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Lois
Leder
LCSW Psychotherapist
Andrea V. Hamilton
LPC, NCC
 
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 Marriage
and Couple Counseling
In counseling couples, I believe that developing and
maintaining a good relationship requires specific skills
which can be learned.
The Goals of Positive Relationship Behaviors
include
1. Accepting responsibility for behavior.
2. To cooperate
3. To contribute to the relationship
4. To support and encourage each other
Relationship-Destroying Behaviors include
1. Blaming others for shortcomings
2. Attention gaining
3. Revenge or getting even
4. Seeking power or control
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Negative goals are usually unconscious and during the course of your
counseling, we will uncover these goals and replace them with positive
goals.
By learning to identify the goal of your
behavior and your partner’s behavior, and the underlying
feelings and beliefs, you can choose to respond in more
effective ways.
Through counseling you will learn the
importance of honesty and openness in a
relationship, and how to communicate more effectively. Our beliefs influence
our ability to communicate with our partner. Sometimes we may be operating
from negative beliefs or assumptions that discourage, or promote competition
rather than encouragement and cooperation
Conflict resolution is an important part
of the counseling process, as conflict is
inevitable in all intimate relationships. Learning to use "I" messages,
using active
listening, solving one problem at a time, avoiding blaming, and other
techniques
can help couples to solve conflicts more responsibly and creatively.
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Inherent in the
process of marriage counseling is the promotion of the
self-esteem of both partners. In order to love someone
else, we must first love ourselves. Self-esteem requires
a commitment to awareness: awareness of self and others.
According to Nathaniel Brandon: "To love another human
being is to know and love his or her person. This presupposes
a commitment to seeing and understanding the object of
our love." This is quite different from our notion
of romantic love. Many couples who come to my office for
counseling complain of feeling unappreciated, unloved,
not valued or understood. They often feel unable to communicate
with their partner. My approach is to understand the presenting
problem and at the same time, to look more deeply into
the dysfunctional patterns that have been created in the
relationship and to learn where these patterns originated.
With such awareness, change becomes possible, as one begins
to understand whether the goals and behaviors are congruent,
and learns how to demonstrate the positive behaviors of
encouragement, support, contribution, and cooperation.
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