How Couples Counseling Can Help Save a Marraige

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The marriage is troubled, attractions that led to the marital union
have waned, and one or both of you are considering divorce. In one
last effort you seek couples counseling, hoping that you can salvage
the marriage. Can it help? Will it help? How will it help us with this
problem?
Each of you entered this marriage as unique human beings, bringing
sole backgrounds, and life experiences. The wealth of experiences that
you brought to the marriage, have provided you with a notion, that the
way you view the world is the "real" reality.
You have tried to "fix" the problem with common sense, and logic, and
seem to only have compounded the problem. In a last ditch effort, you
decide to try the irrational, and illogical approach through seeking
the help of a marriage counselor, hoping but not really "believing" it
can work.
The very act of going to a counseling session to obtain "outside" help
is an act of change. You are seeking help for something you don't
believe can be changed. Paradoxically, this is the first step towards
change, as you are seeking a different solution.
One of the most common fallacies of change is that if something is
"bad", it's opposite must be "good". The wife who divorces the "weak"
husband, to marry the "strong" husband, often discovers to her dismay,
that while the second marriage should be vastly different from the
first, nothing much has actually changed.
A couples counselor is trained to look at the problem from a new
perspective, in order to create change. There are many tips and tools
that can be utilized to help create this change. It might be as simple
as providing opportunities for each partner to speak, and be heard, or
as complex as telling each of you to continue doing the same thing you
have been doing to solve the problem. A counselor might give you
instructions to make yourself be "unhappy". Anybody can be unhappy,
but to make oneself unhappy needs to be learned. In the language game
just presented, symptoms are prescribed, a double bind created, in an
effort to create the desired change.
The therapist can help you "fix" the problem, using methods outside
the box, outside your frame of reference, outside your logic, in
efforts to provide solutions. It is this vast wealth of knowledge,
that expands your problem solving ability, so that each partner can
view a new, and "real" reality.