Why Marriage and Family Therapy Is Essential for Every Household

Marriage and family therapy is a counseling service focused solely on helping marriages stay strong, and families stay together in a healthy and loving way.  

It sounds simple when it’s written down in the text but really, marriage and family therapy covers the majority of the issues that couples and their families deal with. Staying together in a happy marriage and family, requires work, self-awareness, self-discipline, compassion, coping skills, generosity of spirit, conflict resolution, emotional intelligence as well as the capability of dealing with the standard issues in life, such as work and finances.

When you consider how complex marriage and family can be, it’s easy to see why marriage and family therapy can be a special topic-

Here are some ways that you could take advantage of marriage and family therapy today.

Marital therapy:

1. Premarital counseling  

Why not make the most out of marriage and family therapy, by building up a relationship with your counselor from the offset. A counselor can be a new support system for you and your fiance which will help in creating and sustaining a solid marriage and family for the rest of your life.

2. Conflict resolution

Even with the best will in the world, it can be difficult to reach a compromise when it comes to conflict.  Taking part in marriage and family therapy will help you and your spouse to navigate choppy waters smoothly.  

3. Letting go of the past

Sometimes we walk into our relationships with our own personal baggage, or we create some issues in our present relationship that weigh us down.  Marriage and family therapy can help to resolve these issues and teach you how to dissolve the hurt from the past.

4. Enhancing life skills

We are often taught skills in life, that are superficial, or rarely needed, yet we are never taught important life skills such as developing self awareness, learning how to be intimate, developing coping strategies, parenting skills, negotiating skills, listening skills, planning, understanding our psyche, and learning how to healthily interact with others.  Marriage and family therapy can guide you both towards developing such skills.

5. Developing and maintaining intimacy

Most marriages experience times when both spouses might feel distant from each other.  Some couples may naturally find a way to come back together but for those who aren’t able to get over their issues, marriage and family therapy can be helpful.  Counseling can help you uncover the reasons behind the distance and resolve your latent problems.

Family therapy

1. Developing an understanding of the family dynamics

Challenging family dynamics can put a strain on your family in a variety of ways like- unconsciously projecting problems onto one member of the family, anger, repression, overconfidence and so on.  

Marriage and family therapy can help you to identify these issues in your family before they become to hot to handle, and can help you learn strategies to overcome them.

2. Support in dealing with parenting issues

Nobody really ever knows how to truly parent.  Sure, there are some natural tendencies, particularly when dealing with a newborn child but what do you do if your child runs off the reigns as they grow older? How do you handle that? How do you work to ensure that your child is free to grow and develop, but also trusted to become safely independent and responsible?  Marriage and family therapy can help with that – counselors have seen it all and can provide insight, interventions and strategies to develop parenting skills and resolve, reduce parenting problems.

3. Attachment, grief & loss issues

Loss and grief, or unhealthy attachment styles can create a crazy amount of problems in a family.  The impact of loss can cause the most composed families to fall apart. So it makes sense to have something in place so that if a family has to endure such testing times that they can do so with the support of professionals who know what to do and expect.