A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Posts Tagged ‘goals’
You know about preventative maintainence for your car, right? You take it in for factory service every 15,000 miles or so, and you have your oil changed every 3000 miles. Right? You do, right? Good. Your car be happy and will take you wherever you want to go for a long, long time.
What about preventative maintenance for your marriage? How about doing it before you get married? That’s what we call premarital counseling, and it’s becoming more and more popular. In fact, many churches require a couple to attend premarital counseling before they can be married in the church.
How does premarital counseling work? Typically, we meet for 6 sessions. We spend a lot of time talking about communication styles. We also look at expectations, goals, and shared dreams. It’s usually a lot of fun.
Of course, it’s possible that some glaring issue could arise during premarital counseling - something that the couple hadn’t realized was a problem. That sounds bad - but isn’t it better to find out about it before you tie the knot? Yes it is. On the other hand, you may learn in premarital counseling that the two of you are made for each other!
Many couples don’t talk much about their goals. Well, maybe they have a goal to own their own their home or the desire to retire by a certain age. But beyond that, people seem to be so busy with daily life: job, kids, chores, and paying bills that they feel like they don’t have time to think about their goals. Yet, these are the marriages that can be at risk when their kids leave home and the nest is empty.
So, how to avoid the empty-nest crisis? One good method is for you and your spouse to cultivate a deeper sense of shared meaning. In other words: what are you two of you about? What’s your parable? Do you have goals as a couple?
Those of you in business, I’m sure, know about writing a business plan. A business plan describes a company’s goals and expected course of action for some time period, perhaps over the next few years. You usually need to show your business plan to investors or to lenders. I say that if this kind of planning ahead is such a good idea in business, why not apply it to your personal life too? Why not sit down with your spouse and write a marriage plan, or maybe a family plan? You’ve just given yourselves a new shared meaning. And as you work to achieve those goals, you start to feel more like a team then just two individuals.
A Brief History of Plagiarism & Copyright Infrigement of this Website
©2007 - 2011 Jay Slupesky, M.A., MFT. All rights reserved.
Referer: none
East Bay Couples
Counseling
Central East Bay Location
- Walnut Creek, CA Off I-680 at South Main St.