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There’s a hard pill to swallow in every relationship: it’s not always rainbows and sunshine. You may encounter many struggles, but that doesn’t mean you have to resort to breakups. But what if mental health issues arise at one point in your relationship? Will you choose to be tight-lipped, afraid that one word can trigger a breakup or heighten the issue? What if we tell you that what you need is relationship therapy?
Read the article to learn how a therapist’s intervention can help resolve your mental health problems and eventually strengthen you as a couple.
Relationship Therapy: What Is It and When Do You Need It?
Relationship therapy is a type of psychotherapy participated by 3 individuals: you, your partner, and your licensed counsellor or therapist. The third-party individual will help you figure out your goals by using therapeutic techniques to achieve them. It is especially crucial when you (or both) are dealing with a mental illness.
Below are some signs you might need to consult a therapist:
- Your fights, usually mild before, are now composed of door kicks, shouts, and nasty words.
- You feel like you are falling out of love.
- Trust issues now arise, and accusations of infidelity are common occurrences.
- You are constantly questioning your self-worth because you feel abandoned.
- Sexual intimacy is almost non-existent.
- You are starting to have conflicts in terms of handling finances.
- You find it challenging to bring up individual traumas.
Dealing with Mental Health Issues: How Relationship Therapy Can Help
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), mental illness affects around 450 million people worldwide.
When you reject the idea of attending a relationship therapy session, it may create a strain on your relationship, furthering the mental illness issue. Before you know it, one of you is packing their belongings and leaving the other one behind. Therapy might be lengthy and embarrassing, but heartbreaks are brutal, won’t you agree?
Here are 6 ways impartial advice from a therapist can help you get back on track with your relationship:
1. It enables you to establish healthy communication.
Once mental illness strikes a person, it’ll become difficult to share their struggles, even with their partner. When you feel like you and your partner are not seeing eye-to-eye anymore, a therapist will help you bring things out in the open—without shouting or banging doors.
Your therapist will find effective ways to deescalate your arguments, reconnect you, and clear out miscommunication. As a result, you can apply the techniques advised to better communicate and assist each other through rough times.
2. It allows you to heal and relax.
Another way mental illness can affect your relationship is when one of you feels stagnant and neglected. This is particularly true when one is stressed, but the other doesn’t care.
With a therapist, you’ll go through therapeutic exercises to help you deal with your physical and mental problems. You can include a physical treatment in your appointments. A good example is booking a massage therapy in Waterloo. It effectively relieves pains brought on by anxiety, sleep disorders, headaches, and stress.
3. It can help you talk about sexual issues.
Sex is a huge part of every romantic relationship. However, you might be struggling to keep the intimacy alive. You will at times feel lonely, distant, and depressed. But don’t worry, relationship therapy and sex therapy in Windsor can help you keep being sexually attracted to each other.
Sex therapy will introduce you to routes that can spice things up again in your relationship. A therapist will advise you on what other things you should try together.
4. It can help you cope with unresolved traumas.
Opening old wounds might be uncomfortable, especially when one of you is still dealing with unresolved traumas. Talking to a therapist will help you uncover underlying issues and face them. Relationship therapy is a safe space for couples to walk down memory lane and extract life events they generally want to forget—childhood, teenage, or adulthood traumas.
Trauma-focused therapy is an effective way to deal with traumas that continue to distress couples. Many therapists offer trauma therapy in Los Angeles to help couples heal from the effects of childhood traumas. In this way, you can adjust, set boundaries, and recognize what triggers might negatively affect your partner.
5. It can help you go through resolutions for infidelity issues.
Trust is a fundamental foundation of every relationship. When trust is totally broken, a relationship won’t flourish. One of the significant causes of distrust and breakups today is when infidelity issues loom, and it sometimes leads to mental health problems.
Similarly, when you consider cheating on your partner, a visit to a therapist will help you find out the root cause of your desires. If you find out your partner is cheating, relationship therapy can help you decide whether you want to remain in the relationship. Should you choose to stay, your therapist will introduce you to different helpful approaches to restore your trust and navigate the healing process.
6. It will allow you to see things from each other’s perspectives.
Another common struggle of every couple is not viewing things from each other’s perspectives. Each has an opinion, and when they clash, it creates a full-blown tension. This may crack the fragile part of your relationship, intensifying the mental illness you’re dealing with.
Your therapist is someone who can digest things and provide you with a solution to pinpoint each other’s opposing views calmly. This will help you avoid making hurtful statements toward each other. Though not always easy, every relationship should be a safe space to conduct healthy discussions, regardless if you have contradicting views.
Therapy is the “last-ditch” effort to save a relationship. It is another form of self-care, especially when dealing with mental illness. In addition, talking to your therapist is a practical, nonjudgmental way to release your emotions freely.
It is also vital to have a healthy discussion before seeing a therapist, as one of you might recoil from the idea of opening up to a stranger.
Each relationship is different and passes through an inevitable struggle at one point. Remember that your partner should be your haven for solid support when things get tough. So, when extreme mental problems arise, you need to seek relationship therapy—not to end your relationship but to help you improve the parts you failed to see.