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Couples therapy (also known as couples' counseling, marriage counseling, or marriage therapy) is a form of psychotherapy that seeks to improve intimate relationships, resolve interpersonal conflicts and repair broken bonds of love.
It wasn't until the 1950s that therapists began treating psychological problems within the context of the family.Nichols & Schwartz, Family Therapy: Concepts and Methods. Fourth edition. Allyn & Bacon Relationship counseling as a distinct, professional service is thus a recent phenomenon. Until the late 20th century, relationship counseling was informally provided by close friends, family members, or local religious leaders. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counseling and social workers historically dealt primarily with individual psychological problems within a medical and psychoanalytic framework. In many cultures, the institution of the family or group elders fulfill the role of relationship counseling; marriage mentoring mirrors these cultures.
With increasing modernization or westernization and the continuous shift towards isolated nuclear families, the trend is towards trained and Accreditation relationship counselors or couple therapists. Sometimes Volunteering are trained by either the government or social service institutions to help those who need family or marital counseling. Many communities and government departments have their own teams of trained voluntary and professional relationship counselors. Similar services are operated by many University and colleges, sometimes staffed by volunteers from among the student peer group. Some large companies maintain full-time professional counseling staff to facilitate smoother interactions between corporate employees and to minimize the negative effects that personal difficulties might have on work performance.
There is an increasing trend toward professional certification and government registration of these services, in part due to duty of care issues and the consequences of the counsellor or therapist's services being provided in a fiduciary relationship.Stewart v Layton (1992) 111 ALR 687
Before a relationship between individuals can be understood, it is important to recognize and acknowledge that each person, including the counselor, has a unique Personality type, perception, , set of values, and history. Individuals in the relationship may adhere to different and unexamined value systems. Institutional and societal variables (like social or religion groups, and other collective factors) which shape a person's nature and behavior, are considered in 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 seem to predict divorce rates.Sternberg, J. "Satisfaction in close relationships", Guilford Press, 1997, p. 344
Most relationships will experience strain at some point, resulting in a failure to function optimally and causing self-reinforcing, Maladaptation patterns to form, sometimes called "negative interaction cycles." There are many possible reasons for this, including insecure attachment, Human ego, arrogance, jealousy, anger, greed, poor communication/understanding or problem solving, Disease, and third parties.
Changes in circumstances, like Finance, physical health, and the influence of other family members can significantly influence 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 involved who exhibit such traits. Relationship influences are reciprocal: each person involved contributes to causing and managing problems.
A viable solution to the problem, and setting these relationships back on track, may be to reorient the individuals' and - how one views or responds to situations, and how one 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 fundamental changes in thought and feeling.
The next step is to adopt Consciousness, implement 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 alternate satisfaction in the relationship and stability. But it depends on the specific developing duties of each partner in every life phase and maturity".Kaiser-Wienhoff Couples Direct Analysis CDA
When the Munich Marital Study discovered active listening was not used in the long run, Warren Farrell observed that active listening did a better job of 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 people are biologically programmed to respond defensively to criticism, and therefore the listener needed in-depth training 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 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."Gottman, J The Marriage Clinic: A Scientifically Based Marital Therapy (Norton, 1999)
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.
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,
Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing 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. From the book, "Hold Me Tight" by Sue Johnson, Page 6.
Imago Relationship Therapy, developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt in the 1980s, offers another communication-focused approach. The term "Imago" (Latin for "image") refers to an unconscious composite image of one's primary caregivers that Hendrix theorizes influences partner selection. According to this model, individuals are drawn to partners who embody both positive and negative traits of their childhood caregivers, unconsciously seeking to heal early relational wounds through adult partnerships.
The central technique of Imago therapy is the "Imago Dialogue," a structured communication process with three components: mirroring (reflecting back what the partner said without interpretation), validation (acknowledging the partner's perspective as understandable), and empathy (imagining the partner's emotional experience). This structured format aims to create safety for vulnerable communication by ensuring each partner feels heard before any response is offered. Hendrix and Hunt describe three relationship stages—romantic love, power struggle, and conscious partnership—with therapy aimed at helping couples move from the conflict of the power struggle into conscious partnership where each becomes "the other's healer." (2026). 9781250310538, St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 9781250310538
While these approaches differ in emphasis—Gottman focusing on behavioral patterns and interaction ratios, EFT targeting attachment emotions and relational cycles, and Imago exploring developmental origins of partner selection—researchers and clinicians increasingly recognize their complementary nature. Attachment theory provides the underlying explanation for why humans need secure bonds; EFT applies this therapeutically by accessing vulnerable emotions beneath defensive behaviors; Gottman offers specific behavioral interventions for daily interactions; and Imago addresses how childhood experiences shape adult relationship patterns. Many contemporary couples therapists work integratively, drawing from multiple frameworks based on what each couple presents. (2026). 9780393708356, W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393708356
A 2018 review by Cochrane (organization) states that the available evidence does not suggest that couples therapy is more or less effective than individual therapy for treating depression.
A meta analysis published in 2023, covering 48 studies of non-randomized couples therapies, identified influencing factors on the efficiency. These factors include the age of the partners, the length of the relationship, and the type of institution that provided therapy.
Many studies about research on couples therapy can be found in Family Process and Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, both published by Wiley. Further studies can be found on ResearchGate, showing a lot of comparative research activity in Iran in 2024. A biannual newsletter provides short conclusions about actual publications, focusing on practical implications for couples therapy.
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 couples therapy are:
In both methods, the practitioner evaluates the couple's personal and relationship story as it is narrated, interrupts wisely, facilitates both de-escalations 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, there is Consent, 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 reorient their relationship with each other. One of the challenges here is for each person to change their own responses to their partner's behavior. 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 requires patience and commitment to repairing the relationship.
Using modern technologies such as Skype VoIP conferencing to interact with practitioners is also becoming increasingly popular for the added accessibility as well as discarding any existing geographic barriers. Entrusting the performance and privacy of these technologies may pose concerns despite the convenient structure, especially compared to the comfort of in-person meetings.
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 Gay identity was associated with difficulties in marital satisfaction, viewing same-sex activities as compulsive facilitated commitment to the marriage and to monogamy.
37. Conflict to Connection: Importance of Marriage Counselling by Mcdowall Health, Author: James Arrington, Published on August 2, 2023
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