|
Self Help Marriage Counseling - Five Do-It-Yourself Counseling Tips
|
| 1 thumbs up |
 |
|
By: XSTILLA.COM
For whatever reason, you and your spouse have decided to forgo professional counseling and work on your marriage yourselves. The most important part is that both of you are committed to making your relationship work, regardless of the methods used and the route you take to get there.
Here are five simple do-it-yourself counseling tips that any couple can incorporate into their own marriage:
1. Get to the root of the problem: Instead of hemming and hawing and skirting around the less than pleasant issues, both people must be prepared to be completely honest, real, and willing to put all of their cards up on the table. Now's not the time to hold back, be stubborn, mysterious, or however you want to word it. If you're going to save your marriage, you've got to let the other person in, discuss the real reason you're in this position in the first place before you've got a chance at repairing whatever damage that's been done.
2. Accept responsibility: Only you are responsible for your own words and actions. Trying to place the blame or shift the focus on your partner will only drive an ever bigger wedge between the two of you. Although like most everything, there are some exceptions to the rule, but in most cases, the problems in a marriage stem equally from both sides, not just one.
3. "Fix" yourself first: Much like accepting responsibility for ourselves, only we can improve ourselves and our own behaviors. No matter how desperately, or how sure you are that you'll be able to "change" them or "fix" them, you're wasting your precious time, and your marriage. Life is short. We all know that, but, unfortunately most of us forget that important inevitable fact, so why not make the very most of the time we're given?
4. Practice listening: If more of us really listened instead of only talked, we'd learn a whole lot more about the world around us. One of the most common complaints of married couples is the lack of communication, or that one just doesn't listen to the other. It's real easy to tune someone out when you're dealing with all of the usual stressors of the day, taking them for granted and putting your marriage on the back burner. Don't allow yourselves to fall into this trap.
5. Reconnect intimately: A lack of intimacy is yet another telltale sign that a marriage is headed for divorce court. If you don't take the time to keep the home fires burning, all the rest of the passion in your lives is going to die out as well, sooner or later. Schedule "dates" if you have to, meet each other for drinks or dinner after work, go to a movie, run away together for the weekend, or simply spend a quiet night at home without the kids or the phone or the television.
No marriages has to end in divorce, not if both people still love each other and are willing to put forth the effort to prove it to each other and to themselves.
|
| I like it |  |
|
Previous Article
http://www.marriage-counselors.net/couples-problems/Self-Help-Marriage-Saving-Programs.htm