Relationship Counseling – 3 Tips to Improve Your Relationship (When You are the Only One in Counseling)
What if you want to improve your relationship, but your partner will not come along? Can you still improve your relationship better without the help of your partner coming to therapy with you?. You may well feel anger and disappointment that your partner isn’t willing to do the work, but it’s too easy to blame and shame someone else for not doing the right thing in your relationship.
Yes, to improve your relationship, it makes sense that you both come in. However, some people are genuinely afraid of relationship counseling: For them, it seems too overwhelming. They may not be ready to enter into an office with a complete stranger and be asked to share intimate details about their personal life—let alone their relationship.
But you can still do your own individual, personal work to impact your relationship in positive and powerful ways.
What if you want to improve your relationship, but your partner will not come along? Can you still improve your relationship better without the help of your partner coming to therapy with you?. You may well feel anger and disappointment that your partner isn’t willing to do the work, but it’s too easy to blame and shame someone else for not doing the right thing in your relationship.
Yes, to improve your relationship, it makes sense that you both come in. However, some people are genuinely afraid of relationship counseling: For them, it seems too overwhelming. They may not be ready to enter into an office with a complete stranger and be asked to share intimate details about their personal life—let alone their relationship.
But you can still do your own individual, personal work to impact your relationship in positive and powerful ways.
Relationship Counseling Tip #1:
Focus on Your Contribution to the Conflict
It is easy to focus on other people and the things they do to provoke you. However, in any relationship, you need to examine your own negative behavior. Your partner’s absence can be a positive factor, in that you’ll be able to focus on what you say and do, that add to the misery and frustration you’re experiencing.
In relationship counseling, you can specifically explore:
- The ways you were treated in your childhood that cause you to over-react to your partner now.
- How you may be re-enacting how your parents behaved with each other in the course of their marriage.
- Whether you are not fully healed from your last relationship and are taking out unresolved conflicts on your current partner.
Whatever your part turns out to be, finding it will be essential in resolving some of the problems in your relationship.
Relationship Counseling Tip #2:
Learn Ways to Teach your Partner
How to Talk and Behave Toward You
In relationship counseling, you can still learn ways to change how you talk and react to what your partner does and says. Often couples engage in habitual patterns and familiar interactions with each another that keep their conflicts on going. Changing what you do and how you react can drastically change your partner’s behavior. You’ll learn to say things like:
- “When I hear you talk to me that way, I feel _________. I’d like to ask that you say it in a different way.
Relationship Counseling Tip #3:
Do Unto Others—and Especially Your Partner —as They
Wish to be Done Unto Them
The golden rule, “Do unto to others as you want to be done unto you,” doesn’t work in relationships. So in relationship counseling, we have the platinum rule, inviting you to treat others they way they want to be treated. With it in mind, you can honestly tell your partner:
- “I want to hear why behavior makes you react the way you do.”
Of course, following these tips is not guaranteed to improve your relationship. Even if partners don’t attend relationship counseling, they must be willing to listen and be influenced by the ones who do. Otherwise, this will not work. But at the very least, you will improve your own relationship skills. If your current relationship doesn’t work out, you’ll be much better equipped for the next one.
