Premarital Counseling: How It Can Help
So, you’ve recently gotten engaged, congratulations! Marriage is a wonderful stepping stone in your life. Premarital counseling is a great decision to make to help your marriage start off well, as guidance from a counselor can help you and your fiancé work to create a firm foundation. Premarital counseling can help you and your fiancé cover issues that may or may not be on your radar yet. or support in this important stage, consider reaching out to Huntington Beach Christian Counseling.
As you work through premarital counseling, you will boost your ability to address normal challenges in the first few years of your marriage. Couples who do not receive counseling have a greater chance of failing to get through these big challenges with success. All of the time that you invest in premarital counseling is designed to help you and your fiancé become more loving and intentional via your thoughts, words, and actions toward one another.
You, together with your Christian counselor, will strengthen your relationship in many ways in premarital counseling. In the counselor’s office, you will have help identifying your strengths, weaknesses, and any blind spots you may have. This will better prepare you for the long-term commitment of marriage.
You will also get a preview of common challenges married couples tend to face over time and make a plan for how to work through those problems as a team of husband and wife. By doing this, you and your fiancé can start developing positive habits of communication for your marriage.
The Uniqueness of Your Relationship
At the beginning of your relationship together, it’s likely you can list many things that you find attractive about your future spouse. However, the storms of life will inevitably affect your relationship. That’s when it’s easy to lose sight of how unique your relationship is and how much it is worth preserving. The time you invest now in becoming clear about the unique ways your future spouse blesses you will pay off when those storms of life hit your marriage.
During premarital counseling, your counselor will help you look at every aspect of the unique dynamics of your relationship. You will get to see how each of you contributes to the relationship as individuals as well as learn how you can work better together as a team. Your counselor can help you see how both your strengths and weaknesses can affect future decisions and conflicts.
You have probably heard it said that love is blind. Romantic love is wonderful, but it does tend to focus only on the good aspects of our partner. By working with a counselor before you get married, you can have a clearer picture of what to expect in your marriage through the eyes of an objective third party who can see any potential warning flags.
Romance doesn’t last, but instead ebbs and flows across the years of any relationship. With premarital counseling, you can gain tools to strengthen your marriage for times when the blind romance is non-existent to help you through the trials.
In a perfect world, both partners enter a marriage with full emotional health. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Premarital counseling gives you the opportunity to build up emotional health in some weak areas so you can head off future problems. You will do both yourself and your spouse a favor by healing any hurt areas before you get married.
How Premarital Counseling Can Help
A common trial for couples is communicating and processing pain or conflict with one another. Often times your fiancé’s upbringing and life experiences will dictate a very different approach to difficult situations.
This difference, whether it be a huge disparity in emotional health or simply a very different way of coping causes a divide in couples that can become very difficult to navigate. By laying a foundation of skills as well as talking through these topics prior to marriage, couples can gain a sense of how to navigate this without furthering the divide.
Your counselor may employ personality tests or other tools to help you both discover unique aspects of your relationship. The tools are designed to show you in which areas you are most compatible and which areas could use greater improvement or understanding.
You and your fiancé will work to gain greater self-awareness and awareness of one another’s needs. This increased awareness can help you love one another with more sensitivity and an eye toward eliminating unnecessary conflicts.
Handling Conflict
Most adults did not grow up learning how to handle conflict in healthy ways. Many families never operated with a healthy anger management style. But conflict is certain between two imperfect people in a lifetime commitment such as marriage.
You could have many difficult fights with your future spouse if you do not know how to handle conflict in a productive and respectful way. But you can learn how to address your unique dynamics early in your relationship with a qualified counselor’s help.
Premarital counseling is an excellent tool for helping you and your future spouse learn how to handle conflict in a healthy way. Whether you bottle your feelings inside or tend to vent your feelings in anger, your counselor can help you handle your feelings in a more productive manner. The skills you will gain in counseling sessions will help not only in your marriage but all other relationships.
Though conflict in marriage is certain, it isn’t always bad. If you handle conflict the right way, it can help you understand one another more, learn more about one another, and gain mutual respect.
In premarital counseling sessions, your counselor can role-play situations with you so you learn how to assertively handle conflict without disrespecting your spouse. Since over half of marriage issues don’t have a right or wrong solution, you can learn to disagree and still respect one another.
Conflicts often arise simply due to personality clashes. By studying your personality differences in counseling sessions, you can avoid painful clashes at a later date. You will have your eyes wide open to one another’s differences and will be much better equipped to handle them throughout your marriage.
Preserving Your Commitment
No newly engaged couple thinks their commitment is in danger. However, with a world that supports divorce as a viable choice while hiding any to all disadvantages/consequences of it, even a Christian marriage can fall into danger of divorce. But when you attend premarital counseling, you can reduce that risk by developing skills to use in the decades ahead.
Working together as a team is essential for preserving your commitment. You become advocates for each other when you get married. You need to feel that your partner has your back when the tough times arrive, so being advocates for each other is essential. Your counselor can help you see the areas where you may need to serve as advocates for one another.
It’s common for couples to slowly drift apart as the years pass. Other priorities can often get in the way of nurturing the marriage, and this will slowly erode your commitment to one another. But in premarital counseling, you can form plans to strengthen your commitment to one another daily, so your marriage retains the right priority status in your lives.
Satan will also try to destroy the commitment you have to one another. In counseling sessions, you will learn about common traps he lays so you can sidestep them in the future. Your counselor can also teach you how to use God’s Word to shield you from spiritual attacks and equip you to fight back as you work to preserve your commitment.
Goal Setting
You may think that you are on the same page with your future spouse on most things before the wedding. However, the chance of disappointment increases if you don’t discuss your goals ahead of time. A Christian counselor will assist you in discussing both individual and team goals and the ways that you can work toward these goals as a couple.
Unrealistic expectations are common with new love. It can be hard to see how you could possibly disagree with your future spouse on the goals you seem to share. You can gain clarity and wisdom in meetings with your counselor, where you will discuss goals for careers, children, finances, family life, and other important areas.
Building Intimacy
Sex is a very important part of marriage, but it is not the only way to cultivate intimacy in your relationship. You also need to make non-sexual intimacy a priority so you can keep the good feelings in play between you and your spouse.
In counseling sessions, your counselor will talk about what you both expect regarding sexual intimacy and non-sexual intimacy. If there are past hurts in these areas, the counselor can help you heal before your marriage.
Sex isn’t always an easy topic to discuss, but your counselor will make future discussions between you and your spouse easier by getting things out in the open. You will gain practical help for resisting temptation and honoring your spouse as you build intimacy.
In-Law Relationships
In-law relationships can often create problems for newly married couples. You may have already noticed drama in either of your families before the wedding ever occurs. But the Bible clearly teaches married couples to leave their families and cleave to one another (Genesis 2:24), and your premarital counseling sessions will cover how you can do this well—regardless of the zip code you use.
Your counselor will role-play scenarios with you so you can learn to set healthy boundaries in your marriage. You will gain practical help, whether your in-laws are distant or overbearing. It’s helpful to speak about in-law issues with your counselor before the wedding so you can protect your marriage from problems in the future.
Premarital Counseling for You
If you’re ready to start premarital counseling, we would love to help you get started. Set up your first appointment with a Christian counselor at Huntington Beach Christian Counseling today. We look forward to helping you prepare for many blessings to come.
“Bible and Rings”, Courtesy of StockSnap, Pixabay.com, CC0 License; “Talking”, Courtesy of Priscilla Du Preez, Unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Heart Hands”, Courtesy of Kristina Litvjak, Unsplash.com, CC0 License; “Holding Hands”, Courtesy of Imam Muhaimin, Unsplash.com, CC0 License
No matter what a toxic friend will always find a way to incite drama. Whether it’s an argument with a co-worker or a lady in the grocery store who cut in line, something always keeps happening to them. They live an exaggerated life.
12. You no longer enjoy spending time with them.
heal emotionally and mentally. You have been in a friendship that has made you feel isolated, inadequate, and worthless.
to forgive them and take them back when they repented. Despite their many betrayals, He pursued them relentlessly, showing them mercy over and over.
Relationships Are for Sharpening
In your relationships, you will most certainly run into disagreements, but you can choose not to argue. You may have grown up with an unhealthy conflict style that creates more problems. Whether you withdraw, explode, or allow feelings to leak out in passive aggression, these methods perpetuate problems instead of providing solutions.
Though Jesus knew his disciples would desert him in his greatest time of need, he continued to serve them in love and forgive them. Only God can empower you to live this way in your relationship, even pouring the love of Jesus into you so you can truly love others the way Jesus did.
Making friends is something we typically learn to do when we’re young. In one sense, it’s easier to make friends when you’re younger for a variety of reasons. You’re at the same stage of life, occupied by and involved in pretty much the same things; you probably live close to one another, and you see each other quite often because of school and other activities. All this makes it possible to make friendships within your peer group.
Common interests 
Presence
Again, Lewis’ The Four Loves helps us out here, “In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart.
This means that broken relationships aren’t the end of us – they don’t close our doors to other opportunities, and they certainly aren’t a unique occurrence. While it can be devastating and hugely challenging to suffer from a broken relationship, we don’t have to be overwhelmed and entirely undone.
While it’s important to understand what happened and how things fell apart, we must also recognize that understanding what happened does have its limits. In Mend my Broken Heart, Jocelyn Soriano wrote “Yes, I understand why things had to happen this way. I understand his reason for causing me pain. But mere understanding does not chase away the hurt. It does not call upon the sun when dark clouds have loomed over me. Let the rain come then if it must come! And let it wash away the dust that hurt my eyes!”
Forgiving the other person might not mean that things completely reset, but it does mean that you’re choosing to let go of any resentment or bitter feelings toward that person. It’s a way to begin the work of rebuilding the relationship, should you so choose.
Again, couples go through all sorts of things, and many healthy relationships will face challenges, sometimes with mixed results. However, the mark of healthy relationships is that they don’t remain in a state of conflict, nor do they endlessly repeat the same mistakes without learning or growing from them.
Negative spontaneous emotional reactions. Your partner’s gut-level impressions of you, such as whether they like you or find you interesting, or whether they think you are competent, or how you might compare to other people – all these can point to the health of your relationship. A relationship dominated by spontaneous negative emotional reactions is a cause for concern.
Boundaries are important for the health of any relationship. Boundaries signal that each person has their own personality and needs, and respecting those boundaries shows consideration and promotes individual integrity. Boundaries can center around finances, privacy, use of time, friendships, sex, and much else.
Rather, the freedom in mind here relates to things like feeling the freedom to be yourself, to make mistakes, to be with people such as your friends and family. It’s a problem when you’re constantly criticized for being who you are, if any mistakes you make are closely scrutinized while those of others aren’t, or if you get isolated from people such as your family and friends.
There are three C’s that we will be covering today: Compatibility, Compromising, and the most powerful one, Complimentary. These three stages of relationship maturity can help put some perspective to see where you are at in your marriage to see what is next for us to move on.
By now I’m sure you see that these issues can slowly begin to turn a marriage into a rusty and withered relationship. How can compatibility save your marriage? This can save your marriage because you can talk to your spouse about how both of you had a great start but how you need to move forward. The start needs to be celebrated. Reflect on the enjoyable times you had together which will help you both to bond again.
A positive tone will help a lot with communication because it can win someone over. The main issue with the stage of compromise is that it can take you far but not all the way. It’s great to compromise however, one spouse may get burned out if they don’t have the constant refreshment.
Think about that vision for a moment. Both spouses work together to help elevate each other. What kind of marriage do you think they’ll have? It won’t be just a surviving marriage; it will be a thriving marriage! This is the secret to saving your marriage. Both of you must sit down, most likely with another couple, and process this vision to help both learn to inspire each other. This cannot be done alone. Both partners must work together so both of you can prosper.
The pandemic has brought many issues to the surface such as depression due to constant isolation and anxiety when alone. Autophobia is the fear of being alone and is especially difficult the older you are. Undoubtedly families and couples did better than singles while being left alone for such a long time during the pandemic.
Sadly, many couples also ended their relationship in 2020 because the pandemic tested them beyond their capabilities and forced them to tap out. Couples’ characters were exposed and with the added pressures of isolation, they had no one to turn to. These marriages had little to no support that otherwise could have been of immense help.
This is an interesting passage for couples because if my partner and I are one then who is going to help our one unit? Some may suggest that spouses are the other individual to help them out, but we can challenge that position by reminding everyone of the goal that God designed in Genesis 2:24 “the two will become one.”
Having a healthy dynamic marriage is priceless. I look back to when Nicole and I got premarital counseling and I shudder to think what would be said of us right now if we had never invested in our relationship after our engagement. In truth, our marriage would be a nightmare.
