Marriage Counselling in Vernon

Counselling is cheaper than divorce for sure. But how do you stop the conflict and get back to the relationship that you got married for?

How Can Marriage Counselling Help?

Marriage counselling helps you pay attention to the essentials of good relationships. In the beginning of your relationship, everything might have just come naturally, so you never really thought about it. But now it will help to improve some skills that make the relationship healthy and happy:

• Effective communication
• Building friendship
• Emotional regulation
• Gaining insight about each of your own triggers and personality
• Rebuilding after betrayal

Communication

Communication is the obvious target for improvement in your marriage. You can tell when bad communication is happening, but you might not be able to figure out where exactly it goes wrong. Maybe you find that a topic discussion suddenly turns into an argument and then one or both of you shut down and just try to get on with the day. Maybe the topic never gets discussed because you fear what might happen if you say anything.

Either way, you probably wish there was a better way. And there is. I am a counsellor who can slow down your arguments and carefully guide you into better ways to communicate with your partner. I am especially interested in communication, and I pay attention to how your words can soothe or inflame each other. If your relationship is in deep conflict or disconnection, mutual feelings of hurt and being devalued will overtake any chances for understanding each other.

In counselling sessions, we will learn and use some practical tools for better communication. If you both use these tools, you will be able to say what matters and have your partner actually understand it! This might seem impossible right now, but it can really happen when we all work together. I have taken specific training in conflict resolution.

Emotional Content

What happens one of you is feeling hurt, and the other is feeling hopeless? Anything you discuss will turn out badly. Even if you discuss a simple topic, those feelings will drive the discussion into disaster. Even worse is when your partner seems so absorbed in their own feelings, they aren’t interested in what you feel. That is why we have to go deeper than just practicing communication skills.

In counselling, we also work on addressing emotions that are undercurrents to almost everything we say and do. There are practical tools for this too. We will work on seeing and using emotion constructively so you can help your partner feel balanced again. Emotion Focused Therapy is becoming very popular among counsellors because it makes a difference. I have taken specific training in EFT.

Friendship

At first, couples in conflict can miss the importance of friendship in their marriage. But just check if these things have disappeared from your daily life: moments of gentle affection, taking time to listen to each other’s worries, date night, kind acts of service, words of appreciation and affection, friendly moments of parting and coming home, quality time talking about the future. The stress and strain of daily life will make all these disappear until you are just two roommates who wonder why you don’t get along anymore.

In counselling, we will spend some time finding agreeable ways to get these things back into your life. Building friendship can often have a magical effect on your conflicts. When you feel closer, some disagreements lose their intensity and compromise is easier. The famous relationship expert John Gottman found this out when he studied and followed thousands of couples over decades of marriage. The attitudes of appreciation and affection make a huge difference. Watch John Gottman tell you more in this video:
Making Marriage Work – John Gottman

Figuring Yourself Out

It’s true that a better understanding of our own personality, youth experiences and even trauma will help us get along better with our partners. Sometimes we don’t know why we do what we do. Gaining more understanding about ourselves makes us more flexible and careful with our reactions and habits.

For example, some of us get anxious when we are away from or at odds with our partner, and then we protest and pressure them to give us what we think we need. Others feel easily pressured or controlled and then want to get away just to feel balanced again. When people like this are married to each other (and it happens a lot), healing the relationship will involve recognizing these triggers. And some of these characteristics are permanent, but its ok. When they understand how each personality works, partners can learn to meet each other’s needs rather than fight with them. They can learn to ease their own worries and trust each other’s goodwill too.

I include a bit of individual counselling with each partner in a marriage and then help them bring those understandings into the relationship discussions.

Betrayal and Loss of Trust

Sometimes the relationship has been badly hurt by infidelity or some other incidents that lead to one partner feeling betrayed. That can be deadly to a marriage. Deep loss of trust cannot be recovered by “forgive and forget.” Betrayal goes deeply into our nervous system and makes us scared to trust again.

There is a method for rebuilding trust. It takes some time and some careful discussions where partners talk about what happened without the hurt and defensiveness exploding into disconnection. Careful conversations where you both feel safe to be honest are hard to have at home on your own. I will help you pace those topics gently in a safe structured setting. Couples who talk about what has happened have much better odds of staying together than those who just try to put it behind them.