11 Benefits of Marriage and Family Counseling
In today's fast-paced world, relationships face a myriad of challenges. From communication issues to life stressors such as financial struggles, work-life boundaries, and parenting challenges, these things can put a significant strain on marriages, relationships, and family dynamics.
Fortunately, marriage and family counseling offers a safe space for individuals, couples, and families to navigate these complexities, improve their relationships, and strengthen emotional bonds.
At The Gaia Center, we offer couples therapy for both married and unmarried couples, poly-affirming relational therapy, family therapy, premarital therapy, and discernment counseling.
What is Marriage and Family Counseling?
Marriage and family counseling is a therapeutic practice that involves working with couples or family units to address emotional, psychological, or interpersonal issues. Unlike individual therapy, marriage and family counseling focuses on the relational dynamics between two or more individuals, whether it be spouses, partners, or family members. The ultimate goal of this form of therapy is to create healthy patterns of communication, resolve conflicts, and improve the emotional connection between those involved.
Some of the challenges explored in relationship therapy can include sexual challenges and intimacy concerns, communication difficulties, conflict resolution, infidelity, parenting, divorce, uncertainty or anxiety, and supporting your loved one with a mental health condition.
Emotional Benefits of Marriage and Family Therapy
Improved Communication
Communication is crucial to any kind of relationship, and we often aren’t taught skills for effectively and respectfully communicating. This can lead to misunderstandings, anger, and resentment.
One of the most prominent benefits of marriage and family counseling is improving communication skills. By learning how to actively listen and communicate goals, concerns, and desires effectively, couples can better understand each other's perspectives and reduce misunderstandings.
Improved communication not only helps resolve conflicts but also fosters emotional intimacy and trust, which are crucial for a strong relationship.
Resolving Conflict in a Healthy Manner
Conflict is inevitable in any kind of relationship – whether romantic, familial, or platonic. Conflict in and of itself isn’t bad, however, if conflict isn’t handled skillfully, it can ultimately be the demise of a relationship. Poorly handled conflict can lead to lasting, sometimes irreparable, damage. Marriage and family counseling teaches lasting tools for how to resolve conflict in a way that respects each person's unique perspective and maintains the integrity of the relationship.
During therapy, couples or family members learn how to approach disagreements with empathy, patience, and understanding rather than anger or defensiveness. By practicing these skills in a controlled environment, these skills can be carried into day to day life.
Enhancing Emotional Intimacy and Trust
Over time, life stressors, miscommunication, and unresolved conflicts can lead to feeling emotionally distant and distrustful. We often find that folks don’t even realize how emotionally distant they have become until they get into therapy. Marriage and family counseling offers a safe space for couples to reconnect, rebuild trust, and rekindle emotional intimacy.
Marriage and family therapy can create a safe space for increasing vulnerability, sharing deep fears and desires, and working through deeper unresolved issues preventing folks from truly opening up. As emotional intimacy deepens, couples and families often find that their relationships become stronger and more fulfilling.
A Safe Space for Navigating Mental Health Concerns
While individual therapy can be crucial for folks experiencing mental health struggles, couples and/or family therapy can provide a space for navigating these issues as well.
In addition, we often find that folks experiencing mental health conditions benefit from couples or family therapy so that their loved ones can better understand what they’re going through. In particular, we’ve found that when teens are struggling with their mental health, it can be important for all family members to be involved in the process – often through family therapy.
Engaging in couples therapy can also help people get more out of their individual therapy by having a dedicated space to work on relational issues – giving room in individual sessions for other topics. In turn, this can also significantly benefit the relationship.
Specific Benefits of Couples Therapy
Prevent Divorce/Separation
One of the most well-known benefits of marriage counseling is avoiding divorce or separation. While therapy is not a guaranteed fix, and we can never promise a particular outcome, therapy does provide tools that can help you healthily navigate your challenges.
At The Gaia Center, in addition to marriage and family therapy, we also offer Discernment Counseling. Discernment Counseling is designed for couples that are contemplating divorce— especially when one partner is considering it more heavily, while the other hopes to save the marriage. Developed by Dr. Bill Doherty, this short-term counseling process helps couples slow down, explore their options, and gain clarity about their options for the future of the relationship.
Discernment Counseling is not actual “couples therapy,” because the goal is not to solve marital problems, but to determine whether they are solvable. The focus is on better understanding how the relationship got to this point, and each partner’s perspective and contribution to the issues.
Reigniting Romance and Intimacy
With all of the stressors and responsibilities of life, it’s very common for couples to drift apart over time, particularly in the areas of romance and intimacy – both physical and emotional. Whether your struggles are related to emotional intimacy, physical intimacy, or both, couples therapy can be very beneficial. In addition to general couples therapy, several of our therapists at The Gaia Center also offer sex therapy.
Learning Conflict Resolution Skills
For understandable reasons, many couples avoid conflict. However, conflict is a normal (and even important) part of life and relationships. Through couples therapy, you can learn skills for managing conflict in a respectful, healthy, goal-directed way vs. feeling like you’re constantly fighting in a way that never comes to true resolution.
Building A Stronger Partnership
Whether you’re dealing with major issues like infidelity or you just want to make your relationship more solid, therapy can help. Through couples counseling, you’re able to set goals both individually and as a team, build trust and emotional intimacy, and find or reestablish a sense of shared purpose.
Specific Benefits of Family Therapy
Improving Parent-Child Relationships
Family relationships are complicated, especially parent-child ones. A wide variety of factors including communication difficulties, behavioral challenges, and external stressors can all play a role. Family therapy helps parents and children navigate these issues in a structured way that can help improve or rebuild the family dynamic.
While many people often think of family therapy as occurring with young children or teens and their parents/siblings, at The Gaia Center, we often do family work with parents and their adult children, adult siblings, or a combination of the two. Being an adult child provides additional, different difficulties that aren’t always present when under the age of 18.
Support With Co-Parenting and Blended Families
Whether you’re navigating divorce, a new marriage, a polyamorous dynamic, family therapy can be helpful in skillfully navigating co-parenting with ex-spouses, relationships with step children, or just adjusting to new family dynamics.
Strengthening Family Bonds
Family therapy doesn’t only have to occur in times of crisis – it can also be effective for families who just want to make their bonds stronger and improve their overall dynamic. Through therapy, families can build more effective communication skills, better resolve conflicts, and develop a deeper level of empathy and understanding.
The Importance of Having An Inclusive Couples, Marriage, or Family Therapist
While more therapist education programs are starting to become informed in working with couples and families who aren’t just cisgender, heterosexual, and monogamous, and there are various clinical trainings that focus on this as well, many marriage and family therapists still aren’t equipped to work with folks in “nontraditional” situations.
At The Gaia Center, our therapists practice from a lens that is inclusive of ALL relationship types – including LGBTQ+, ethical non-monogamy, polyamory, and kink.
Why Choose The Gaia Center for Marriage, Family, and Relationship Counseling
At The Gaia Center, our therapists are highly trained in providing effective, evidence-based counseling.
We tailor our approach to your unique needs, while also remaining clinically sound. We know every relationship is different, and we want therapy to feel like something that’s supportive of your needs versus just what a textbook may say. In addition, all of our couples therapists have experience with the Gottman Method, the most research supported of any couples therapy approach.
We are also one of only a handful of therapy practices in the Nashville area that offer Discernment Counseling, a specialized approach for couples on the brink of divorce.
With our wide variety of services, including individual counseling, relationship counseling, and group counseling, many clients have found that they can address all of their therapy needs in one place. Our clients have shared that they love being able to seek additional services with our team beyond what they initially came to us for as they are already familiar with our vibe and feel comfortable in our office.
