Marriage Counseling

What is a Marriage Counselor?

Marriage counselors are counseling professionals who provide support and guidance to couples. They guide couples through conversations to find the root troubles and conflicts before working with both individuals to find compromises and routes to progress.

Marriage counselors often work in a guidance role, offering little to no opinion but rather helping the couple to uncover their own needs and conflicts. With a better understanding of these, the couple can begin to put strategies in place for coping with these areas of conflict, reducing them or negating altogether.

Marriage counselors can form long-term relationships with couples and work with them to solve ongoing issues as well as provide a safe and trusting place to discuss new or developing issues. They can also provide a short term outlet for couples who need to discuss a specific issue or reach a decision together if they are struggling to do so. Sometimes couples seek the help of marriage counselors when they are considering splitting up and, once again, the marriage counselor helps to guide them through their feelings on the subject without expressing views either way.

What Does a Marriage Counselor Do?

Although marriage counselors work with a fairly specific population, they nevertheless offer a variety of services to their clients. Primary among their duties is to provide counseling services to couples that have issues that need to be addressed in their marriage. These services may involve individual counseling for both partners, couples counseling together, and family counseling with any children the couple may have. The focus here is typically on the dynamics of the family and how the relationships between family members are contributing to dysfunction.

To determine the cause of the problems between marriage partners, counselors may conduct educational programming with clients, such as martial enrichment courses, to improve communication skills or to build trust.

Diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders is a highly common practice for marriage counselors as well. This includes administering tests to determine a client’s level of mental health, the presence of personality disorders, or even the presence of an intellectual disability. Marriage counselors must be versed in interpreting the results of these tests, using those results to devise treatment programs, and working with clients to successfully complete their treatment program in order to have a more stable and fulfilling marriage.

Many marriage counselors also work specifically with couples and families that have been impacted by alcohol, drugs, or domestic violence. Marriage counselors may refer one or both members of the marital relationship to treatment programs, such as a residential facility, to get clean. Other times, marriage counselors will work with spouses that have been abused in order to help them overcome the trauma of the abuse they have suffered at the hands of a loved one. Yet another duty of marriage counselors is to work with spouses that have committed abusive acts in order to help them work through the anger or other underlying issues that led to their behavior.

Why Do We Need Marriage Counselors?

Marriages, like any relationship, often is not without problems. That is where a marriage counselor can be an invaluable resource in helping couples to improve their relationship. Often, there is a communication breakdown, which leaves couples feeling at odds with each other. A marriage counselor can provide useful tools in bridging the gap that can sometimes occur when there is a breakdown in communication or other relationship challenges.

Sometimes counselors can work with the couple on an individual basis, as well as together, allowing for a deeper understanding of the couple’s concerns and relationship issues. Marriage counselors are also tasked with diagnosing and treating mental and emotional disorders, which can help to address underlying issues that contribute to the troubles the couple is experiencing.