Seeing a Marriage Counselor
One of the most frustrating things about seeing a marriage counselor is that we often wait until we are in marital crisis before doing so. Since it takes some time for the paperwork and the history to be completed it may be a couple of weeks before we even get to bring up the issue which brought us there in the first place.
For some who marry in certain religious ceremonies premarital counseling is required before the couple is allowed to be married. If this were only the case in all marriages there might be fewer divorces or even fewer marriages in the first place.
Premarital counseling allows a couple to discuss the expectations they have of each other and of the marriage before they tie the knot. It gives them the opportunity, through the counselor, to discuss such things as who, if anyone will give up their job when the children come, if they both even want children and when.
Many couples who finally see a marriage counselor as a last ditch effort to save their marriage find they don’t even know each other. It’s really sad because if they had only discussed expectations in the first place, they could have saved themselves a lot of heartache.
For those who see a marriage counselor before it’s too late, they are able to learn to listen to what the other person is saying without being so defensive. For example, if the wife says, “I feel abandoned when you go to work,” the husband learns through counseling thatthis is how his wife feels; this doesn’t necessarily mean he is a bad husband.
Perhaps the wife has abandonment issues that need to be dealt with. Yet before the couple started seeing the marriage counselor, they weren’t even able to discuss the issue because when the wife said she felt abandoned, the husband retorted with something like, “You don’t mind me going to work when you go shopping. You like the fact that I work my rear end off when you want to spend money,”
It goes downhill from there with the real issues never being discussed because the couple is too busy blaming each other to discuss what is really going on. This is illustrative of what the marriage counselor can do by helping the couple to communicate. With a good marriage counselor helping husbands and wives to communicate, more marriages can be saved and more children can have both parents in the home.
