Regardless of what movies, TV shows, or social media might suggest, relationships take a lot of work. Sometimes you just can’t work things out between you and your partner, no matter how hard you try. When you find yourself in this situation, it’s wise to turn to counseling to help iron out your problems and rebuild your happy, healthy, and loving relationship.
Seeking help is proof of how much you and your partner value your relationship. It shows that no matter what your differences are, you both want to be together and make things work. This small element means you’re already on the path to a strong, successful relationship.
Counseling can help you at any point of your relationship, whether you’ve been married for 30 years and things are getting stale, you’ve been together for 6 months and are having trouble successfully communicating, or you’re planning on getting married this year and you want to avoid unnecessary problems in the future.
Couples versus family therapy, this is how they are different >>
Premarital counseling vs marriage counseling vs couples counseling
While there’s a lot of overlap between these three types of counseling, they are three distinct types of therapy. Here’s a short description of each and the types of topics you can expect to be covered in them.
Premarital counseling
For couples who are planning on getting married. This type of therapy helps ensure you and your partner have a strong and healthy relationship that provides a solid foundation of a stable, satisfying, and successful marriage. It will also help you determine any weaknesses which could cause problems later on in your marriage.
As part of premarital counseling, you can expect to discuss:
- Marriage expectations and role beliefs
- How your past affects your future together
- Plans to resolve conflicts in marriage
- Effective money management
- Intimacy issues
- Developing healthy communication
- The possibility of having children
Marriage counseling:
For married couples seeking to improve a troubled relationship. Marriage counseling can help you determine and understand the cause of problems within your marriage, before discussing ways to solve them. This type of psychotherapy is often reserved for people unhappy with their marriage who want to resolve conflicts and improve their relationship.
What you discuss in marriage counseling will be determined by your problems. This can include:
- Communication issues
- Sexual difficulties
- Conflicts over having children, raising children, or family involvement
- Substance abuse
- Anger
- Infidelity
Couples counseling:
Couples counseling is essentially the same as marriage counseling. The only real difference is that the term “marriage counseling” is generally reserved for married couples, while “couples counseling” is reserved for couples that aren’t married.
Couples and family therapy pros and cons >>
Couple relationship goals
Marriage and couples counseling isn’t just for people who have a troubled relationship. This type of therapy can help couples strengthen their relationship even further, ensuring years of happiness together in the future. Talking to a therapist as a couple can help you better understand the person you’re with and appreciate their needs, desires, and feelings.
One of the best ways to ensure your relationship is a priority and stays fresh is to set couple relationship goals together. Working towards joint objectives will help make your relationship stronger and deepen your connection to each other.
Here are a few examples of couple relationship goals designed to strengthen your bond:
- Prioritize each other’s needs
- Treat “together time” as important as “alone time”
- Understand each other’s love language
- Commit to doing new things together
- Be each other’s biggest supporter
- Maintain a physical connection
- Speak positively about each other
- Openly discuss your relationship
- Create an equal partnership
A couples counselor can help you determine which type of relationship goals will be most beneficial for you to set and help you work toward them. If you struggle to maintain the momentum and find yourself veering off on a tangent, a counselor will help you remember why you wanted to set goals in the first place and get you back on track for a healthy, loving relationship.
More about relationship goals >>
Why does my husband hate me?
If you’ve ever found yourself asking this question, you and your husband can both benefit from therapy. No matter what has been said, it’s doubtful that your husband truly hates you. It’s much more likely that you’re having troubles effectively communicating.
Your husband might feel like you don’t listen to him or that you don’t take his feelings into consideration. In this situation, it’s very easy for tensions to rise and people to say things they don’t mean. Marriage therapy can help improve your communication skills, so you can effectively tell each other how you feel.
A counselor will work closely together with both of you to identify underlying problems in your relationship and determine what caused them. From there, they’ll help you come up with solutions to your issues, so you can move forward with your marriage and enjoy a healthy, strong relationship.
Online premarital counseling
One of the trickiest parts of premarital counseling is finding a time when a premarital counselor is available, which also coincides with when you and your partner are available. It’s often difficult enough to find time to spend together without also having to fit in with a counselor’s schedule.
Online premarital counseling makes it simple for couples to seek the therapy they need without having to completely change their schedules. Just as beneficial as in-person counseling, online premarital counseling can be done from your own home or any other space in which you feel comfortable to openly discuss your relationship.
All you need is a tablet or computer, a reliable internet connection, and the ability to download Zoom. With these three things, you can choose your appointment time and have your premarital counseling session whenever it fits in with your lifestyle.
Thanks to today’s advanced technology, there’s no need to spend hours finding a premarital counselor in your local area and wasting time traveling there every week. Instead you can strengthen your relationship by resolving problems with the help of a qualified professional from the comfort of your own home.
Take the online premarital counseling test >>
How much is marriage counseling?
Although price should never be the deciding factor when it comes to marriage counseling, it’s something every couple needs to take into consideration before seeking help. Successfully managing finances is one problem Cyti therapists often see and adding to that burden when you can’t afford it will only worsen your problems.
How much does marriage counseling cost >>
Marriage counseling cost
The average marriage counseling session is 50-60 minutes long and recent data shows that most counselors charge $75-$150 per session. As most counselors recommend a minimum of three months of therapy with one session per week, that’s at least 12 weeks of therapy.
This means to benefit from marriage counseling, you can expect to pay $900-$1,800 for the full three months. Your counselor will assess your current marriage problems during the first few sessions and determine how many visits you’re likely to need in order to resolve your problems. Depending on your counselor’s analysis, you could find yourself paying less or more. This means that it’s not really that expensive compared to other options.
Couples therapy cost
As they’re both similar and generally cover the same topics, marriage counseling and couples therapy cost the same. Expect to pay $75-$150 for a single session and $900-$1,800 for a complete three-month therapy course.
Although this might sound like a lot of money, you shouldn’t let the cost deter you from seeking help. As more people are speaking about couples therapy and sharing their experiences, more people are opening up to the idea and seeking therapy themselves.
Couples therapy is one of the best solutions for couples which need to work through relationship problems with the help of an impartial, non-judgemental professional who has helped many other couples over the years.
This type of counseling is often a long process which requires intense emotional vulnerability over the course of several sessions. At the end of the counseling process, almost all couples agree that the cost was more than worth it for the help they needed to resolve their issues and save their relationship.
Affordable couples counseling
At Cyti Psychological, we understand that couples counseling can be the difference between a loving, successful relationship and a missed opportunity for true love. Because of this, we try to make therapy accessible to as many people as possible by providing affordable couples counseling.
We regularly offer reduced-priced sessions which are available to everyone without insurance or any monthly membership signups. We help people get to the root of their relationship problems and rebuild them from the ground up without spending more than they can afford.
Money can be the source of many problems within a relationship and we don’t wish to add to that burden. However, we also understand the incredible value speaking to a counselor can have on a relationship. By offering regular 50% discounts on therapy sessions, we ensure couples get the help they need for a price that’s manageable.
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Start strengthening your relationship today
Seeking counseling as a couple is one of the best things you can do for your relationship. If you’re planning on getting married, premarital counseling will help remove the mystery surrounding marriage and ensure you both understand each other’s expectations as you move forward in your relationship. It will also help reveal any major incompatibilities which would be incredibly damaging to discover after getting married.
Marriage and couples counseling can help you resolve issues in your relationship so you’re free to grow together as a couple. Even if there aren’t any problems in your relationship, having joint counseling can help strengthen your already solid relationship, so your powerful is substantial enough to see you through decades to come.
