Marital difficulties contribute not only to personal unhappiness & family instability, but also to a wide range of mental health & physical problems. Marital therapy is directed towards helping couples to overcome their difficulties & discuss differences between them without having emotional explosions. Couples frequently seek marital therapy because one or both of the partners believe that the relationship is troubled or contemplate ending it through separation. By seeing the therapist together, the partners cn more easily identify problems & alter the ways in which they relate to each other.
The main advantage of couple therapy is that, the therapist, as an impartial observer, can actually witness the couple's interaction rather than hearing about them in a secondhand & perhaps one sided report. Both family therapy & marital therapy can be carried out from one of several perspectives. Family therapy is likely to use a cognitive behavioral or psychodynamic approach. Couple therapy often utilizes cognitive approach as well. Regardless of the type of marital therapy practiced, a current trend is to focus attention on specific relevant issues like helping the couple increase communication, express feelings, help each other & enjoy shared experiences.
Marital therapists report distinct pattern of symptoms among couples. In some cases, each partner in a marriage, demands too much of the sae thing from the other like service, protection, care & so forth. In other cases, spouses compound each other's problems by complementary behaviors. For example, when one partner takes charge, the other becomes important. Or the wife of an overbearing & emotionally distant husband behaves like a hysterical way, & her erratic behavior makes her husband still more overbearing . In other examples, a strong, angry wife focuses her anger on her passive, alcoholic husband & that anger makes him even more passive, or the husband of a depressed & hypochondriac woman takes on the role of a healer & Savior. Often marital therapy aims to reveal what is hidden, the passive partner's suppressed anger, the Savior's feelings of helplessness, etc.
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