Orlando Non-Religious Pre-Marital Counseling
At Groundwork Counseling in Orlando, we understand being engaged is an exciting time, but we also understand it can be stressful. The processes of planning a wedding, combining your lives, and negotiating family dynamics can all take a toll on a soon-to-be married couple. Many couples go to religious pre-marital counseling, whether out of their own initiative or through requirements of their church.
No relationship is perfect – premarital counseling can help couples work through challenges, prepare for marriage, and prevent possible issues arising with proactive communication. Seeking counseling before marriage gives couples a head start on healthy expectations and behaviors in a relationship.
Topics Addressed in Premarital Counseling
Communication
Communication is usually considered to be the most important factor in a marriage. Without healthy and effective communication, an individual can believe they are expressing their thoughts, feelings, and frustrations to their spouse, yet not feel as if they are being heard or understood. Counseling can help couples learn how they and their spouse communicate, how to most effectively communicate with each other, and how to create positive ways of expressing the range of emotions that will come up in a marriage.
Conflict resolution
In any relationship, conflicts occur. Marriage, and especially the process of becoming a married couple and negotiating all the aspects a marriage includes, creates conflicts. Building off of healthy communication, counseling can help to manage the conflicts in a healthy manner, which can increase the strength of your relationship. Establishing a positive and equal way to deal with issues that arise early on in your marriage makes it more likely that the habit will be formed with the healthy behaviors.
Establishing expectations and understanding
The process of combining two lives, households, and families can be stressful and complicated. Through counseling, a couple can discuss their thoughts on having and raising children, the involvement of parents-in-law, financial arrangements, religion and possible attendance of a religious congregation, household duties, intimacy, and many other topics. Understanding each other’s experiences, personal family history, opinions, and expectations of all these topics can help to increase understanding and build cohesion between partners. Are you not comfortable having your in-laws stopping by unannounced? Do you expect that your spouse will do the majority of the housework? Do you want children, and if so, how many over what period of time? These are all questions that can be answered and worked through in counseling.
Establish a relationship and comfort with counseling as a couple
Finally, going through the process of pre-marital counseling will set you up as a couple to feel more comfortable returning to counseling later on in your marriage as needed. Becoming comfortable with a counselor and the process as well as experiencing how well it can work for you will make you more likely to return to counseling for small issues before they get entrenched in your relationship. Don’t be afraid or embarrassed to seek counseling; even if you feel as if your relationship doesn’t have any issues, you can always improve and prevent them from arising!
If you are seeking non-religious pre-martial counseling, we’d be happy to help you move into your marriage better equipped to handle challenges as they arise.
