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It’s never easy when your relationship starts to struggle. This can happen due to a lack of communication. Or, struggles in the bedroom. Or, a fundamental disconnect in love languages.
In these cases, a struggling relationship can feel like it’s beyond saving. However, there are tools that can aid you, such as couples therapy and marriage counseling.
These two crucial services often get treated as interchangeable. However, they aren’t, in fact, the same. What’s the difference between couples therapy vs marriage counseling? How can you tell which will be more useful than the other? Here’s what you need to know.
What Is Couples Therapy?
Couples therapy is, in essence, a process designed to follow your relationship issues back to their root causes. Couples therapy brings both people together to look over their past arguments and their own past traumas to determine where their issues spring from. This is not intended to place blame. Rather, it’s to help the couple in question understand where they stand and what they need to address to bring their relationship closer.
This often involves extensive amounts of therapy for all parties involved, individually and as a group. It requires more work, both within the therapy sessions and at home.
What Is Marriage Counseling?
Marriage counseling, like what is offered at Naya Clinics, is a shorter-term service. Rather than focusing on the root of your troubles, it focuses on finding solutions for the present issues. It works to give the couple tools to handle conflicts with rationality. Compromise and improving communication are crucial elements of counseling for married couples.
You can receive marriage counseling even before a marriage takes place. In fact, it might even prove beneficial to receive it so that you can head off any communication breakdowns at the pass.
Couples Therapy vs Marriage Counseling: What’s the Difference?
Now that you understand what each of these services offers individually, let’s talk about how they compare. What’s the real difference between couples therapy vs marriage counseling?
First, it’s a difference of scale and focus. Couples therapy tends to be much more in-depth and runs for much longer, as its goal is to reach the root of the relationship’s problems. Marriage counseling, on the other hand, focuses on mending communications and bringing forth compromises.
Couples’ counseling activities often involve taking deep and painful dives into past traumas and exploring the mismatches between their child-rearing and financial styles. Marriage counseling activities will focus more on taking heated emotions out of the equation and approaching their present issues as a united team.
Looking for More Relationship Tips?
Before today, you might have wondered about the differences between couples therapy vs marriage counseling. Now that you know, you might find yourself looking for more relationship tips and advice.
If you need all the help you can get to repair, boost, or welcome your love life, then why not check out our blog? We update each day with more articles designed to help you find and keep the love of your life.
