Relationships Counselling
1. Pre - Marriage Counselling:
“Marriage is Not a bed of Roses but some couple comprehend that quite late and thus, the marriage turns out to be on rocks. Pre – martial counselling greatly increases the chances of a blissful and steady marriage“
– Neha Pandey,
Founder – Be Bold Counselling Services
Marriage in India is one of the biggest, significant and happy events in life. But the other side of the coin is that it brings a lot of stress too. Since, it brings out huge changes, adjustment and a lot of responsibilities too.
Premarital counselling is a process which helps to prepare the couples mentally for the upcoming marriage. The process helps the couple to prepare themselves to navigate the issues, discuss, have mutual decisions, and acquire skills to adapt to these coming changes in a healthy manner.
Right from finances to children, everything and anything can be discussed beforehand in a safe space, through counselling sessions. It helps couples to be on the same page, understand, respect and accept the differences between them. It canalso help identify potential areas of conflict and equip you and your partner with the tools to successfully resolve them. Premarital counselling aims to help to lay a strong foundation for the marriage.
Life is uncertain. We can’t predict the problems or forecast them in advance but through marriage counselling, we try to make marriage a less complex and more fun for the newlyweds. The counsellor can help to build a strong fortified basis for the couple and deal with issues in future, in a healthy way.
2. Marriage Counselling / Couple Therapy:
“Good marriage needs love and trust but mostly it requires understanding between a couple”
– Neha Pandey,
Founder – Be Bold Counselling Services
A good, stable marriage requires respect, trust and a lot of solid communication and to build that, marriage counselling helps.
Marriage counselling, also known as couple therapy, helps couples to understand and resolve conflicts and improve their relationship. It gives tools to couples for better communication, to negotiate their differences, solve problems, and evenargue in a healthier way.
Marriage counselling often brings couples or partners together in joint therapy sessions. A counsellor or therapist helps couples identify and understand the source of their conflicts and work to resolve them. You and your partner will analyse both – the good and the bad of yourrelationship in a safe space, along with someone who has a neutral outlook towards you and your issues. This is way too different, from how a couple’s issues are viewed and discussed with family members and friends.
Marriage counselling can help you learn skills to strengthen your relationship. These skills may include communicating openly, solving problems together, and rationally discussing differences. In some cases, such as mental illness or addiction, your marriage counsellor may work with your other health care professionals to provide a full range of treatments.
There is a misconception that people who are at the verge of separating or having divorce seeks marriage counselling but speaking the fact and truth, marriage counselling is also for couples having struggles in their marriage, about parenting, raising child, lifestyle, emotional difficulties and even for couples from LGBTQ+ community. It can help you to develop communication skills, listening skills, and dealing with problems in an efficient manner and to strengthen your relationship.
3. Parent - Child Relationships:
The Parent-Child Relationship is one that nurtures the physical, emotional and social development of the child. It is a unique bond that every child and parent enjoy and nurture. This relationship lays the foundation for the child’s personality, life choices and overall behaviour. It is known to be the most crucial relationship as it is the foundation of the child’s personality, attachment style, and has an influence on the way of bonding with others and overall behaviour of the child. Therefore, overall, we can say that this relationship decides their social, physical, mental and emotional health.
A healthy parent-child relationship might look like warm and loving interactions, to have boundaries, rules & consequences, listening and empathizing with your child, problem solving, and playing together. Positive parenting includes spending quality time with the children, listening to them, having good conversations, understanding them with their point of reference, indulging along with them in their activities, brushing and aiding them in their curiosity.
4. Break - up Issues:
Being in a relationship can be very happy and healthy thing. It gives a sense of being loved and belongingness to the persons involved. But when such relationships end, it might be difficult to cope up as it disrupts
different aspects of your life, many times. This can also take a toll on your emotional and mental health. Such issues can be coped well by taking the help of a professional counsellor when things are overwhelming or when one feels the need to take help.
5. Romantic Relationships :
According to the triangular theory of love developed by psychologist Robert Sternberg, the three components of love are intimacy, passion, and commitment. As a human being it is our inherent need to love and be loved. This is fulfilled with the different relationships such as having family, friends, children but this need is fulfilled in an important way through romantic relationships. This relationship fulfils our needs and makes us feel good about ourselves and our life too. They can help us to grow, develop and strive. But they come with their own set of difficulties and issues such as fights, misunderstanding, miscommunication, adjustment issues, infidelity and arguments to name a few. Sometimes they can be solved by communicating and taking time but when things seem to be difficult one can always take help from professional.
Sometimes, it helps to see the relationship from a third person’s perspective – in a safe space, without the fear of judgement and discrimination. The counsellor is consciously not gender biased, is neutral towards the issue(s) and equipped with scientifically proven counselling techniques to help romantically involved couples. This is something very different then taking advice from family and friends who are not neutral towards our issues rather are involved in them directly or indirectly and therefore, are not the best advisors at times.