Tammy Stoner, a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, provides presentations, coaching and counseling services. As the developer of the Teddy Bear Technique® Toolkit she demonstrates fast and fun ways to engage in storytelling for adults and children, and quickly reach the hard to reach. As author, presenter and coach, services are guaranteed to create breakthrough results!
How Couples Counseling Can Help Save a Marriage
The marriage is troubled, attractions that led to the marital union have waned and one or both of you are considering divorce. In one last effort you seek couples counseling hoping that you can salvage the marriage. Can it help? Will it help? How will it help us with this problem?
Each of you entered this marriage as unique human beings, bringing sole backgrounds and life experiences. The wealth of experiences that you brought to the marriage have provided you with a notion that the way you view the world is the "real" reality.
You have tried to "fix" the problem with common sense and logic, and seem to only have compounded the problem. In a last ditch effort you decide to try the irrational and illogical approach through seeking the help of a marriage counselor, hoping but not really "believing" it can work.
The very act of going to a counseling session to obtain "outside" help is an act of change. You are seeking help for something you don't believe can be changed. Paradoxically, this is the first step towards change as you are seeking a different solution.
One of the most common fallacies of change is that if something is "bad," its opposite must be "good." The wife who divorces the "weak" husband, to marry the "strong" husband, often discovers to her dismay, that while the second marriage should be vastly different from the first, nothing much has actually changed.
A couples counselor is trained to look at the problem from a new perspective in order to create change. There are many tips and tools that can be utilized to help create this change. It might be as simple as providing opportunities for each partner to speak and be heard, or as complex as telling each of you to continue doing the same thing you have been doing to solve the problem. A counselor might give you instructions to make yourself be "unhappy." Anybody can be unhappy but to make oneself unhappy needs to be learned. In the language game just presented, symptoms are prescribed, a double bind created in an effort to create the desired change.
The therapist can help you "fix" the problem using methods outside the box, outside your frame of reference, outside your logic, in efforts to provide solutions. It is this vast wealth of knowledge, that expands your problem solving ability so that each partner can view a new and "real" reality.
Reprint permission granted in part or whole when the following credit appears: Reprinted with permission from Tammy Stoner LCSW at
http://www.TeddyBearTherapy.com 1-770 639-7719
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