About half of all psychotherapist visits are prompted by marriage and family troubles, according to the Harvard Mental Health Letter. When couples can't communicate in a healthy way, marriage counselors may be able to help them develop new strategies for more productive listening, talking and daily interactions.
Identification
Marriage counseling helps couples identify conflicts, find solutions and build new ways to communicate and help them avoid future conflicts. According to the Mayo Clinic, most marriage counselors are licensed therapists or clinical social workers, some with credentials from the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. Counselors may work exclusively on the couple's issues, or may recommend that each spouse undergo private therapy sessions to tackle individual issues.
Methods
Marriage counselors share a number of techniques with psychotherapists, according to the Harvard Mental Health Letter. In addition to providing a safe, calm and supportive presence, a marriage counselor also might need to challenge a patient's beliefs, teach problem solving skills and assign homework or practice exercise to help patients change unwanted behaviors.
Initial Assessment
Some---but not all---marriage counselors will provide couples with an initial written assessment as they begin their therapy. Everett L. Worthington, author of "Hope-Focused Marriage Counseling: A Guide to Brief Therapy," believes this formal assessment is an underused and undervalued tool. It helps the therapist and couple start on the same page, clearly outlines goals and expectations, and can help unsure spouses begin to trust the process of therapy. Worthington believes that "assessment and feedback sessions can account for one-fourth of the normal gains" people expect to receive through marriage counseling.
Therapist Strategies
As a therapist, Worthington believes the best strategy for helping a troubled couple pulls ideas and techniques from several schools of thought. He praises emotionally focused marital therapy for its ability to help spouses see each other at their most emotional and vulnerable. He employs the concrete nature of solution-focused therapy to promote clear, achievable goals. Both behavioral and cognitive therapy focus on the positive aspects of communication and aim to help couples accept each other instead of trying to change each other. Worthington also cites a useful metric to help identify successful couples---the "minimum ratio of five positive to negative behaviors."
Patient Strategies
Psychotherapist Bryce Kaye recommends that his patients focus less on issues of love and more on issues of integrity. Personal integrity, he writes in "The Marriage First Aid Kit," allows you to feel safe with your spouse, which leads to responsible actions and deeper, more affectionate bonds. Kaye believes that activating positive, empowering memories can trigger the brain's dopamine circuits, causing you to think more creatively and behave in a mature fashion. He also suggests trying to balance your own identity with the identity you've created as a married couple. Losing the first makes it very difficult to revive the second.
