Sun Signs Everything Under The Sun!
How To Know If Your Marriage Counselor Is Good Or Bad?
Marriage is an institutionalized bonding between two persons of the opposite gender in general. There are thousands of communities spread all over the world with different cultural trends. However, whatever may be the differences between such communities regarding culture, religion, habitat, etc., most communities believe in the sanctity of marriage. Finding the right marriage counselor can save your marriage or it might mean bad news.
In our day-to-day life, we come across several couples living together bonded by the institution of marriage. Still, among these couples, not everybody is happy living with their partner as a married couple. Many such people feel unhappy in their marriages.
In today’s busy and fast-paced life, the number of unhappy couples is on the rise. And with that, there is a spurt of marriage counselors making a beeline for solving all the problems of such unhappy couples worldwide, especially in developed and developing countries.
The question here is, does such marriage counseling work? Are they effective enough to save a marriage from disintegration? Let us have a look at the signs by which we can ascertain that the counselor we have chosen is not bound to help save the marriage:
Is Your Marriage Counselor Giving You Bad Vibes?
1. Focus On The Partner’s Shortcoming
Marriage counselors often tend to focus solely on the partner’s deficiencies and try to undermine the client’s role in the relationship. This is done to satisfy the ego of the client. Such partial counseling will do more harm than any good to
A relationship depends totally on the mutual understanding of two persons and their interactions. Counseling must always be on an impartial note. Inadequacies and flaws are part and parcel of human nature. A marriage counselor must understand and focus on the shortcomings and faults of both the people involved in a relationship.
Projecting one person as the culprit will not solve the problem. Due attention must be given to understand the dynamics of the relationship. A solution has to evolve accordingly.
2. Judging Your Partner – Signs of a Bad Marriage Counselor
We often behave strangely in adverse circumstances. When you approach a marriage counselor to solve the problem of your unhappy relationship, we often tend to ignore the difficulties of the circumstances your partner might have experienced before due to bad or rude behavior towards you.
The context is critical. Your partner may be in a fierce mood at one point in time and may rue or repent later for such uncalled-for behavior towards you. Marriage counselors must consider such contexts, the situations responsible for bad behavior by their partner before being judgmental.
A counselor who is quick to judge your partner without even meeting them in person can prove to be destructive for your relationship. Until and unless counseling involves the right perspective, there is the danger of going in the wrong way.
3. Insistence On Individual Counselling
Individual counseling in a troubled relationship is the first step towards a rapprochement. A counselor must collect individual opinions and facts from both persons to ascertain the severity of the case at hand. However, the counselor should always be insistent on counseling the couples together after the initial stage of individual counseling.
Effective couples therapy will go a long way in rejuvenating a troubled relationship. Counseling a couple together requires a lot of skill and a different strategy than individual counseling.
There are a lot of counselors who are not competent enough to handle the delicate dynamics of marriage. Their incompetence makes them repulsive towards counseling the couples together. Every individual should refrain from approaching such counselors.
4. Counselor Emphasising On Divorce
The first and foremost duty of marriage counselors is to save the marriage. However, some counselors build the case by prioritizing divorce as the only option.
They try to project an irreversible sick relationship between the couples and persuade couples to divorce. In technical parlance, this is called ‘Pathologizing.’ But people should be aware of such destructive counselors and distance themselves from the clutches of such counselors.
5. Counselor Encouraging Your Individual Needs
A healthy family signifies that both persons’ needs are well attended to and synchronized to the well-being of other members of the family. However, it would help if you worried about the effectiveness of your marriage counselor when individual needs are given preference over the needs of the marriage and family.
This overemphasis on fulfilling individual needs will disturb the balance of the marriage, and the interdependence of the family members will be compromised.
According to some recent researches, married couples need a proper marriage education rather than marriage counseling. It also reveals that most counselors conducting marriage counseling have no formal training at all. Those who prefer the profession are mostly comfortable with individual counseling.
Most of these counselors avoid dealing with couples. So there are numerous incidents of marriage counselors’ failure to save marriages. Marriage education may be considered as a more practical substitute to save marriages from failing. If, at all, you opt for a marriage counselor, make sure that you choose the right one wisely and carefully.