Couples Therapy
Are You And Your Partner Struggling To Approach One Another With Empathy?
Is your relationship suffering from emotional distance and difficulties with communication? Are you feeling unheard, unseen, and underappreciated by your partner? Do you have unrealistic or unspoken expectations, preventing you from expressing gratitude toward your significant other or seeing their point-of-view?
No matter what stage of the relationship you’re in, it’s important to be mindful of the patterns and dynamics at play. Whether you are just becoming serious, considering a big step together, or have been committed to one another for years, a lack of consistent emotional connection and attachment can create issues if left unresolved.
Emotional disconnection is often at the core of things such as power struggles, betrayals, distrust and the cycle of blame and reactivity. If you find it difficult to maintain empathy for one another, it’s likely that you struggle to communicate effectively; operating more from a place of disagreement than collaboration. Naturally, your ability to engage in harmonious, quality time together will be affected. Your sex life and day-to-day routine are most likely impacted as well.
Couples therapy gives you an opportunity to learn skills for mitigating criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness. It helps couples find ways to be honest and thus productive with their communication. With counseling support, you can enhance feelings of emotional safety, intimacy, and connection in your relationship.
Emotional Skills Are Not Innate—They Have To Be Learned
Strong relationships are not always valued in our hyper-individualistic culture, and it’s common for us to develop the fear of losing ourselves when navigating the give-and-take of long-term partnerships. As a result, we may develop blind spots to what our partner feels and become stubbornly attached to our own ideas and expectations.
Every relationship, romantic or not, involves two individuals with different perspectives and models for communicating. Many of us weren’t given full access to empowering, healthy, and emotionally supportive interactions as children. Instead, we learned to shut down, react with aggression, or put up a wall. For a relationship to flourish, it’s essential to learn how to collaborate through conflict instead of avoiding it. Yet, most couples struggle to navigate conflict because they’ve never seen it done in a healthy way.
A therapist offers nonjudgmental, empathetic perspective on the issues you face as a couple as counseling challenges you to consider: Do I want to be right, or do I want to be in a relationship? In the therapy space, you can create a solid foundation for connection and communication, ensuring that your partnership can survive—and even thrive—through hardship.
Common Questions About Marriage and Couples Counseling
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I’m afraid that I’ll be judged or blamed for the relationship’s problems.
Our therapists understand that it takes two people to create and repair a marriage or relationship. There is no bias here—we’re not going to take sides or blame you or your partner for your relationship challenges. The goal of couples therapy is to help you identify what you’re struggling with from a place of understanding.
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How long does couples therapy last?
The answer to this question depends on the depth of your concerns and the effort you put into therapy. As long as you want to see change and you’re willing to work on yourself, change is inevitable. Premarital counseling generally lasts six sessions, but for standard marital and couples counseling, we encourage a minimum of twelve sessions. That said, the timetable varies from couple to couple and it’s vital to be patient with yourselves regardless of how long the process takes.
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Will there actually be solutions to our problems?
One of the main goals of couples therapy is teaching you to communicate in a healthy way so that you don’t fall into unproductive and painful patterns. Instead of just providing solutions to relationship problems, we’ll help you learn strategies to avoid falling into those problems in the first place.
Therapy Deepens A Sense Of Shared Meaning Between Couples
Whether you’re married, unmarried, or engaged, our therapists can support you. Here at Mental Wellness Montclair, we’re confident that our approach to couples and marriage therapy can help you and your significant other become vulnerable, allowing you to connect with each other in a more profound and affirming way.
Our therapy sessions provide a neutral territory that’s free of distraction or judgment, regardless of the hurdles you face as a couple.
What to expect in couples counseling sessions
We aim to help you both feel safe and seen in the counseling space. During your initial session, you and your partner will meet with your counselor to go over your needs and goals for therapy. Following this session, it is possible that a session will be scheduled with each of you separately, giving your therapist the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of your individual history and goals. This is done to get a better grasp of both of your roles in the relationship.
From there, weekly joint sessions will continue. By helping you and your partner get in touch with your emotions, you can learn to communicate your needs more effectively. We’ll address how frustration, resentment, confusion, and joy are manifesting in the context of your relationship, and you’ll learn to actively listen to your partner as you collaborate on solutions together. With time and practice, a sense of trust and connection will be cultivated between you.
Our approach to Couples Therapy
The ultimate objective of counseling is to help couples stop resorting to defensive behaviors and start focusing on the feelings of the self rather than the fault of the other.
To do this, our therapists draw from a wide range of approaches to guide clients. We often use the Gottman Method for Couples Therapy, which focuses on helping partners repair their hurt, create a foundation of shared meaning, and turn toward each other (opposed to away from one another). Our therapists also utilize the Imago Relationship approach, which is especially useful for newlyweds and engaged couples. Instead of working from a mindset of proving the other person wrong, the Imago method teaches you how to generate empathy from conflict.
There is a pathway to healing and growing together. As long as you and your partner are willing to work in tandem—and we’ll teach you how—your relationship can evolve. Couples therapy can help you learn the emotional skills that will transform your relationship into one of connection, intimacy, and mutual gratitude.
Connection Is The Key To A Solid Foundation
If you want to improve your relationship so that it can weather conflict and stand strong for years to come, we encourage you to consider couples therapy with us.
To learn more, contact us below or call 973-210-7310.
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