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samedi 29 mars 2014

What You Should Know Before You Attend Couples Counseling

By Pat Skeats


Relationship counseling is a process by which the parties in a relationship seek outside help in order to recognize and manage problems within the relationship. Every marriage experiences troubles at some time for a variety of reasons. Many people choose to go to couples counseling in order to prevent the marriage from breaking down.

John Gottman is a well-known relationship therapist who researched marriage for more than thirty years. His finding lead him to believe that healthy couples do not listen to and echo the feelings of their partner naturally. Instead, whether they were happy or sad, their partner always responded in a reciprocal manner.

Such exchanges happened infrequently in marital interactions, however, they could not predict whether the marriage would succeed or not. In addition, a 1984 study conducted in Munich showed that reflective listening did not help people to improve their marriage. Instead, therapy that is emotionally focused and based on attachment theory uses emotions to target conflict and bring about change.

In the 1950s, therapists began dealing with psychological problems in the family context. Relationship therapy as a professional service is still fairly recent. Before that time, relationship help was informally conducted by friends, family members, or religious leaders. In some less advanced cultures, village leaders and group elders fulfill the role of relationship mentor.

As cultures modernized and the western world saw nuclear families become more prevalent, there was a shift towards training people to become accredited relationship counselors or therapists. Volunteers can be trained by a Government agency or a social service group in order to help those in need of family therapy. Some communities have their own groups of volunteers who can help others.

These types of services are also operated by universities and colleges, normally on a pro bono basis. Therapy centers are often staffed by student volunteers, led by a member of the college faculty. Many larger companies also have a full-time professional therapist on staff to assist employees who are experiencing personal problems.

Today, it has become more common to require these individuals to have professional certifications before they offer therapist services. There has also been a move toward the Government registering these services. This is partly due to the fact that therapists have a duty of care to those whom they counsel, and there may be consequences if the therapist is not careful to preserve a proper fiduciary relationship with their client.

Some therapists are increasingly using modern technologies like voip conferencing to interact with clients. This is becoming popular because of the added accessibility that it gives to busy clients, as well as breaking down any geographic barriers if one partner is in a different city or town. However, there are concerns regarding the privacy levels of these new technologies, despite their convenience. Many clients and therapists still prefer the comfort of having in-person sessions.




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