Whether you find yourself alone at the end of a relationship, considering marriage or facing challenges in your marriage or relationship, a trained, unbiased coach and therapist can help. Counselling can restore your confidence, help you to gain deeper understanding of your self and your emotional needs during one of the most important crossroads of life.
A trained counselor can help with your understanding and exploration of the most important relationship in one’s life – your own self. This will help you move forward in any future relationship. Often unresolved trauma such as past relationships, or family history prevents us from being feeling safe. Subconsciously, it creates sadness, loss or lack of self-esteem. Often accompanied by guilt or anger. This frustrating state is a lonely experience when you do not know where to turn for help.
With the help of a therapist, you can explore your fears from past relationships: fears of rejection or repeating unhealthy and dysfunctional patterns. It can assist you to take more conscious control of your future relationships and restore your trust for others while improving your problem-solving skills.
As you are reading this website it is evident that you know successful relationships don’t just happen. Premarital counseling is a great investment to ensure a strong, healthy relationship. It helps prevent potential problems, it facilitates communication on such delicate and sensitive issues as goals, values, priorities, having and raising children, cultural and religious differences, career plans, finances, boundaries among other things. Premarital counselling will help develop trust and confidence not only between the couple, but between the blended and extended families. Often this type of counseling allows for the couple to deal with potential frictions and get help with past traumas before the marriage, thus ensuring a more harmonious relationship in marriage.
All marriages and relationships experience tests and challenges. In fact, when handled properly, this is often how such relationships gain strength. The sooner a couple seeks help, the better the results. This often depends on both parties being committed to each other. Despite this, all situations can be opportunities for healing, even if only one person is willing to seek help.Counseling is required under many circumstances. When there is poor communication, infidelity, unresolved conflicts, dishonesty, past hurts, or when the only thing holding the couple together are the needs of the children, counselling is needed. It is always best to seek help before you believe that divorce is the only solution.A trained therapist will help bring about honest communication in all areas: help restore hope in the resilience of the relationship, to rediscover love and commitment, empower the couple to regain a meaningful connection and to even dream of their future together. Good marriage and relationship counseling can help with the healing of hurts or communication issues. In short, to assist you in regaining trust in each other.
Intercultural families and marriages are an ever-increasing trend in the modern world. Many factors contribute to this, including access to education, migration or work mobility. Forced displacement caused by economic, environmental, religious, political, or security circumstances (whether voluntary or involuntary) can result in the movement of populations in many countries of the world.
All marriages and relationships are very complex. These complexities are magnified by the many factors that are unique to intercultural couples and families. These include a complex list of challenges that make up our unique cultures. Differences in patterns of behaviour, ethnicity, race, religion and language can contribute to stress.
In addition, the roles of men and women, extended families, the feeling of being an outsider (by one or both parents) differences in cultural references can all be contributing factors. In addition, expectations regarding holidays, raising children in a different culture, discipline, social and economic status, even hospitality and humor can create tension. Due to the complex factors involved, each family and each relationship is very different.Multicultural couples and families also enjoy unique advantages which can help the therapist in their counseling. These include increased cultural literacy and adaptability, a world view and multilingual capacity, cultural empathy with an ever-increasing diversity in our society, our workplace, our faith communities, and educational institutions. A competent multi-cultural counselor has often experienced firsthand the challenges and opportunities faced by others. They can better navigate the intercultural adjustment. Acting as a cultural mediator and interpreter, they assist in the transition from culture shock to mutual accommodation and adjustment, as well as mutual acculturation during the relationship.
Communication issues are at the core of many counseling interventions. It affects all trusting relationships whether with friends, family, intimate partners, and professional ones. This is especially relevant due to the great cultural diversity we now face in our families and professional activities. A qualified therapist can help and coach how to transform this distressing challenge into an opportunity for many conflictive situations. Each person has their own unique personality, perception, verbal, and nonverbal communication style, needs and experiences, some of which maybe traumatic and that have molded their interpretation of other people’s communication expressions. This diversity can be an asset when we learn how to harness its benefits when seeking truth and unity.Among the skills needed are great respect and empathy towards those you seek to understand. They also include active listening, expressing your opinion not as the truth but how you feel about it, reflecting on what you have heard with an open mind, with serenity and composure,listening not just in order to respond, but to gain understanding. Another objective is to neither impose your views or to acquiesce to other people’s views but to search for agreement and unity. This requires a consultative attitude and willingness to accept the outcome, even if different than your original views prior to such communication.Furthermore, a therapist can help identify and heal the underlying causes of any unconscious communication difficulties. These difficulties may include past traumas, relationships or emotional distress creating aggression or passivity. Insecurity is often a by-product, feeling unsafe to communicate certain fears and resentments or dealing with cross cultural communication issues.
Infidelity can be very hard to overcome but not impossible if both parties make the needed effort. The process requires one or often two trained therapists who try to determine if the relationship can be healed. If trust can be re-established, and help the couple recognize the love that brought them together, their desire to protect the family unit can assist them to move beyond infidelity.Even if one or both parties choose to not continue their relationship, therapy can be of great value. It can redefine their future relationships, help them to understand the reasons for the infidelity, and to process feelings of guilt. It can also lessen hopelessness, feelings of inadequacy, regret, betrayal, anger, self-blame, revenge, or a desire for a way out. It also helps with the grief over the loss of the relationship.
All relationships are unique; many factors affect the recovery from infidelity. Among other factors. these include their respective cultural and religious background, their communication skills, sexual addictions, low self-esteem, capacity to handle conflict, their sense of responsibility, attachments to each other and their capacity for patience. Therapy can be effective in helping prevent infidelity if the couple engages in counselling when the relationship shows the first signs of trouble. Also, one may not know if they wish to reveal their infidelity or how to approach their partner in doing this. In other situations, the infidelity is discovered in a traumatic way. In all such situations the couple will benefit from the counseling in navigating the healing process, to determine unhealthy patterns in the relationship such as emotional or physical abuse, to forgive or be forgiven, to determine what they can do to reconcile or to consider a breakup.
Relationships and marriages benefit from therapy and counseling anytime it is in trouble and the sooner we seek help the better the chances for success. Unfortunately, many do not seek help until the situation has reached an almost irreversible stage or even after the separation or divorce.A pre-emptive stage counseling can be effective in reducing relationship stressors and nurture the marriage before things fall apart. It can help with change and disunity issues regarding careers, finances, raising of the children, or when they leave home, communication, intimacy, or retirement.If the relationship or marriage is already in trouble, when contemplating separation or divorce (even after divorce) counseling can help navigate these transitions. Counseling offers a more respectful and constructive way for support in this process; it helps you to better understand what went wrong in the relationship, how to learn from it and how to make future relationships more successful.Divorce is stressful. many questions arise that appear insurmountable: how to help the children with counseling, co-parenting after a separation, whether mediation can help, how to deal with the normal feelings of anxiety, grief, loss, or guilt and depression. Questions and emotions that affect most people even when the divorce was of mutual accord.It is not unusual to face a situational depression during divorce. The symptoms include changes in sleep and eating patterns, fatigue, irritability, loss of interest in activities, responsibilities, and social engagements, crying, feeling of hopelessness of lack of self-esteem, not being able to concentrate, pessimism, and even suicidal ideation.There are many advantages when doing online counseling. Some of these include confidentiality, easy access, no travel, no absenteeism from work and access to qualified therapists that may not practice in your area.Counseling can also provide coaching for ways to manage your self-care. It is important to learn about, and look after your health. Access to healthy ways of coping and recovery help you to discover your strength and balance.