A Couples Counselor Study
“For a lot of couples, life gets up and running and we stop paying attention to the health or our marriage,” explains Dr. James Cordova, Ph.D. “Often, our marriages don’t catch our attention until they start to hurt.” Cordova is an associate professor of psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts, where he is heading a study on the effectiveness of an annual couples counselor. So far, he says the results are promising for “a marriage checkup,” which can offer prevention and treatment for a number of marital snafus.
In an annual couples counselor check up, you and your spouse will attend an initial session to complete a series of questions about marital health, revealing how problems are solved, what communication skills each mate possesses, what each person feels about child rearing, which intimacy issues may come up and what patterns of disagreements frequently surface. In the second session, the couples will come in face-to-face for an interview with the counselors. “We ask about the early phases of their marriage, how they got together, the decision to get married,” Cordova says, thereby identifying strengths and weaknesses.
The initial results of these annual counseling sessions for couples have been promising, Cordova reports. In the first 68 couples, most reported increased marital satisfaction, improvements in intimacy and a higher level of cooperation and acceptance in their households. “People that have been through the marriage checkup are improving in all kinds of ways in comparison to couples who haven’t.” He admits that some couples will undoubtedly relapse, as anyone would in medical or emotional therapy, yet those with access to treatment always fare better.
David and Kay Bayer are two study participants who saw a couples counselor together. Though they’ve been married for 23 years, they said they wanted to participate because they feared unanticipated hurdles. “We had two really close friends get divorced and it sort of hit us when they got divorced: ‘What happened to them?’ So, we’re trying to improve on what we saw go wrong,” Kay Bayer said. Through the study, they learned to communicate more effectively, they said. “You don’t realize the little things that may affect your marriage,” Kay Bayer said. “[I was] learning to speak more clearly to him so he could understand where I was coming from. I tend not to think before I speak on some issues.”
