couples therapy

The goals of couples therapy can be different for different couples and these will be identified and shared during the initial interviews.

General goals can be identified in couples therapy such as:

• Improve conflict management skills and modify dysfunctional behaviors
• To increase the degree of awareness of emotions and behaviors of oneself and one’s partner
• Improve levels of intimacy
• Live sexuality in a more playful way
• Promote emotional regulation: often within the couple experiencing difficulties may be present tendencies to express themselves in an exaggeratedly aggressive manner or, conversely, repressing their emotions.
  The therapist can help in promoting the ability to put oneself in the shoes of the other, then in guiding to express in a more functional way one’s own experiences with respect to the other.
• Improving cooperation and sharing, so the well-being: often couples interact in a conflictual and competitive way significantly reducing cooperation. Psychotherapy can bring out new ways of experimenting and cooperating as a couple, strengthening the relationship.
• Look at your relationship in all its facets and from different points of view
• Discover, define and redefine the value system of the couple
• Promote acceptance of personal limits and enhance each other’s potential
• To support the couple along the path of separation, in case the awareness emerges that the well-being of both cannot be achieved by being in a relationship. In this specific case, therapy provides tools for the elaboration of grief and concrete aspects for the application of this choice, such as communication to the children of the separation.
  
  

Other times, however, it may happen that therapy brings to light and awareness that in fact the relationship is not what you really want and that you want to separate.