What to expect when you start online counseling for couples

What to Expect When You Start Online Counseling for Couples

Relationship counseling online is intended to help improve your relationships by empowering you to recognize and healthily resolve conflicts. It should also help you work on yourself and make a decision on putting effort into rebuilding your relationship or ending the relationship on good terms.

 Online couples counseling usually includes both partners. However, sometimes one partner can choose to work with a counselor alone, and this is okay too. The specific treatment plan of a couple's therapy depends on your relationship situation. Here’s what to expect when you start online counseling for couples.

Expect to Dive Deep during Your Marriage Counseling Session

Expect to explore deep and to invest 6-12 months as relationship counseling online is not a short-term crash diet kinda therapy. Online counseling for couples will help you gain skills to improve your relationship. Online counseling will boost your problem-solving skills, communication skills, ability to accept the differences and understand each other’s feelings.

Also, online marriage counseling may help you learn how to recognize and address the problems in your relationship without blame. You will be strengthened to understand problems from a new perspective and explore and practice healthy solutions to your relationship problems.

According to Dr. Sue Johnson, a clinical psychologist and couples therapist, when one of the partners feels upset and vulnerable, they need emotional confirmation from each other, not a logical explanation.

If you respond intellectually rather than emotionally to your partner’s bid for connection, he or she will perceive your response as no response and feel as you are ignoring him/her. If this pattern repeats, it will create distance and lead to emotional detachment.

What we need when we feel overwhelmed is not a rational insight but empathy. Deep self-exploration during online couples counseling may boost your empathy and teach you how to respond on an emotional level to your partner’s bids for emotional connection.

Expect for Things to Not Work Perfectly

Like everything else in life, online couples counseling may not work perfectly sometimes. Just like life, technology is a blessing and a curse. Relying on computers sometimes brings technology to the center of the counseling process. Internet service failure or hardware and software issues can affect your counselor’s availability and this can be very frustrating if it occurs during your online counseling session.

To prevent confidentiality issues, avoid using computers at work, in a café, public library, or any other space where other people have access to the same computer.

Expect to Follow Your Marriage Therapist a Lot

In online couples counseling sessions, I am not in the room with you both which makes it more challenging for me to redirect you when needed. This means that you will need to follow my lead. We can come up with different signs that will help us pay attention and focus. For example, I may be raising my hand when you need to stop talking. 

Expect to Make Some Powerful Changes from Your Home

Most relationship problems won't go away on their own with time. On the contrary, if you ignore the problems, they will most likely accumulate and escalate. The sooner you seek couples counseling and start working on your issues, the sooner things between and your partner will begin to improve.

Online counseling for couples may help you address early marriage breakdown signs and motivate you to begin understanding relationship problems from a new perspective.

It can provide tools to learn new, constructive ways to approach and resolve conflicts, to learn how the be vulnerable with each other, and how to validate each other’s feelings. Online marriage counseling may help you learn how to rebuild trust and reconstruct marriage after the infidelity.

And you can achieve all of these important changes from your home.

Summary

Relationship counseling online may not always work perfectly, but it will definitely nudge you to dig deep, achieve better self-awareness and gain a deeper understanding of your relationship problems. Expect to follow your therapist’s lead on this journey and be prepared for some big positive changes in your relationship to be achieved from the coziness of your home.

If you want to learn more about online couples counseling, give me a call at (703)347 3200 and schedule an appointment online or in my Wake Forest office

here.