Relationship Counselling

Relationship Counselling

Relationship Counselling 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, employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.

Couple Therapy

Couple Therapy (or relationship 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 long 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.

Basic Principles

Before a relationship between individuals can begin to be understood, it is important to recognize and acknowledge that each person, including the counselor, has a unique personality, perception, set of values and history.   Individuals in the relationship may adhere to different and unexamined value systems.   Institutional and societal variables (like the social, religious, group and other collective factors) which shape a person’s nature, and behaviour are considered in the process of counseling and therapy.   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 optimal amounts of conflict.   Conflict is not intrinsically adverse to relationship happiness.   In fact 60% of divorces occur in low conflict marriages.   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.   There patterns may be called negative interaction cycles.   There are many possible reasons for this, including insecure attachment, poor sense of self, unconscious pain from early life being triggered by similar issues in the ‘here and now’.

Changes in situations like financial state, physical health, and the influence of other family members, including political environment, 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 getting a relationship back on tract may be to help facilitate a conscious understanding of painful, past issues, formerly unconscious material, so that the client can better manage and take responsibility for their own issues rather than lay them at the feet of their partner.

Also learning to fight fairly, rather than to try and avoid conflict, can be of assistance.