The world has changed a lot in the space of a few decades. Many things held dear and sacred have lost most or some of its respect and traditional values. One such institution is marriage, although even today many view it as vital to a person’s happiness and well being. Most religions consider a happy marriage as the basic structure of a healthy and content family.
A marriage can be affected by many factors ranging from the global financial crisis, changes in the roles males and females are expected to perform within a family and outside it, changes in the way children are disciplined to even the way our bodies have changed as we moved from an active healthy life to today’s life style with obesity and unhealthy food. These and many other factors can create immense tensions within a marriage. Do you feel that your marriage has been affected in such a way? Who can you approach for help to get your marriage running again?
Marriage counseling is offered by many psychologists and family therapists. These secular therapists will most often work with you and your spouse individually to address each of the issues within your marriage. Although such therapy can help your marriage, a severely strained marriage would benefit much more from a holistic approach to marriage counseling. After all, a marriage is meant to bring two people together, not to see them as individuals.
A church is one place that offers such a holistic approach to marriage counseling. A church pastor, unlike a secular therapist, is trained to advise couples as a team rather than individually. A secular therapist would view a marriage strain as a psychopathology that needs individual treatment.
The church, and hence the pastor, would view any marriage strain as a temporary hurdle that needs to be crossed, and not as any pathology which can break down your marriage. The advantage of the pastoral counselor being that he will uphold your marriage vows to be forever and seek to talk to you and your spouse as a team to get your marriage back up and running. In the process, he’s there to help you and your spouse to be closer than ever before.
Most secular therapists attend few courses dedicated to marriage and family counseling. Pastors are officially trained by the church and have formal education to specifically address marriage and family counseling. Most pastors, even if they do not have any formal training, would have attended many seminars and workshops on family and marital counselling.
Church welcomes and offers it’s services to all. If you have an existing membership with any church then you can avail counseling services immediately. However, if you do not have a membership and you need immediate help with your marriage, then it would help to get in touch with your local church and enquire about weekend seminars, workshops on marriage, or couple retreats open to the public.
Attending such retreats would help you to address some of the issues in your marriage. One of the most common and yet the most important factors that affect marriages is the lack of communication between partners. Most weekend retreats address this issue. Attending one can make a tremendous difference in the communication patterns in your marriage, which can in turn improve many other aspects of your married life. These retreats also offer counseling and classes on financial management, sexual relations, and parenting, which are often areas which lead to a strained marriage.
These retreats can also get you in touch with pastors who would be willing to offer you marriage counseling and thus can help save your failing marriage.
Like many other things in life, marriage too has its ups and downs. Like a ship on the high seas, it requires constant navigation, steering, and hard work to see it through the storms and ensure a smooth voyage. If you feel your marriage is in rough waters and requires help, then a pastor will be able to guide you to look at it with new eyes that will help save your marriage.
No matter how bad you think your relationship is, take some salvation in knowing that love is rarely the reason that relationships crumble. Take baby steps to get you from break up to make up, and re-bond. Don’t try to take too big a step and patch things up all at once. That’s too much, too fast. Take small steps. Sometimes even small steps is too much at the current time.
In fact, many times, taking a step ‘back’ is the best course of action. Click here for our free Save My Marriage mini-series newsletter and also get a copy of my book “Tips to Save Your Marriage” (free for a limited time). You’ll also get access to a video that explains the re-bonding process in more details.
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