Each year, hundreds of thousands of couples go into counseling in an effort to save their troubled relationships.
But does marital therapy work? Not nearly as well as it should, researchers say. Two years after ending counseling, studies find, 25 percent of couples are worse off than they were when they started, and after four years, up to 38 percent are divorced.
That’s a rather depressing statistic isn’t it. So, what’s going on?
We’re coming to understand that many forms of couples therapy are based on teaching better techniques, such as effective listening, improved communications, and so on.
Enhancing these skills is an important contributor, but often it’s not enough because the root cause of the relationship issue isn’t being addressed.
Almost always in such cases, the relationship is being affected by what is going on in the subconscious of one or the other partner; sometimes in both.
The directly affected partner may not be aware of the issue, which is often a consequence of an earlier – perhaps long forgotten – experience.
However, despite best efforts at applying better relationship techniques, the underlying issue will keep on sabotaging the relationship.
As an example, in one case, Jennifer, (not her real name), had difficulty truly trusting her partner, even though he had never given her any reason not to trust him.
Jennifer’s behavior was being caused by long forgotten memories, (forgotten at the conscious level anyway), of how, as a small girl, she had seen one of her mother’s early partners behave.
Although Jennifer had forgotten about the events, her subconscious had not, and it was acting to protect Jennifer from what might become a similar situation.
In such cases, I use hypnotherapy to work individually with the affected partner at the level of the subconscious to address the underlying issue by helping the subconscious to find other, more positive, ways of helping.
A few hypnotherapy sessions with Jennifer alone and the problem was permanently solved and their relationship was restored.