Why get help to sort out couple issues?

When psychotherapy helps, love prevails.

Apart from the meaningful ‘Love is all you need’, couples go through a variety of circumstances and situations unique to each of them, some of which require the intervention of a healthcare professional.

Even more, we often say that any couple is made of two different individuals who function as a new human organism which goes ‘beyond the mere sum of its components’. That’s why it’s not easy to continuously match each other and act to the full satisfaction of either partner. Issues within couples can be of an enormous variety indeed but, even so, any issue is shared with many other ones.

In fact, it resembles one-person therapy in the sense that many people think they are the only ones to have a certain issue, causing them an extra amount of anxiety and, possibly, a sense of guilt or inadequacy. However, couple issues are areas of exchange which must be either updated or explored to fix. In other words, each issue represents a new opportunity to improve the couple relationship.

Mental healthcare professionals can help those couples in that journey to finding better ways to sort out things and learn better ways to be happier together. Thus, an initial stage of the therapy process typically requires from the couple a clear openness in front of the therapist to let them know each member of the couple as well as every significant bit of their history up to the present. This means that both partners are listened to in a neutral, respectful way, by the therapist, and this usually results in having an initial picture of the point of their relationship as an starting point for the therapy itself.

Within a certain approach, issues are seen in therapy in order of importance, and this is decided in each session by the members of the couple attending. Neither partner is judged by the therapist but helped to find out better ways to cope with their common issues. Occasionally, individual issues can require individual sessions to be sorted out. This will contribute to the harmony of the functioning of the couple, as individual issues act as personal interferences to the functioning of the couple system.

After all major issues have been sorted out and the couple feels no need to attend more appointments, the therapy is virtually finished and a later follow-up session is offered to confirm that all issues were effectively sorted out and the underlying matters appropriately managed by both members of the couple with love and understanding.

Written By

Dr Antonio Jose Femenias