As we grow and change, issues within our relationships will likely come up. Whatever may be causing you and your partner to have relationship issues, our licensed counselors can help you navigate it. Whether it is marriage therapy, premarital counseling, or counseling for your romantic relationship, we have couples counselors who can help.

Help with empathy in your relationship

 

In any kind of human relationship or discourse, people are more willing to listen when they feel heard. Your counselor will help members of the relationship understand the others’ perspective. Often, issues happen in relationships when there is not enough empathy. Empathy refers to one person’s ability to embody the experience of the other. It goes beyond understanding. It relates to the extent to which one person can experience what it is like to be in the other person’s shoes. If each partner can lean into empathy before vocalizing their stance, communication improves. Your counselor will help you adopt methods for increasing empathy in both partners.

 

Help you understand your emotions

 

Emotions in romantic relationships are often intense. This is because romantic relationships elicit feelings and emotions that we have related to our early attachments. Through helping each partner explore their emotions through attachment theory, your couples counselor will help each partner understand how the feelings they have about their partner didn’t start with their partner. In intimate relationships, people open themselves to the capacity for incredible emotional connections, but also open themselves to the capacity for great pain. Through counseling, you can learn to connect emotionally to your partner while feeling safe and secure.

 

Help with communicating better with your partner

Once your counselor helps you embody empathy and understand the core and developmental basis of your emotional experience, your relationship counselor can help you with tools to communicate better. Many relationship problems relate to issues with communication. Your relationship counselor will help you navigate your communication styles and will help you learn to accommodate each other’s ways of communicating so that information can be passed between members of the relationship more accurately.

 

Help your relationship move from struggling to thriving

 

Through embodying empathy for your partner, exploring your emotional experience and attachment roots, and teaching you effective communication tools, your counselor can help you improve the foundation of your relationship. Through using evidence-based practices such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, interpersonal process therapy, and dialectical-behavioral therapy, your licensed mental health counselor will help you improve your relationship. To learn more about our couples counseling services in East Lansing, MI, contact us.