I. Overview of the Marriage and Couple/Relationship Counseling Process
II. Goals and Procedures in Counseling
III. Why Isn't Love Enough?

I. OVERVIEW OF THE MARRIAGE AND COUPLE/RELATIONSHIP COUNSELING PROCESS

A. Your First Call
Since I am not part of a hospital or psychological clinic, but rather a psychologist/marriage counselor in private practice, when you call my office, you speak directly to me. I'll be happy to spend time with you, at no charge, sympathetically exploring your reasons for inquiring about marriage or couple counseling. If you wish we can arrange an appointment at that time, or if you prefer, you can talk it over with your spouse and call me back. If your spouse/partner is unwilling to come, it may be even more important for you to come and start the process. When we meet, I can help you make certain changes to alleviate the situation, convince your spouse/partner to join you in the process of fighting for the success of your relationship, and help you explore options that you may not have considered.

B. Counseling Begins with the Initial Consultation
Prior to my meeting with a couple, I send a questionnaire as an email attachment which is to be printed in duplicate by the couple and filled out privately by each of you. The questionnaire asks about the nature of your relationship with your spouse, your level of satisfaction in different areas, the adequacy of your communication, and your wishes for change. This time- and cost-effective exercise affords both of you an opportunity to organize your thinking so as to make maximum use of the time spent with me at our first meeting. You bring your written responses to the initial session; this gives us a jump-start in the counseling process and helps in the development of our agenda for this and future meetings.

Counseling, which includes feedback from the counselor, specific suggestions for the couple, and guidance begins with the very first meeting. Understandably, long term solutions can only be reached after a thorough exploration of the complaints, problems and emotional reactions each partner's experiences, getting each person to see their partner's point of view, getting each person to understand their own shortcomings or failures in the interaction, and a recognition by both parties how negative emotions and negative interactions aggravate the situation. After meeting both of you, as a couple, once or twice, I often schedule an individual meeting with each of you. This affords each individual the opportunity to elaborate on his/her replies to the questionnaire, explain in greater detail certain facets of the home situation, or bring up items that they weren't ready to present earlier. The latter may include past history in this marriage or previous relationships and history. Each person brings to the relationship his individual personality, philosophy, expectations and modus operandi.

My immediate initial goals include relieving your tension, fears or depression about the low level of your relationship and your concerns about its future. I do my best to provide encouragement and inspire hope by helping you understand how you, as a couple, got into this low state of affairs because of ineffective, inadequate, or counterproductive behaviors by one, or both parties, towards the other. I encourage you both to explore, consider and implement other, more constructive, caring and hopefully loving, modes of thinking and feeling about your partner and the situation. This will lead to the abandonment of the inadequate or ineffective approaches that one (or both) of you have been using towards the other and the adoption of proactive, positive, constructive, caring, loving and effective behaviors which will satisfy your partner, and at the same time inspire cooperation and accommodation in your partner to satisfy you, thus bringing about the changes you so ardently desire.

In contradistinction to what may take place at home, the counseling sessions take place in a quiet office setting wherein both of you will have an opportunity to enumerate specific problem areas, explain what you mean, elaborate your hurt, pain, frustration, disappointment, anger and other emotions in a constructive fashion. You will have a peaceful and supportive environment wherein you will be encouraged to delineate the needs and wishes that you hope to satisfy in your marriage and get your spouse to listen respectfully, comment caringly, and commit to appropriate behavior in the future. Click here for my article on "Happily Ever After?"

C. Homework Assignments
The purpose of homework assignments is to enrich our sessions, extend the impact of each session, and to maintain momentum from meeting to meeting. Sometimes, I assign questionnaires, which require written responses to help you explore yourself, your partner, your interactions and to evaluate important themes in your marriage. The information elicited by this approach enriches the material that you bring up during our counseling sessions, and is used during subsequent meetings as a map and guide for our work together. At other times, I assign specific activities including the weekly "business meeting." As your communications training proceeds, I will teach you how to conduct the business meeting at home to augment the work that we do in session.

II. GOALS AND PROCEDURES IN COUNSELING (TOP)

A. Achieving Your Goals
Fortunately, by the time a couple reaches the office of a marriage counselor they realize that our culturally bred fantasy of getting married and automatically living happily ever after is a myth. You both understand that keeping a relationship on track requires a lot of caring attention and constant fine-tuning. In order for a marriage to develop and grow successfully, each person must have respect for the other's opinions, show sensitivity to their feelings, and practice openness for honest communication.

Concurrent with the development of competence in these areas, we approach head-on the issues that are causing you distress and prompted you to seek counseling in the first place. My primary focus is to help you reach an understanding of, solution to, or at least a reasonable compromise to, and resolution of the outstanding problems as quickly as possible, and bury the hatchet. This can be accomplished by a mutual commitment to throw yourselves into the counseling process so that you both may learn and put into effect a caring and loving attitude and new communication and interactive skills. We hope to recapture the romance of your early courtship, resume your enjoyment of each other's company, find greater harmony and satisfaction with each other, and peace and contentment in the marriage.

B. Procedures in Counseling: Content and Process
Content: The content of our sessions together will cover the topics that you initially present, your replies to specific questions that I pose about your relationship, and the answers that you give to the questionnaires that will be offered to you. Additionally, our meetings are open to any appropriate subject that you or your partner may wish to introduce at any time. This might include something hidden or unmentioned until now, or perhaps a continuation of a subject that had been explored in the past, but has not been completely resolved.

Process: In addition to our focus on your specific complaints or areas of unhappiness, we also focus on process, viz., (1) the nature of your interactions in presenting these problems to your spouse, and (2) your previous attempts at trying to solve the problem. In this process, we assess the effectiveness of your communication and problem-solving skills. I offer full training for skill enhancement in these two areas. We not only model and practice these skills in session, but I also give structured homework assignments so that you may integrate these new habits into your modus operandi.


III. ISN'T LOVE ENOUGH? (TOP)

Unfortunately, love is not enough. Sometimes, the breakdown of a happy relationship is due to immaturity or sheer ignorance of one's role or responsibilities in the relationship. At other times there are specific personality deficits or traits, active or passive, that precede the relationship and are counterproductive to a healthy interaction. Since each person's attitudes and behavior is only one side of the coin, we investigate what each of you is doing, or failing to do, to contribute to the current situation. Because of reciprocal frustrations, a couple may press each other's buttons and get into a vicious cycle in which both partners are victims as well as aggressors, i.e., both suffer from, and contribute to the unhealthy pattern.

In other situations, both partners are perfectly normal, but have a "desire discrepancy" i.e. have different levels of desire or need in important areas such as affection, sex, emotionally-focused conversation, sharing, closeness, recreation and fun, attachment to friends or family, or have differing views on money or religion, etc. In these cases, failure to understand or adjust to each other's needs and feelings, and react appropriately, can be a source of hurt, disappointment, and anger, which in turn may initiate an unhealthy pattern of reciprocal frustration.

At other times, the problem involves outside sources and may include problematic relationships with an "ex," children from a previous marriage, inability to loosen your ties with parents or friends or other third parties, causing your spouse to complain that he/she does not hold first place in your life.

In view of my training and experience both as a psychologist as well as a marriage counselor, I am sensitive to and will differentiate among issues that stem from within the individual, those that stem from external sources and those that stem strictly from your interaction with your partner. I will work with each of you, and both of you, as the situation requires.

Increasing Your Chances for Marital Success:
It is my objective to make you and your partner as comfortable as can be during this counseling process. Please be assured, that at no time am I looking to blame or embarrass either party. I state at the outset that my goal is to help each of you become the best spouse that you can be. We are always looking for a win-win situation. In any given interaction, if one person wins and the other loses, both people lose, and the marriage suffers. Since we get married to increase our happiness, not our misery, each person should do his best to make the other person happy. In so doing, your mutual chances for success will be excellent.

What Shall I Do Now?
In determining whether or not you wish to pursue marriage or couple counseling, you need to ask yourself:

1. What are the consequences of not taking this opportunity to work this out with the guidance of an experienced marriage counselor now? Will the situation improve, stay the same, or get worse?
   
2. Assuming that the problem will stay the same or get worse, are you willing to spend the rest of your life this way?

If, sadly, your answer to question number (2) above is "no" you have a clear need for professional counseling. Since 50% of American marriages end up in divorce, the statistical chances for success of any marriage chosen at random are about equal to a gambler's chances at Atlantic City or Las Vegas. Fortunately, you can do something to improve your chances for success, especially if you attack the problem early. Although there is no guarantee that every failing marriage can be saved, it is also true, that many failing marriages have been saved with professional help, and that many couples who divorced might have been spared that tragedy had they sought help.

In the unfortunate situation where your partner is hesitant or refuses to come for help, it may be even more important that you come alone to discuss what you might do to convince him/her to join you in this effort. Failing that, perhaps you will learn to make whatever changes you can to single-handedly stop vicious cycles and get your relationship back on track, or, in a worst-case scenario: explore other options and get on with your life.