It can be daunting reaching out for relationship help, however, Couples Counselling can be the best thing you ever do.
But what is involved in the process? How does it work? What is expected of each person? And what does each person need to bring to the process to get the best results?
These are some good questions, and I thought it might be a good idea to give you a brief outline of how I undertake Couples Counselling with my clients.
Firstly, the process through every stage is handled with sensitivity and is initially based around finding facts and reasons as to why things might not be travelling along as well as you might like.
I start with some important questionnaires that each client is asked to complete.
I then spend individual one-on-one time with each partner as I try to find out who they are and investigate the factors that they believe might be contributing to the issue(s).
Eventually, depending on exactly what that issue (or issues) are, I bring the two partners together into joint sessions.
Here, we start to discuss what has happened, and what we can do to hopefully improve things moving forward.
I also try to improve the communication styles of my clients by introducing Transactional Analysis theory/strategies (find out more about Transactional Analysis here).
It might not come as a major surprise, however quite often the issues that we tackle in Couples Counselling revolve around simply poor communication skills or just misaligned communication skills/techniques.
As we all know, it is tough for people to communicate with someone when they speak a different language – that’s regardless of how well each person tries to get their message across!
So, what do you need to bring to Couples Counselling? Hopefully some hope, an outlook towards the future and a willingness to investigate your skills and attitudes.
As I frequently say, we cannot change the past, we can go back and look at why things happened and the emotions around the events, however, most of my focus is on the here and now and on what we can do together to have a better future.
If you feel that I might be able to assist, please feel free to get in touch with me.
