Individual or Marriage Counseling? Which therapy format should I start with?
When people call my office, they often feel overwhelmed. The problems they are dealing with are causing problems in their personal life and also in their marriage. They want help with both parts of their life, but they are unsure if they should begin with individual counseling, marriage counseling, or both. If you find yourself in this position, here are two questions to ask yourself:
1) Do you believe the problems in your marriage would get much better if you could improve a personal problem you or your spouse is dealing with?
Sometimes one spouse is dealing with stressors related to their health, their job, or their parents. These types of stressors frequently cause anxiety and/or depression and lead spouses to act negatively such as isolating themselves, being short-tempered or grumpy, failing to do their share of the tasks at home, failing to proactively do nice things for their spouse, and drug or alcohol abuse. Understandably, these reactions make it difficult to connect emotionally with their spouse, creating distance. If the stressed spouse’s behavior is the primary cause of the problems in your marriage, we would expect the marriage to recover once the stressed spouse has better emotion regulation tools. In this situation, individual counseling would be the most appropriate format for the stressed spouse.
2) If unhelpful communication and interaction patterns are the primary cause of the problems, is your spouse open to marriage counseling?
If the answer is “no”, the best way to respond is to be respectful and accepting of the answer, even though it will of course be disappointing. Begging and nagging the spouse to change their mind will likely backfire in two big ways!
(1) If your spouse agrees to show up to marriage counseling with no intention of actively participating, the therapy will be at best unproductive and is likely to cause more emotional pain to each of you. (2) If your spouse refuses to attend marriage counseling after nagging, your spouse will very likely be more frustrated and angrier, causing even more conflict in your marriage.
If your spouse is not committed to actively work on the marriage in marriage counseling, individual counseling for the spouse who wants to work on the marriage would be the most appropriate. I have watched spouses, who want to be the best version of themselves, single-handedly improve their marriage with the help of individual counseling.
If your spouse is open to marriage counseling and you believe the problems in your marriage are mostly due to poor communication about differences between you and your spouse, marriage counseling would be the best format. When spouses struggle to make personal changes that are being discussed in marriage counseling, the addition of individual counseling for either or both of the spouses, could be necessary to support the work being done in marriage counseling.
By considering these two questions, spouses have the opportunity to make an informed choice about whether to start marriage counseling or individual counseling.
Brian Whitley, LMFT
I draw from many different types of therapy to help my clients including Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Harm Reduction, Exposure Therapy, Cognitive Processing Therapy, and Internal Family Systems Therapy. For marriage and couples counseling, I draw from Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy, The Doherty Approach, and the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy.
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