Establishing an intimate, rewarding, and healthy relationship requires great skill, courage, and determination because it is the most difficult and emotionally challenging thing that you will do during your lifetime!

Once you were separate people who came from different family environments and possibly different sub-cultures. Now you are the architects of a new family. Why out of all the people in the world, did you select each other as mates? How you chose each other gives clues to why you may now be disappointed with each other. How you express your feelings, love, expectations, needs, and disappointments with each other gives clues to why the relationship is or is not in trouble.



Marital therapy or couples therapy is a form of psychotherapy designed to positively change the interactions of two people who are experiencing conflict with each other. A trained therapist establishes therapeutic contact with the couple and through definite types of exercises, mindsets, and communication processes, attempts to alleviate the disturbance, to reverse or to change maladaptive patterns of behavior, and to encourage personal growth and development.

Marriage counseling and couples counseling is more limited in scope than Marital Therapy in that only particular familial conflicts are discussed. This type of counseling is primarily task-oriented, geared to solving your specific problem, such as child rearing, or to increase the joy and happiness in a relationship.

Relationships determine the character and happiness of the family. The relationship is the axis around which all family or couple relationships are formed. A strained relationship tends to produce conflict and to put a strain on communication and to foster dysfunctional parenting. A dysfunctional relationship may be the main contributor to symptoms in a child, therefore, the relationship between partners must be the first concern in your therapy.

Two of Twenty Rules for a Happy Marriage or other Relationships:

1. Impute Good Intentions, Be a Positive Force. Remember that your partner, child, parent loves you and is doing their best to please you. If they hurt you that was not what they intended to do. Most people try to do the right thing, the loving thing, sometimes without the knowledge and skill necessary, but their intentions are good, just as yours are.

2. Preserving and strengthening the relationship is More Important than the issue that you are confronting.