[Back]

Marital & Relationship Counseling ...

If our main focus is on children, why do we also specialize in marital and relationship counseling?

The quality of the relationship between caretakers has a great deal to do with a child's emotional and behavioral health. Children are very sensitive to conflicts and hostilities between parents as well as to a lack of love, intimacy, communication and cooperation. At an early age, perhaps from birth, they begin to form the core of their feelings and beliefs about themselves, the world and their place in it by watching how you interact with each other. So, you can see how that makes the quality of your relationships extremely important.

Furthermore, children naturally are power-brokers. Any division between you offers them the opportunity to "divide and conquer," thereby diluting your ability to provide discipline and guidance. You lose your credibility as parents. 

Even though children enjoy having this kind of power in the family, it frightens and angers them, too. They instinctively know that when they're in control, their parents are not and this is an inherently dangerous situation for them. They need know they have a strong parental unit above them, guiding and protecting them.

Each one of us leaves our parents' home with a little bag of tools and a sketchy blueprint to begin the process of building this huge thing called "a life." To our dismay, we often find that the "tools" are too few and the "blueprints" incomplete. It's like trying to build a mansion with a penknife and a fuzzy picture out of an old Better Home & Gardens. Sure we get something built but it's lopsided, the doors are in all the wrong places and you've got stairs leading nowhere. Yikes!

Who's to blame?

Well, nobody, really. Your parents had the same problems and so did their parents and their grandparents and on and on back to who-knows-when. Finding someone to blame doesn't help, anyway.

Relationship and marital counseling is about taking stock of the tools and blueprints you have now, finding their strengths and weaknesses, sorting out the ones that aren't working for you and acquiring new ones that do work. It's about learning new communications skills ... how you talk and listen to each other ... developing realistic expectations of each other and the relationship, healing old hurts and avoiding new ones, and hopefully getting to know more about each other than you do now.

Becoming a united, loving, communicative and strong relationship is the best gift you will ever give your kids. And, it will make our job one heck of a lot easier.