The American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists reports an overall success rate of 98%. The success of couples therapy and other factors contribute to the decline in the divorce rate in the United States. Today, counseling can save and strengthen a marriage. Dating couples have challenges just like married couples.
Couples counseling can help provide you and your partner with the tools needed to overcome these challenges and improve the quality of your relationship, whether you've been dating for a few weeks or married for decades. Couples counseling before marriage is often referred to as premarital counseling. Studies have shown that couples who receive premarital counseling are successful in marriage in the long term. This is because counseling provides a couple with a solid foundation for their marriage by discussing issues related to children, finances, and shared responsibilities.
Individual sessions are a possibility, but no couples therapy is successful with purely individual sessions. To be successful, you must ensure that both you and your partner are committed to the sessions. Couples therapy can be very effective. The American Psychological Association (APA) states that marriage counseling that uses emotion-centered therapy (EFT) is effective and useful for approximately 75% of couples.
In addition, the meta-analysis shows that close to 90% see a significant improvement after going through EFT. Overall, the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS), used to measure therapy success rates over decades, shows positive results for couples receiving counseling, in some cases for at least 2 years after the end of therapy. Effective couples counseling should help both of you to better understand your relationship and help you increase skills that support healthy relationships. Because you're wondering if couples counseling works, you're showing clear signs that you're open to strengthening your relationship.
An important benefit of couples counseling is that you can begin to truly understand the dynamics of your relationship. It's not uncommon for a couple to accept couples counseling simply to be able to claim that they've tried to save the relationship. The Relationship Suite offers couples therapy, marriage counseling and other mental health treatments for relationships in and around New York. If you're struggling in your relationship and you and your partner can't successfully overcome the problems you're facing, receiving couples counseling can help minimize the impact that a bad relationship has on your physical and mental health.
Whether this means breaking up or figuring out what it will take to make the relationship work, a great benefit of couples counseling can be to clarify your feelings. It's important to note that, right now, BetterHelp is offering text-message-based therapy (and not video therapy) for long-distance relationship counseling.
