Transcript:
Couples usually come into counseling when there’s unhealthy patterns in their relationship that are leading to resentment, frustration, defensiveness, or loneliness. Counseling can help offer an opportunity to bridge some of those gaps, to work on communication, and to experience new ways of interacting with one another. Hopefully, when leaving counseling, you have the opportunity to grow closer together, to experience a deeper level of intimacy and connection, and to know one another in ways that you weren’t able to know each other previously.
Marriage is a big concept and a big construct, and oftentimes, when people come into a marriage they could be thinking about it two different ways. And so pre-marriage counseling is a good opportunity to really explore, in depth, some of these more fundamental things that happen in marriage. So we might be looking at different roles that the couple may be taking, concepts about marriage, concepts about children, family, where one begins and the other ends. Things like that.
Do you value the couple before yourself? Do you value yourself before the couple? Teamwork, some of these kinds of things to explore to get on the table– it’s about getting to know one another in that way, a deeper way, before you enter into the deeper commitment of marriage.