You and your spouse may have been happily married for 20 or more years, but lately, you just haven’t been connecting. It seems as though your communication is falling on deaf ears.
Or perhaps you are somewhat newly married — only a few months or years in — and the newness of marriage has worn off. You are starting to notice the proverbial cracks in the veneer, and you wonder if you’ve made the right choice or if this is how it will always be.
Get connected with a Christian Counselor
Please contact our reception team at
(469) 943-2452
Marriage counseling at McKinney Christian Counseling can help either end of the spectrum, whether you’re just married or you’ve built up years and experiences with your spouse. A licensed, trained marriage counselor will help you and your spouse talk about what’s really going on in a safe space. He or she will ask questions to help you identify where the issues stem from and what patterns need to change so that you can move toward solutions — together.
Marriage counseling is when a married couple meets with a trained counselor to discuss areas of concern, difficulty or problems so that the counselor can help the couple find ways to solve these areas of struggle.
The first session of marriage counseling can be like the first day of a new school year. The “teacher” (or counselor in this case) explains some of the ground rules for counseling. He or she may talk about how to share safely and allow your spouse to finish his or her thoughts without interrupting, for example. Your counselor will also talk about confidentiality policies, practical agreements such as missed sessions or fee schedules, and will probably begin to ask a few questions about why you and your spouse are seeking counseling.
Your first session may also involve addressing areas of strain or stress in the relationship and providing a wide-lens overview of your relationship — how you met, how long you’ve been married, if you’ve moved or stayed in one place, etc. This contextual information will be helpful to your counselor so that he or she can ask more detailed questions in future sessions.
Depending on the reason you’re seeing a marriage counselor, the amount of sessions will vary. Some counselors begin with a longer introductory session, such as 90 minutes, and then scale back to 50-minute sessions after the initial meeting. You can ask questions of your counselor too about these pragmatic concerns as well as what types of therapy he or she adheres to when counseling.
There are a variety of marriage counseling therapies, so we will aim to identify some of them here. Know that this is a sample, and you can find more information by talking directly to one of the trained marriage counselors at McKinney Christian Counseling. He or she will be able to go into much more detail about how he or she counsels married couples.
Emotionally Focused Therapy: This type of therapy explores why we respond the way that we do to our partners in a relationship. A counselor will help you and your spouse identify how you’re feeling and what may be motivating those feelings, which may or may not be on the surface.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: This type of therapy revolves around the principle that a person’s feelings connect to and direct a his or her thoughts, which then dictates his or her behavior. So marriage counseling that leans on CBT for its foundation really helps couples explore why they feel a certain way and how that can be a reflection of a thought pattern and, in turn, a behavior in either or both spouses. The goal in this type of therapy is to help couples accept each other’s differences and improve conflict management skills so that they can remain connected.
Relational Life Therapy: When a strict adherence to traditional men’s and women’s roles is the source of a marriage struggle, this type of therapy can be especially helpful. Sometimes this means a husband may struggle to identify and discuss his emotions because he has believed that his role is to be the strength for his wife, or it may be that the woman in the marriage believes her role should never be defined by her emotions, even if that’s something her husband identifies in her. It can be good to explore some of the beliefs that a couple may have adopted from popular culture previous generations, to learn where those beliefs are inerrant or causing problems, and then learn new ways of interacting with one another that involve listening, giving mutual respect, and asking questions in ways that are honoring to the other person.
Solution Focused Therapy: This type of therapy identifies a very specific issue that a couple is dealing with. It could be anything from how to handle conflict or intimacy struggles, but the hallmark of this therapy is that one particular struggle is identified. Then, the counselor helps the couple find solutions so that they can move forward in a healthier marriage relationship.
While many marriage counselors use a mixture of therapies, it’s important to consult with anyone you’re considering and ask what they believe is the most helpful for your situation. It may even be the first or second session when you talk about this, but knowing where your counselor is coming from can help you identify if he or she is a good fit for you and your spouse’s situation.
There are a variety of reasons that couples come to Christian marriage counseling in McKinney, Texas. These reasons vary in intensity, duration, and consequence. Some come to counseling in great distress and are possibly considering divorce as their only option. Other married couples identify small issue that they don’t want to become bigger — so they seek the help of a qualified counselor.
Some of the most common reasons that a couple seeks counseling are:
- You keep having the same argument over and over with little to no long-term resolution.
- You’ve become more like roommates or co-parents rather than a married couple, and you’d like help to reconnect in more intimate, close-knit ways.
- You are struggling with intimacy issues. These may or may not stem from relational fears, past hurt and trauma, previous relationship struggles, or communication gaps in the marriage. A trained counselor can help you explore what the root of these struggles are and address ways to bring hope and health to this area of married life.
- You or your spouse has experienced trauma, and your spouse wants to help understand how to be supportive.
- Together, you’ve gone through tragedy or loss, and you fear it will tear apart your marriage or have seen some of the negative effects of the traumatic event in your marriage relationship.
- One or both of you struggles with work/life balance, so the marriage relationship suffers.
- One or both of you has committed infidelity of some kind, and you need help to rebuild trust.
- One or both of you struggles with trust, jealousy, or control issues, and you seek a healthier way of relating to one another.
Many couples don’t see eye-to-eye on a need for counseling. This can be related to one person in the relationship viewing counseling as something that “other people” need. Or it could be that one person in the relationship is satisfied and the other is not. However, if you see a need in your marriage and would like to learn more about how marriage counseling works at McKinney Christian Counseling, we’d love to talk. The trained Christian counselors in McKinney, Texas can talk with one or both of you and give you the information you need to make an informed decision that offers you hope for the future.
Get connected with a Christian Counselor
Please contact our reception team at
(469) 943-2452