Does pre-marital counseling help? What’s involved, and how long does it take?

We often get asked, “do you offer pre-marital counseling at New Growth?  If so how long does it take and what’s involved?”  These are great questions!  While there is no one-size-fits-all response, thankfully there are a few categories that are typical.  The good news is that pre-marital counseling helps most people – but only if the counseling focusses on the correct area.  There are many well-known programs available to couples considering pre-marital counseling – these often focus broadly and can be very helpful.   They are structured and feel like a class to many who complete them.  Here at New Growth we offer custom-tailored counseling based on your needs – there is an aspect that may feel like a class, but our real goal is to assess your relationship and help you shore up any weak points in an efficient time frame.  The way we do this is to ask you to answer the question, “which of the following scenarios below best fits our situation?

1.  Some people understand that marriage is a serious commitment and approach pre-marital counseling as a chance to learn about what it takes to succeed in marriage. They know how high  the divorce-rate is and don’t want that for themselves. They are wise enough to recognize that even though they’re in love and can’t imagine things ever going wrong, it still can.  If only there were a way to safeguard yoursef?  Many of the pre-marital counseling formats that are taught in churches and community centers focus on providing the preparation needed to avoid the common pitfalls that can lead to unhappy marriages and divorce.   Pre-marital counseling of this type is more educational and skills-oriented.  It involves learning about the types of behaviors and attitudes that hurt a marriage as well as the ones that help it.  If you are looking for this kind of premarital counseling, then you may be better served by someone who offers a generalized program such as Prepare and Enrich.  Alternatively, there are many books to get you started down the same path – the best one we’ve ever seen is John Gottman’s “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work.”  In addition, we recommend Sue Johnson’s “Hold me Tight” and “Love sense.”  These books alone have helped countless people to gain the information they need.  Pre-marital counseling at New Growth involves these books and diving into the principles and skills they offer so that you can feel like you’ve learned what you needed – we’ll take you beyond where you can go by just reading a book.  So the counseling is part education (read those books) and part assessment (find out what is strong and what is lacking in your relationship).  At New Growth, we do this type of work and focus our energies on helping you acquire the skills and practice them enough to feel confident.  This type of counseling is shorter and requires more homework on your part, because you have a lot to learn.  But this path is recommended to EVERYEONE – after all, wouldn’t you like to know the key ingredients to success if they were available.

2.   Some people lack confidence for a variety of reasons. They may sincerely love their partner and want a happy marriage, but they wonder if it’s possible.  They say things like, “I’ve never had a successful long-term relationship that didn’t end in heart-break and pain” or “I always find a way to sabotage my relationships” or “I have a pattern of choosing the wrong mate and I don’t know if I’m doing that again” or “sooner or later, the love fades and then what?”  People in this category are wary of committed long-term relationships….they may be afraid of getting trapped or becoming powerless to work out a long-standing conflict.  Whatever the reason, the long-term commitment piece is issue.  The problem is, they care about their partner and don’t want to end the relationship either!  When pressures mount to “figure out what we’re doing in this relationship….” pre-marital counseling can be a solution.   Pre-marital counseling looks different than example #1 above.  It includes elements from #1 above, but also offers an exploration of their history in order to understand where they get their concerns.  At New Growth, we know how to help people identify the origins of these longstanding positions and attitudes and uncover a wound that can be healed. When this happens, the idea of marriage no longer poses a threat as it once did.  While this work often takes longer than the first format above, it actually provides a deep healing that results in a peace-of mind that was initially lacking.

3.  Some people want pre-marital counseling because their current relationship, while valuable and good on the one hand, has suffered in some important way that has shaken the foundation. These folks tend to really care about each other, and have hopes that things can work out, and very much want them to, but they cannot ignore some aspect of the relationship that is a red flag.  This type of counseling is more like traditional couples counseling, because the focus is on something that is going wrong in the relationship itself.  The lessons that come from pre-marital counseling in example #1 above still apply – but the counselor focusses on the red-flags and works to resolve them.  For these folks, pre-marital counselling helps them to sure-up the relationship so that they feel confident about getting married.  If counseling doesn’t work, this kind of counseling can end with the couple breaking up.  Because of this, this counseling tends to be more of a high-stakes experience.  It’s hard to say how long this kind of counseling can take – it depends on what the red flags are, how many exist, and how deeply they’re entrenched.  Substance use is usually a red-flag that is more difficult to resolve than communication struggles.

If you can relate to one or more of these situations, pre-marital counseling at New Growth Counseling can help you.  If you’re not sure you want to spend the money on counseling, we’d highly encourage to purchase John Gottman’s book “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” and read it.  You will find helpful assessment tests in each chapter that will help you each identify the areas that make your relationship strong, and those that will need some attention and possibly even repair.  We also recommend reading Sue Johnson’s “Hold Me Tight.”  It also offers simple tests that help you assess where you are doing well and where you might need to work to insure relationship success.  If after reading these books, you are running into problems, it might be a good idea to consider getting some help – many of the problems can be solved and healed.  But so often, it can’t be done without some third-party intervention.

We hope this article has been helpful – please feel free to share it with your friends.

Thanks for reading, Jussi Light