Getting married today means you have an almost equal chance of growing old together as going your separate ways. However, before saying goodbye to the life you built together, you should know that excellent marriage counselling Sydney services are available to help you save your marriage.
Relationship counselling Sydney services have a range of strategies they use to help you reconnect with your partner, including:
- Re-open communication channels
- Work through long-time issues
- Talk productively about finances
- Resolve intimacy issues
- Reveal the cost of divorce versus saving the relationship
- Teach you how to pick your battles
- Get on the path to healing after infidelity
- Teach you a different way of looking at issues
- Goal setting
- Create a safe space for honesty
1. They Help You Re-Open Communication Channels
Not every relationship will survive relationship counselling, but the ones that do are stronger for it because counselling is all about helping people grow. During your sessions, you will learn new ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling so you can see where your relationship went off the rails and how to get it back on track.
Communication is a common issue often cited as one of the main contributors to marriage troubles. Unfortunately, blocked communication channels can give rise to many other problems because we are not mind readers.
Communication is a two-way street, so even if one partner can voice their concerns, it doesn’t help much if the other doesn’t listen or is not able to empathize
Some partners may hear what the other is saying but already knows how they will respond. Getting the last word, pretending to listen and paying lip service, and getting defensive all end up with partners devaluing the other without trying to understand them
We have more distractions in our lives than ever. Mobile phones, TVs and computers are all vying for our attention at all hours of the day, and it’s easy to switch off and not pay attention to what’s happening in the relationship.
A skilled marriage counsellor’s job is to get the flow of communication running again. They can show you where your communication may be breaking down and teach you the listening and communication skills you need to restore them.
2. Get You Over the Hurdle Of Long-Time Issues
You have a lot invested in a relationship, especially when children and mortgages are involved, which mean you can put up with a lot before reaching breaking point. In some marriages, it can take years before one partner or both decide enough is enough, and they finally resolve to do something about it.
Quite often, it’s more than just one issue that couples can bottle up for the sake of the relationship or the kids. Eventually, the pent up negativity could cause either of you to explode. The sudden display of emotions may be a complete shock to the other partner because the communication channels have broken down.
Other long-term relationship issues can cause arguments that go round in circles without a solution. They may die down for a time, but they soon start up again when the problem remains unresolved.
Regardless of the scope of the issue or the length of time it is has gone unresolved, a marriage counselling Sydney professional can help you get to the root of the problem. This way, they can help you break free of the vicious circle by teaching you patience, compassion, and understanding.
3. Help You Resolve Your Money Issues
In nearly every relationship, one partner is a spender, while the other is a saver. The two traits can both be present, but one usually dominates the other to define a person’s general attitude towards money.
The two financial personalities are primarily incompatible, and it can take some work for couples to get on the same page about money.
One partner may want to have fun and travel while they are still young, while the other is focused on getting the mortgage paid off and leaving exploring the world for later, maybe during early retirement. Financial disagreements can worsen when credit cards and personal loans are involved.
While marriage counsellors may not be financial experts, they can teach struggling couples to communicate about their monetary issues.
Money and how to handle it often has deep psychological and emotional connections, which can be difficult for the other partner to fathom.
A relationship counselling Sydney professional can help you get to the core issues so you can understand your connection with money and why your partner may be struggling to understand your financial behaviour. This way, you can finally start having constructive conversations around spending and saving, rather than the constant arguments.
4. Help You With Intimacy Issues
In a long-term relationship like a marriage, one problem can lead to another, especially when swept under the carpet or bottled up. The pent up negative emotions can lead to a loss of intimacy, often the foundation for a host of other problems appearing in the relationship.
Intimacy does not come as easily to long-term partners as it does for young couples in love. It takes effort to regularly connect, and life, kids, and work can get in the way.
Maybe you are both too busy at work, or babies and young children are taking up more of your time. Married couples often find themselves simply too exhausted to bother with intimacy, and life turns into a revolving door of work, kids, TV, and sleep.
There are proven strategies to restore intimacy in a relationship. Marriage counselling Sydney services can open your eyes to what may be causing the lack of closeness in your relationship.
When you find the source of your issues, you can then receive further guidance on managing your time so you can enjoy intimate moments that will strengthen your bond.
5. Show You The Cost of Divorce
Some couples go through marriage counselling to ultimately discover that divorce may be the best solution. However, it’s the counsellor’s role to make people see the actual cost of divorce versus repairing the relationship.
After all, you did get together for a reason, and learning how to reconnect with those feelings and getting to know your partner again can help repair the rift.
There’s no guarantee you will be happier after the divorce, and it could introduce even more logistical and financial challenges you may not have expected.
Barring the exception of abusive partners threatening the family’s safety, children are the biggest losers in a divorce. Separation can lead children into a downward spiral of insecurity and depression.
When you share custody with the kids, your ex will still be in your life, and those unresolved issues that created your marriage problems will still be there.
If you believe that both of you are decent people worthy of love and affection, divorce may be the worst-case scenario. A relationship counselling Sydney service can help you weigh the pros and cons to reveal that separating may not be your best solution.
Once you understand there are other options, your counselor can then teach you how to rekindle the love that may be buried under unresolved issues.
6. Show You How to Pick Your Battles
Even the best relationships have the occasional argument. However, disagreements in a troubled marriage tend to be trivial and inconsequential.
One partner may harbour resentment or anger over what they consider an egregious act. However, instead of expressing how they feel and working with their partner to resolve the issue, they bottle it up. The frustrations have to come out, so they get angry at every little thing.
Pent-up emotions are dynamite waiting to explode, and little things like whose turn it is to do the dishes or a spouse not responding to a text can ignite the fuse.
If you and your partner are constantly bickering over little things that don’t matter, there may be more significant issues at play that need to be brought into the open. A marriage counselling Sydney professional provides a safe place where you can air these feelings in a controlled, unbiased atmosphere.
Understanding the real issues behind your constant fighting can put everything into perspective and give you the emotional energy to deal with the most critical problems. The rage that fuelled the fire over little things dissipates when the bottled up resentment is dealt with.
7. Facilitate Healing After Cheating
Infidelity is a tough pill to swallow, and many couples struggle to get over the many hurdles it throws up. Cheating is a severe breach of trust and can deliver a serious blow to self-esteem. Rekindling the love and trust afterwards can take months or years, and it’s never easy.
There’s no sugar-coating the fact that many relationships fizzle out after infidelity, but there is always hope if both couples are willing to do the work.
Naturally, there are a lot of emotions to work through when confronted with a cheating partner, and it’s tough to do on your own without professional help. However, exploring the reasons behind infidelity can help with the healing process.
It can take professional guidance to investigate the issues leading up to infidelity, and couples need a safe place to explore emotions that run deep, some of which they may not even be aware of. Marriage therapy Sydney services are professionals at getting these emotions to surface and allowing couples to put their relationship back on the mend.
8. Show You a Different Perspective
Motivated couples intent on saving their relationship are often surprised to discover from their marriage counselling Sydney sessions that looking at things from a different perspective can do wonderful things for the marriage.
The way we look at the world develops over a lifetime, and accepting that you and your spouse will always have a different view on certain things is the key to a successful marriage.
After years of spending time together, spouses can fall into the trap of expecting their partners to have the same ideals, values, and opinions as they do. When they find out this is not the case, it can cause a rift.
People tend to think in terms of right versus wrong. They are right, and anybody with differing opinions, including a spouse, is wrong.
Differing perspectives are the source of many arguments in relationships, and most are not straightforward with a simple solution. Marriage counselling Sydney professionals can show you how two people with different world views or opinions can both be right. They can also teach you how to view the world from someone else’s eyes so you can see where they are coming from.
9. Help You Set Goals
All couples will turn to a marriage counselling Sydney professional with a unique set of issues. To help you work through your problems, you will sit down with your therapist to work out the goals you have for your relationship.
All couples will turn to a marriage counselling Sydney professional with a unique set of issues. To help you work through your problems, you will sit down with your therapist to work out the goals you have for your relationship.
Goals create the guideposts on your journey to rebuilding your marriage. Relationship therapists will better understand your marital problems when they know where you want to be at the end of your therapy. The goals you set will depend on the issues you are having, but they could be one or more of the following:
- Develop problem-solving skills
- Dealing with differences
- Anger management
- Understanding issues developed during childhood
- Better communication skills
- Constructive criticism
- Developing positive thinking skills
- Bring back the intimacy
10. Create a Safe Space for Honesty
When a marriage is in serious trouble, it can take a lot of digging to uncover the issues that are causing problems.
The home is often the battleground of the marriage, making it more difficult to keep emotions in check. In short, it’s not the right setting for exploring deep and often confronting issues.
A couples counselling office is a safe place where these outbursts will not be tolerated. This tends to put people on their best behaviour, so calm and productive discussions can prevail.
The counselor promotes an unbiased environment where judgments are withheld, and everyone has an equal say. There is safety in numbers, and it’s a lot easier to examine deep-felt emotions when there is a professionally trained guiding hand at the helm.
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