Category Archives for omaha-relationship-counseling-blog
Tidying Up and Couples Therapy
Tidying Up the Home and the Relationship?
Do you have an interest in a very alternate form of couples therapy? If so, you might want to catch Tidying Up with Marie Kondo (Netflix). In watching the first two episodes, it was evident that in showing the results of Marie helping each couple to tidy up their home, she also helped the relationship. In the first one, she even commented that there is some stress in the relationship, and in the second couple, though they seem to have a very good relationship in the beginning, one can see some stress come out as they get into the process of tidying up.
Healthy Apart & Together in Couples Therapy
Healthy Apart and Together
It often becomes a very important part of couples work for each individual to get their own act together, to become healthier, to become healthier apart from the partner (become differentiated) and to become healthier in being with the partner (to grow intimacy and vulnerability in relationship with the partner). Both are required for making things go well with a couple, being healthier apart from your partner and being healthier with your partner.
Can You Just Talk to One Another? Avoiding Couples Counseling
Like is the case with any relationship, partners looking for couples counseling in Omaha often have problems with getting into fights. These can escalate into name-calling, dragging up old grievances, getting defensive and a slew of other ways of keeping each other from resolving issues. Lingering anger and resentment, illnesses, communication problems, sexual and monetary issues can all make relationships hard to stick with. Couples often both end up being right (or thinking they are both right) but most couples don’t know how to move beyond the impasse of both being right.
Heading to Couples Therapy for the First Time
It Can Be Scary to Call
Calling a prospective couples therapist can cause bit of anxiety—it is someone you don’t know, you are asking for their time, and you are going to be trusting that person with something that is very important and you are not doing well with. People often ask a friend or confidant or a professional for the name of someone to call. You are putting your relationship between you and your partner into their hands.
Hard to Say and Couples Therapy
Bringing Myself Into the Work
I try not, as a rule, not to talk much about myself or my relationship with my partner in my couples therapy sessions as a psychologist or even in writing about couples therapy. But I found myself building on something in a session with a couple, building on an issue that was happening in the couples therapy that also has happened at home, so I used an example from home and brought it into the couples therapy.
The Top Reasons Couples Go to Therapy
Everyone knows relationships are difficult, but it’s easy to feel like your relationship is really hard — like your partner is the first partner in history to nag or nitpick or leave dishes in the sink and expect you to clean them.
Does Your Relationship Need a Checkup?
If you are:
- doing well as a couple
- able to talk to each other
- able to let go of the small stuff that comes up
- talk through to resolution most of the bigger topics most of the time
Values in Couples Therapy
On thing that couples don’t really think during an argument: “We really disagree on our values on this one!” It’s too bad—that thought could change the argument. When couples are locked into how they are both right, they often stay stuck with their “righteousness” rather than work their way out of the impass. Yet being able to take a step back and think, “we just disagree” often is not felt to be enough. We each often think/feel that we have our “right” point or issue and the other is wrong. But the partner is thinking the same thing. So to back out in your mind (or even by physically taking a step back) can drastically change the shape of the argument.
A Bit of Couples Counseling for Everyone
Michelle Obama has been publishing information about her life recently. And she and the former president have attended couples counseling. She said, “I want them to know Michelle and Barack Obama — who have a phenomenal marriage and who love each other — we work on our marriage and we get help with our marriage when we need it.” If a former president and a former first lady think it is helpful, can’t the two of you?
And couples therapy is a place for change. She also said, “We learned how to talk out our differences,” which is something that is helpful for all couples and something that almost always comes up in couples therapy. You can work on talking out differences.
Maybe it’s time for you to consider couples therapy.
How Partners Talk to Each Other and Couples Therapy
I am going to briefly talk about an issue I have not read about in the couples therapy literature, it is, instead, something I have observed. The issue is talking about how you talk to each other. Couples often get caught up in the details about an issue, who has done it the most, who wants it done, when it should be done, how it is like or not like something else, the details. And they don’t often move to how they are talking to each other about the issue. With many couples, I can tell that they are progressing with each other by their moving in and out of the details to how they talk to each other about those details and then back to the details. Not only is it progress but they are arguing differently in doing so and they feel better about their arguing, probably because it is accomplishing something rather than not.
Dr. Robert G. Kraft
