Marriage Counseling & Couples Counseling Peachtree City, GA. Marriage Counseling can help a couple develop skills to sustain a strong and healthy marriage. Counseling can help a couple achieve the ideal marriage by identifying barriers and triggers. Couples will learn healthy boundaries, communication skills, and the art of compromise. Couples will gain a deeper understanding of each other as they grow closer.

Marriage counseling originated in Germany in the 1920s as part of the eugenics movement. The first institutes for marriage counseling in the USA began in the 1930s, partly in response to Germany’s medically directed, racial purification marriage counseling centers. It was promoted in the USA by both eugenicists such as Paul Popenoe and Robert Latou Dickinson and by birth control advocates such as Abraham and Hannah Stone who wrote ‘A Marriage Manual’ in 1935. Other founders in USA include Lena Levine and Margaret Sanger.

Before a relationship between individuals can begin to be understood, it is important to recognize and acknowledge that each person, including the counselor, has a unique personality, perception, set of values and history. Individuals in the relationship may adhere to different and unexamined value systems. Institutional and societal variables (like the social, religious, group and other collective factors) which shape a person’s nature and behavior are considered in the process of counseling and therapy. A tenet of relationship counseling is that it is intrinsically beneficial for all the participants to interact with each other and with society at large with optimal amounts of conflict. A couple’s conflict resolution skills seems to predict divorce rates.

Two methods of couples therapy focus primarily on the process of communicating. The most commonly used method is active listening, used by the late Carl Rogers and Virginia Satir, and recommended by Harville Hendrix in Getting the Love You Want. More recently, a method called “Cinematic Immersion” has been developed by Warren Farrell in Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say. Each helps couples learn a method of communicating designed to create a safe environment for each partner to express and hear feelings.