PREMARITAL COUNSELING

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Research shows that nearly 50% of marriages in the United states will end in divorce—aproximately 50% of divorces occur within the first 7 years—and the average couple will wait 6 years before seeking help for preventable marital problems.

Given the staggering divorce rates, one of the best things engaged couples can do to help save their marrigage before it begins is premarital counseling. Couples that are involved in a specific church or those that want to be married within the walls of a church are often required to recieve counseling before their ceremony can be officiated. Couples that are either non-religious or not required to seek premarital counseling may miss out on starting their marriages with all the skills, tools, and experience to ensure long-term relationship satisfaction. 

Couples who attend premarital counseling have the opportunity to discuss and resolve issues and unhealthy behaviors that most often lead to divorce. Dr. John Gottman, co-founder of The Gottman Institue has spent over 40 years conducting research on couples to understand what defines and breaks a healthy relationship. Dr. Gottman referrs to these unhealthy behaviors (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling) as the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse because their presence within a relationship can predict divorce with 90% accuracy. 

At Here & Now Counseling Services, our counselors work exclusively with couples using Gottman Method Couples Therapy to help change these unhealthy behaviors for couples at every stage of their relationship. Our counselors have helped many couples rebuild the foundation for their relationships following either years of discord or a significant regretable incident, so we know how to help new relationships and engaged couples build a strong and steady foundation for a happy and succesful relationship. 

Premarital counseling can help to increase the likelihood for happiness and success through identifying fears, values, beliefs, needs, and desires while also learning how to communicate them to your partner. Many couples believe the primary reason for divorce is infidelity or some other traumatic event within the relationship but in reality the major cause of divorce is a lack of communication. Premarital counseling can help empower couples with the tools they need to build trust, combat unhealthy relationship behaviors, and support one another.

Premarital counseling is often provided over the course of just a few short sessions and may ask that the couple complete a varity of activities and exercies both together and seperatly to better understand how they function together and their level of compatibility both in their current relationship and in their future marriage. These exercises may involve having the couple acting out or responding to potential situations they may face in marriage, creating marriage resolutions and goals, and identifying potential causes of marital tension. 

At Here & Now Counseling Services, our counselors work with every couple to complete The Gottman Relationship Checkup and Assessment over the course of four sessions which provides a detailed anaylsis of the couples relationship including strengths and potential struggles along with specific tools that can be used to address problem areas. Couples often find that having this information alone makes them feel better equiped for marriage while others with potential problem areas find it is useful to continue slighlty longer to ensure success. 

Having a healthy and long-lasting marriage should not feel like an impossible challenge or a gamble where only the lucky are successful. Relationships take hard work and very few of us have parents with ‘picture-perfect marriages’ who not only role model how to achieve and sustain a healthy marriage but also how to navigate the challengs that confront them. Most people will recieve little to no training or education on how to express themseleve so others can and will listen, how to listen so others can talk, nor how to understand one another without defaulting to one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling).

At Here & Now Counseling Services, our counselors strictly provide online couples counseling in an effort to provide services to individuals that live in isolated areas or those with demanding work and/or life schedules which make seeking help more restrictive. Our services are also beneficial to couples in long-distance relationships (both partners must reside in the state(s) for which your counselor is licensed). 

Great relationships are never ‘found’ nor do they ‘just happen,’ they take a lot of work and attention. Many couples avoid premarital counseling and counseling early in their marriage out of fear that talking to each other or a counselor about their problems will only lead to more problems. However, it is the couples who face their fears and problems together with effective skills and tools for addressing them that go on to have long and succesful relationships that last the rest of their lives together.