When my own marriage began to unravel a few years ago, my wife and I attended some marriage counseling sessions for couples. We gave it an honest effort, but in the end we didn’t really feel like it was much help to us. Apparently we were not alone. I found out awhile back that statistically, traditional couples counseling has an 80% failure rate! That means that only 2 out of every 10 couples who participated in the survey reported any improvement in their marriages! There had to be a better way and luckily, I found it!
This article is NOT intended to disparage counseling. Millions of people are helped every day by the wonderful work that therapists and counselors do for them. My own therapist was a tremendous source of help to me when I was dealing with some personal issues. The reality for most traditional marriage counseling though, is that it has not been effective in helping to save troubled marriages. Let’s examine this for a moment.
Traditional marriage Trauma Counselling Vancouver is practiced mostly by people who received the bulk of their education in INDIVIDUAL therapy. Since their training and experience and focus are primarily on the growth of the individual, they really are not well equipped to focus on a marriage. They actually work from a faulty model when they focus on the health and happiness of the INDIVIDUAL because the real focus should be on the health and happiness of the COUPLE or the marriage itself.
This traditional model of couples counseling therefore focuses on communication as the problem. Since there are two INDIVIDUALS involved, the problem must be communication right? Wrong!!!! For most married couples the primary problem in their marriage is NOT communication, but they get it pounded into their heads by counselors that communication is the key to a successful marriage. Often times after learning better communication skills, the couple just learns how to fight better and the problems are still there. In many ways, this type of therapy can actually be more damaging to the marriage.
If a doctor was only successful in treating 20% of his patients, would you go see that doctor?
My marriage began to get better when I made a very important discovery. The key to saving a troubled marriage is to take the focus off the couple as individuals and direct the focus on the marriage itself, almost as if it is a third person. This approach is different than most anything being taught by traditional counseling and often times, the solution will seem like the complete opposite of what we think we should be doing. But it works if you are willing to take ACTION!
If you don’t take this action to save your marriage, then who will?
The solution I discovered has been so successful that it was featured on Dateline NBC and has nearly a 90% success rate! It works even when only one partner wants to save the marriage! And you can do it at home without spending tons of money on counseling that doesn’t work!
