Couples Therapy in a New Day and Age
50 years ago, couples counseling wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is today. There was an implied sense of “grin and bear it” when marital problems occurred. If you and your partner were having problems, you simply looked the other way. In addition, prior to the feminist movement, women were taught that if they did have a problem with their partner, they had little recourse and should get back to kitchen and bake their cares away.
Interpersonal relations have come along way - and in some ways have gone backwards. Expressing your emotions and utilizing communication skills effectively is a relatively new concept. We’d like to believe expressing yourself comes naturally. And to some extent, it is. But communication skills require two and there are certain ways to hone their skills for maximum results. In other words, while expressing yourself may be an innate trait, communicating effectively may not be.
Couples counseling now uses a variety of techniques to work through marital difficulties though healthy communication is still the backbone of just about any school of thought. Couples counseling may utilize new age techniques, for instance. Or art therapy. Or role-playing. The scope is widening as times are changing.
And while we’ve come along way, baby, our ability to reach one another is being challenged by new factors. Living in the computer age, we have become increasingly disconnected, spending endless hours on cell phones and computers. Human emotion almost seems like a fallibility, something to be shunned in our sterile, mental environments. Couples face challenges unknown to humankind. Couples counseling has to reach people in holistic and varied ways in order to be effective.
