for a type of verbal operant* TACT * TACT * TACT Records, a record label* Tact Meyers, a Galaxy Angel character...
- ConsentConsentConsent refers to the provision of approval or agreement, particularly and especially after thoughtful consideration.- Types of consent :*Implied consent is a controversial form of consent which is not expressly granted by a person, but rather inferred from a person's actions and the facts and...
- ConfidentialityConfidentialityConfidentiality is an ethical principle associated with several professions . In ethics, and in law and alternative forms of legal resolution such as mediation, some types of communication between a person and one of these professionals are "privileged" and may not be discussed or divulged to...
- AccountabilityAccountabilityAccountability is a concept in ethics and governance with several meanings. It is often used synonymously with such concepts as responsibility, answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and other terms associated with the expectation of account-giving...
- Expertise
- Evidence based
- CertificationCertificationCertification refers to the confirmation of certain characteristics of an object, person, or organization. This confirmation is often, but not always, provided by some form of external review, education, assessment, or audit...
, ongoing trainingTrainingThe term training refers to the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies as a result of the teaching of vocational or practical skills and knowledge that relate to specific useful competencies. It forms the core of apprenticeships and provides the backbone of content at institutes of...
and supervision
In both methods, the practitioner evaluates the couple's personal and relationship story as it is narrated, interrupts wisely, facilitates both de-escalation of unhelpful conflict and the development of realistic, practical solutions. The practitioner may meet each person individually at first but only if this is beneficial to both, is consensual and is unlikely to cause harm. Individualistic approaches to couple problems can cause harm. The counselor or therapist encourages the participants to give their best efforts to reorienting their relationship with each other. One of the challenges here is for each person to change their own responses to their partner's behaviour. Other challenges to the process are disclosing controversial or shameful events and revealing closely guarded secrets. Not all couples put all of their cards on the table at first. This can take time.
Novel practices
A novel development in the field of couples therapy has involved the introduction of insights gained from affective neuroscienceAffective neuroscience
Affective neuroscience is the study of the neural mechanisms of emotion. This interdisciplinary field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood.-Brain areas related to emotion:...
and psychopharmacology
Psychopharmacology
Psychopharmacology is the scientific study of the actions of drugs and their effects on mood, sensation, thinking, and behavior...
into clinical practice. There has been interest in use of the so-called love hormone – oxytocin
Oxytocin
Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone that acts primarily as a neuromodulator in the brain.Oxytocin is best known for its roles in sexual reproduction, in particular during and after childbirth...
– during therapy sessions, although this is still largely experimental and somewhat controversial.
Popularized methodologies
Although results are almost certainly significantly better when professional guidance is utilized (see especially family therapyFamily therapy
Family therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of...
), numerous attempts at making the methodologies available generally via self help books and other media are available. In the last few years it has become increasingly popular for these self help books to become popularized and published as an e-book
E-book
An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...
available on the web, or through content articles on blogs and websites. The challenges for individuals utilizing these methods are most commonly associated with that of other self help therapies or self-diagnosis.
Some resources include:
- Gottman's what makes marriage workJohn GottmanJohn Mordecai Gottman is a Ph.D. psychologist known for his work on marital stability and relationship analysis through scientific direct observations published in peer-reviewed literature...
- The Five Love LanguagesGary Chapman (author)Gary Demonte Chapman is a relationship counselor and author of the The 5 Love Languages series. He is the director of Marriage and Family Life Consultants, Inc...
- what spouses respond to. - Please Understand MePlease Understand MePlease Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types is a psychology book written by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates which focuses on the classification and categorization of personality types. The book contains a self-assessed personality questionnaire, known as the Keirsey Temperament Sorter,...
- determining personal psychological makeup. - Hold me TightSue JohnsonSue Johnson is one of the creators of Emotionally Focused Therapy or EFT. She is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Emotionally Focused Therapy. She is also the director of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute.-Works:*Johnson, S.M. . ...
- 'Love demands the reassurance of touch. Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath the distress, partners are desperate to know: Are you there for me? - Love & RespectLove & RespectLove & Respect: The Love She Most Desires; The Respect He Desperately Needs is a self-help book that was written in 2004 by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs that suggest a direct connection between the emotional needs of men and women and a verse of scripture found in the Bible, that when adhered to, can...
- emotional needs of spouses. - Divorce BustingDivorce Busting"Divorce Busting":A Step-By-Step Approach to Making Your Marriage Loving Again is a self-help book of practical solutions for saving and restoring relationships written by Michele Weiner-Davis, M.S.W....
- solutions for saving and restoring relationships.
Relationship counseling with homosexual/bisexual clients
"Marital Therapy" is now referred to as "Couples Therapy" in order to include individuals who are not married or those who are engaged in same sex relationships.Most relationship issues are shared equally among couples regardless of sexual orientation, but LGBTLGBT
LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...
clients additionally have to deal with heteronormativity
Heteronormativity
Heteronormativity is a term invented in 1991 to describe any of a set of lifestyle norms that hold that people fall into distinct and complementary genders with natural roles in life. It also holds that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation, and states that sexual and marital relations...
, homophobia
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...
and both socio-cultural and legal discrimination
Discrimination
Discrimination is the prejudicial treatment of an individual based on their membership in a certain group or category. It involves the actual behaviors towards groups such as excluding or restricting members of one group from opportunities that are available to another group. The term began to be...
. Individuals may experience relational ambiguity from being in different stages of the coming out
Coming out
Coming out is a figure of speech for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people's disclosure of their sexual orientation and/or gender identity....
process or having an HIV serodiscordant
Serodiscordant
Serodiscordant is a term used to describe a couple in which one partner is HIV positive and the other is HIV negative. Serodiscordant relationships are also referred to as "magnetic". The term seroconcordant is its antonym, used to describe a couple in which both partners are of the same HIV...
relationship. Often, same-sex couples do not have as many role models of successful relationships as opposite-sex couples. In many jurisdictions committed LGBT couples desiring a family are denied access to assisted reproduction, adoption
Adoption
Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents...
and fostering, leaving them childless, feeling excluded, other
Other
The Other or Constitutive Other is a key concept in continental philosophy; it opposes the Same. The Other refers, or attempts to refer, to that which is Other than the initial concept being considered...
and bereaved. There may be issues with gender-role socialization that do not affect opposite-sex couples.
A significant number of men and women experience conflict surrounding homosexual expression within a mixed-orientation marriage
Mixed-orientation marriage
A mixed-orientation marriage is a marriage in which one of the partners is heterosexual and the other is bisexual or homosexual.- Motivations:Some cite spiritual reasons for getting married...
. Couple therapy may include helping the clients feel more comfortable and accepting of same-sex feelings and to explore ways of incorporating same-sex and opposite-sex feelings into life patterns. Although a strong homosexual identity was associated with difficulties in marital satisfaction, viewing the same-sex activities as compulsive facilitated commitment to the marriage and to monogamy.
See also
- Counseling
- Counselling psychology
- Family therapyFamily therapyFamily therapy, also referred to as couple and family therapy, family systems therapy, and family counseling, is a branch of psychotherapy that works with families and couples in intimate relationships to nurture change and development. It tends to view change in terms of the systems of...
- Interpersonal psychotherapyInterpersonal psychotherapyInterpersonal Psychotherapy is a time-limited psychotherapy that focuses on the interpersonal context and on building interpersonal skills. IPT is based on the belief that interpersonal factors may contribute heavily to psychological problems. It is commonly distinguished from other forms of...
- List of basic relationship topics
- Relationship EducationRelationship EducationRelationship education presents and promotes the principles and practices of premarital education, relationship resources, relationship restoration, relationship maintenance, and research-based marriage preparation.-History:...
- Social WorkSocial workSocial Work is a professional and academic discipline that seeks to improve the quality of life and wellbeing of an individual, group, or community by intervening through research, policy, community organizing, direct practice, and teaching on behalf of those afflicted with poverty or any real or...
- List of counseling topics