Couples Therapy
All relationships experience difficulties. Challenges with affection, communication, disagreements, and fears of divorce are some of the most common reasons couples reach out for help. Also, as the personal needs of each individual change over time, couples can begin to drift or the relationship itself can fall into unhelpful patterns of ambivalence, resistance or opposition. These problems contribute to a separation rate of 40%-45% across all relationships in the UK and this is where couples therapy can help.
Whilst it's appropriate for some couples to separate, working on relationship differences, conflicts and problems with emotional closeness, can significantly improve relationship satisfaction and well-being. Learning how to handle your conflicts can not only resolve your difficulties, but it can also make your relationship much stronger.
Couples who are dissatisfied with their relationship may turn to a variety of sources for help including online courses, self-help books, retreats, workshops, and couples therapy also called couples counselling.
Like any form of therapy, couples counselling requires a commitment and willingness to open up from both involved parties.
When it comes to committing to couples therapy, partners can start therapy for any reason that’s causing conflict, distress, or mistrust. These are some of the reasons:
- rebuild trust after infidelityor deceit
- enhance physical and emotional intimacy if you’re feeling unsatisfied
- overcome trauma
- go through a transition together, like parenthood or a big move
- navigate conflicting views on how to parent
- help manage substance use disorder recovery for one or both partners
- learn more about the relationship
- gain stability when feeling lost in the busyness of life
- get support when grieving the loss of a loved one
- have fun within your relationship and reignite your spark
- resolve conflict in a rational way
- define the significance and seriousness of a relationship with the help of a third party
- work through infertility
- help with blended families and step-parenting
- navigate career pressures and job changes
- handle financial problems
There are many models for couples therapy and one with a very high level of evidence for its effectiveness is called Cognitive Behavioural Couples Therapy. It is a highly structured approach for identifying, understanding and resolving unhealthy patterns of conflict, communication and emotional distress in close personal relationships.
The Benefits of Cognitive Behavioural Couples Therapy
Cognitive Behavioural Couples Therapy (CBCT) has been shown to support improved emotional awareness, behavioural change, listening and communication skills, joint problem solving, conflict management, relationship resilience and the development of shared values.
Unlike some of the passive approaches to relationship therapy, CBCT focuses directly on the attitudes, skills, behaviours and emotional responses found in adaptive, fulfilling and resilient relationships. These benefits are not just anecdotal, extensive research conducted over the last twenty years has consistently demonstrated that CBCT can provide a practical and reliable approach for dealing with relationship dissatisfaction, conflict, poor communication, emotional distress and crisis resolution in relationships.
CBT starts with identifying current situations and thoughts, feelings, and behaviours related to those situations. Many therapists have found that the best way to create positive expectations of couples' therapy is to begin by identifying what partners appreciate about each other.
What do you like about them? What do they do that helps make the relationship work as well as it does? What are some pleasant memories you have of your partner? These types of questions can also help the therapist understand the basis of your relationship.
Identifying Problem Situations, Thoughts, Feelings, And Behaviours
Before you can change anything, you'll spend some time talking about the situations that are causing stress in the relationship. Some examples might be changes in employment, serious medical conditions, interference in the relationship by family members, or past traumas of one or both partners.
You'll also describe your feelings about these situations and talk about what seems to trigger those feelings. In the process, you'll get an opportunity to learn more about your partner's perceptions and feelings and notice how they're the same as or different from yours.
The goal here is to create an accurate and complete picture of what is happening in your relationship.
You will also identify what negative thoughts get triggered for both of you in those problem situations and the way you behave in response to those negative thoughts and feelings. Some of those behaviors are likely to be unhelpful and might keep the problem going so you will then learn alternative, more constructive behaviors to try out.
The Importance of Homework
You're typically only in therapy for a limited amount of time. If you're going to make real changes, you'll need to practice new behaviors more frequently than you can in a therapy session.
Your therapist might give you information to read, exercises to do alone or together, and of course, specific behaviors from your list of behavioral goals to practice. It's important to take the time to do these exercises if you want to get the most out of therapy and create the changes you want for your relationship.
At the Meyer Therapy Practice, some of our therapists have specific training for working with couples using the CBT approach and we offer online CBT for couples. This is delivered via video link and works in the same way as face-to-face relationship therapy. The additional flexibility means that you can hold the sessions from the comfort of your own home without the usual travel or childcare constraints.
Please get in touch for a free, no obligation phone consultation if you would like to discuss seeing one of our couples therapists.
