Pre-Marital Counseling on Long Island | Strengthen and Prepare Your Relationship
Marriage is an exciting time. For the rest of your life, you hope to be connected to the person that you love most – the person that you envision growing old with, perhaps starting a family, and achieving your mutual goals.
Every couple – even those madly in love – has their own challenges. Working through those challenges before the marriage and preparing for what it means to be a wedded couple can have a tremendous impact on your marital success. It can be quite difficult to transition from being single to married and integrating two unique family cultures into one new family.
If you’re looking for couples counseling before marriage, call us at (516) 732-0273.
What is Pre-Marital Couples Counseling?
Although couples counseling is often associated with struggling relationships, the goal of counseling is not just to “save” the couple. It can be to strengthen the relationship and make it even better than it was before or to resolve questions or concerns that one may have before getting married. That’s why many couples engage in what’s known as “pre-marital counseling” – a service designed for couples that are planning to get married, and are looking for support throughout the process.
During pre-marital counseling services in Long Island, we explore a variety of topics that are all uniquely beneficial for soon to be married couples, including:
- How to Have a Successful Marriage
- How to Overcome the Stress of Planning a Wedding/Pre-Wedding Jitters
- How to Communicate More Effectively
- How to Resolve Differences
- How to Merge into a New Family Unit
- How to Address Family of Origin Issues
During pre-marital counseling, we openly talk about any issues you may have been holding on to in a safe and supportive environment, and we will discuss either as a couple or in an individual meeting what it takes to make a marriage work.
Pre-Marital Counseling with Long Island Psychology
Marriage is very different from simply being in a relationship, and some of its benefits are also some of the issues that are working against it. For example, marriages can be extremely comforting, knowing that you’re with your partner for years to come. But that comfort can also be problematic if you take it for granted or become overwhelmed by the the commitment.
Our goal as Long Island pre-marital counselors is to both explore these issues and also see how we can bring out the strengths that the two of you have as a couple and build upon them to make your relationship even stronger.
If you are interested in pre-marital counseling, please feel free to give us a call today at (516) 732-0273. We can talk about what’s involved in our pre-marital counseling services, or schedule an appointment to meet. We have offices in Garden City, and Rockville Centre, New York, and we are happy to talk to you and your partner about your relationship.
The Gottman Method in Our Couples Work
When couples come to us stuck in the same argument, or slowly drifting apart without quite knowing why, we often draw on the Gottman Method alongside the other approaches described above. Developed from decades of direct observation of real couples, it gives us a concrete language for what is actually happening in a relationship: the balance of positive to negative interactions during conflict, patterns like criticism, defensiveness, or withdrawal that predict distress over time, and the strength of a couple's underlying friendship outside of conflict altogether.
In session, this might look like helping partners notice and respond to each other's small bids for connection during an ordinary week, not just during a planned date night, or working through a structured process for rebuilding trust after an affair or a significant breach. We find these tools especially useful for couples who still have real affection for each other but have lost their footing around communication and repair.
Gottman's approach is rarely the only thing we use. Most couples benefit from combining this structured skill building with the deeper emotional and individual work each partner brings into the room.
