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Relationship counseling
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Relationship counseling is the process of counseling the parties of a relationship in an effort to recognize and to better manage or reconcile troublesome differences and repeating patterns of distress. The relationship involved may be between members of a family or a couple (see also family therapy), employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.
Couples therapy is a related and different process.
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Encyclopedia
Relationship counseling is the process of counseling the parties of a relationship in an effort to recognize and to better manage or reconcile troublesome differences and repeating patterns of distress. The relationship involved may be between members of a family or a couple (see also family therapy), employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.
Couples therapy is a related and different process. It may differ from relationship counseling in duration. Short term counseling may be between 1 to 3 sessions whereas short term couples therapy may be between 12 and 24 sessions. An exception being brief or solution focused couples therapy. In addition, counseling tends to be more 'here and now' and new coping strategies the outcome. Couples therapy is more about seemingly intractable problems with a relationship history, where emotions are the target and the agent of change.
The two may differ in other ways as well, but all the differences may indicate more about the counselor/therapist's way of working than the title given to their process.
History
Relationship counseling as a discrete, professional service is a recent phenomenon. Until the late 20th century, the work of relationship counseling was informally fulfilled by close friends, family members, or local religious leaders. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and social workers have historically dealt primarily with individual psychological problems. In many less technologically advanced cultures around the world today, the institution of family, the village or group elders fulfill the work of relationship counseling. Today marriage mentoring mirrors those cultures.
With increasing modernization or westernization in many parts of the world and the continuous shift towards isolated nuclear families the trend is towards trained relationship counselors; these are often volunteers who wish to help others, and are trained by either the Government or social service institutions to help those who are in need of counseling. Many communities and government departments have their own team of trained voluntary or professional relationship counselors. Similar services are operated by many universities and colleges, often staffed by volunteers from among the student peer group. Some large companies maintain a full-time professional counseling staff to facilitate smoother interactions between corporate employees, to minimize the negative effects that personal difficulties might have on work performance.
Basic Principles
Before the relationships between the individuals can begin to be understood, it is important for all to recognize and acknowledge that everyone involved has a unique personality, perception, set of values and history. Sometimes the individuals in the relationship adhere to different value systems. Institutional and societal variables (like the social, religious, group and other collective factors) which shape a person's nature, and behavior must be recognized. A tenet of relationship counseling is that it is intrinsically beneficial for all the participants to interact with each other and with society at large with the least conflict possible. And where conflict arises as inevitably it does, to manage those conflicts consciously.
Most relationships will get strained at some time, resulting in their not functioning optimally and producing self-reinforcing, maladaptive patterns. These patterns may be called negative interaction cycles. There are many possible reasons for this, including insecure attachment, ego, arrogance, jealousy, anger, greed, poor communication/understanding or problem solving, ill health, third parties and so on.
Changes in situations like financial state, physical health, and the influence of other family members can have a profound influence on the conduct, responses and actions of the individuals in a relationship.
Often it is an interaction between two or more factors, and frequently it is not just one of the people who are involved that exhibit such traits. Relationship influences are reciprocal - it takes each person involved to make and manage problems.
A viable solution to the problem and setting these relationships back on track may be to reorient the individuals' perceptions and emotions - how one looks at or responds to situations and feels about them. Perceptions of and emotional responses to a relationship are contained in a mental map or a love maps. These can be explored collaboratively and discussed openly. The core values they comprise can then be understood and respected or changed when no longer appropriate. This implies that each person takes equal responsibility for awareness of the problem as it arises, awareness of their own contribution to the problem and making some fundamental changes in thought and feeling. The next step is to adopt conscious, structural changes to the inter-personal relationships and evaluate the effectiveness of those changes over time.
Basic Practices
Relationship counselor or couple's therapist
The duty and function of a relationship counselor or couple's therapist is to listen, respect, understand and facilitate better functioning between those involved.
The basic principles for a counselor include:
- Provide a confidential dialogue, which normalizes feelings
- To enable each person to be heard and to hear themselves
- Provide a mirror with expertise to reflect the relationship's difficulties and the potential and direction for change
- Empower the relationship to take control of its own destiny and make vital decisions
- Deliver relevant and appropriate information
As well as the above, the basic principles for a couples therapist also include:
- To identify the repetitive, negative interaction cycle as a pattern.
- To understand the source of reactive emotions that drive the pattern.
- To expand and re-organize key emotional responses in the relationship.
- To facilitate a shift in partners' interaction to new patterns of interaction.
- To create new and positively bonding emotional events in the relationship
- To foster a secure attachment between partners.
Common core principles of relationship counseling and couple's therapy are:
In both the practitioner evaluates the story as it is narrated, and facilitates development of realistic, practical solutions; individually at first only if this is beneficial to both, is consensual and is unlikely to cause harm, and then jointly to encourage the participants to give their best efforts at reorienting their relationship with each other.
Methodologies
Although results are almost certainly significantly better when professional guidance is utilized (see especially family therapy), numerous attempts at making the methodologies available generally via self help books and other media are pervasive on the market (occasionally ranking highly on best seller lists).
Methodologies include
See also
External links
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