Heal Together: 4 Relationship Changing Benefits of Marriage Counseling

Are you and your partner having difficulty in your marriage? There is no fairly-tale marriage. The truth is that relationships experience discord and problems from time to time.

The Abu Dhabi Statistics Centre reported that 28.5% of marriages end in divorce in the first year. They also found that 52.2% of marriages ended in the first three years.

While this can paint a sad and even hopeless picture, there’s help to prevent marriage failure. Continue reading to learn about the benefits of marriage counseling.

Reasons for Considering Couples Counseling

All long-term relationships experience highs and lows. If you and your partner have trouble navigating this road, consider talking with a counselor.

They can guide you through the rough patches that may result from:

Loss of trust
Problems with communication
Ineffective conflict management strategies
Decrease or lack of emotional intimacy
Lack of confidence in the relationship

Engaging in couples therapy improves relationship skills together. Therapy teaches positive communication, active listening, and conflict management.

Benefits of Marriage Counseling

Marriage counseling helps couples find harmony in their personal and family life. This reduces quick decisions to give up and divorce. Waheeda Hassan said, “family guidance is an integral part of building stable UAE families and a holistic process that requires the contribution of multiple entities.”

The following describes four benefits of marriage counseling.

1. Strengthen Emotional Bonds

To maintain a relationship over time, partners must create an emotional bond. This bond can become strained by daily stress, life changes, or less time spent together. It’s important to spend time focusing on your personal needs as well as your partner’s needs.

Marriage therapists help you define what is interfering with your emotional attachment. Once you identify the problem areas, you can work together to resolve the issues. The result is a deeper connection and stronger emotional bond.

2. Improve Dysfunctional Family Interactions

Marriage therapists help to identify dysfunctional relationships. The counselor works with parenting issues that may increase conflict. The couple learns about positive parenting techniques. They also work on conflict resolution.

The counselor encourages four elements of a healthy relationship:

Respect
Honesty
Equality
Communication

By identifying triggering behaviours, you can work toward positive change. The goal is marital stability and happiness.

3. Address Alienation Between Partners

A marriage may falter when tension and alienation occur in the relationship. This damages the love, affection, and feelings between spouses. This may develop slowly over time or after a precipitating event such as an affair.

A therapist guides the couple in expressing their feelings. They can help reveal the consequences of these emotions. The counselor provides strategies to resolve divides in the relationship.

4. Decrease the Divorce Rate

Deciding to spend time strengthening your marriage benefits you and your partner. Experts have shown that happy couples live longer, healthier, and more satisfactory lives.

This is not true for those who have undergone a divorce or who have an unhappy marriage. This research reported that being in an unhappy marriage increases your risk of illness by about 35%. It can even decrease your life span by 4 to 8 years.

Entering into couples counseling can improve the happiness and health of you, your partner, and your marriage. This decreases the chances of divorce.

Have You Considered Engaging in Counseling Services?

If you are feeling tension or changes in your marriage, consider these benefits of marriage counseling. The Thrive Wellbeing Centre, located in Dubai, has a team of psychologists ready to meet your needs. We provide confidential and affordable individual therapy for children, adolescents, adults, and couples.

Sarah RasmiMay 23, 2020