Marriage Counseling
The word "counseling" is defined in many dictionaries as "giving
advice" or "warning". People in trouble in their marital
relationships have always been the recipients of all kinds of
well-meant advice, and in that "educational" sense marriage
counseling is probably as old and as universal as marriage itself.
It has been carried on through the centuries and in many parts of
the world by interested relatives and friends, and by ministers,
doctors, teachers, lawyers and others with varying degrees of
professional formality.
The new approach to counseling differs from the older methods in
many important respects.
In the first place it is conceived and carried out more as a
therapeutic or healing than as an educational activity. It may, of
course, still include some education; about, for example, the main
principles underlying human relationships and especially the most
intimate relationships of marriage and parenthood.
This attempt at the healing of a "sick" marriage, like the healing
of a sick person, rests on the conviction, confirmed more and more
by experience, that the essential factor in all healing is a
natural healing force with which the "healer" seeks always to
cooperate.
On the other hand it has been abundantly confirmed that when a
counselor can achieve with troubled people the kind of personal
relationship in which they can progressively unburden their
strained affronted and conflicting feelings, they then come to see
themselves and their conflicts more clearly and objectively, and
are in a much better position to make their own decisions about
what they shall do.
The "sick" marriage can best be healed when the partners are
helped to help themselves, when the counselor can sit down
patiently with them and give them the chance to "see" themselves
and their partners through the previously blinding mists of
emotion, and then to apply "sweet reason" freed from the
distortions of upset feelings, to their common task of rebuilding
- or, if they see fit, dissolving - their partnership.
Their decisions may be assisted by the offering of information
when it is desired and seems appropriate, but the modern counselor
feels very diffident about giving advice except in very special
circumstances.
A second difference from the older methods of marriage counseling
is that modern counseling does not set out to interfere in
people's marital troubles, nor does it indulge in coercion of any
kind. Help is offered, but as in all healing it is more likely to
be of value when it is sought and accepted by a willing "patient".
Marriage counselors are not in any sense "managers" or
"do-gooders", and they will never "butt in", even when requested
to do so by an anxious relative. They will offer their services,
and then leave it to the people to decide whether or not they will
accept them.
A third difference between modern counseling and the older
traditional methods is that the modern counselor does not feel
competent or in any way disposed to judge either of the partners
in conflict, or to impose his own moral values on them.
He may ask them what they think the possible consequences of any
attitude or action may be, and why they would want to do what they
are doing, but in general the counselor sees his function as that
of looking with each of them at the problem and the whole
relationship, and accepting their feelings and their attitudes,
and their conduct within the law. In this way their ultimate
attitudes are dictated by their own consciences and by their views
about the total situation.
Modern counseling then seeks to offer a service of such a nature
that people are helped to help themselves; to provide an accepting
relationship of a kind that will encourage each person to express
his feelings in a permissive atmosphere, and progressively to
achieve better insight into many aspects of the marital
relationship. In this way each of them has the opportunity to make
their own decisions as to what to do about it in an atmosphere of
realism rather than of distorted emotion.
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