Marriage Therapy Reflection Paper

I am very excited about this class and learning more about couples and marriage therapy. Ever since I took love and relationship class in undergraduate and studied John Gottman I knew I wanted to learn more about marriage, couples, and family dynamics. This week readings were very insightful and makes me eager to learn more. Many concepts after chapter three were fairly new to me and I have enjoyed learning more about marriage and couples and have a more understanding of the meaning of marriage and also how hard it really is to maintain a marriage throughout the numerous life stages and transitions. The need for marriage counseling be and for Christians briefly discussed the statistics of cohabiting before marriage and the damage that can

As couples may come to counseling the have pre-existing ideas of problems in their marriage but as the sessions continue other problems may arise that are the cause for the presenting problems. Assessment help to establish the problem and aid in creating a treatment plan for the couple, assessment can consist of notes, observation, inventories, daily logs, and behavioral monitoring. Using a combination of these sources and understanding what arears to asses will help in making an initial treatment plan that will be altered throughout sessions if needed. Communication may be the number one issues in marriage as I have read in the text when couples communicate they have power rules that they are unaware of, the context of communication is important, openness of communication is important but too much sharing of negative feelings can be damaging. My goal is to help them change the unhelpful patterns of communication. The most interesting information in this chapter was the four level of conflicts by Guerin, the level of conflict the couple is on will determine the prognosis of their marriage. By level four usually all hope is lost as one of the couple has already started to think and/or prepare for divorce. Assessment of commitment is also important, assessing their commitment to spirituality, their marriage and counseling. It takes a lot of work and willingness of the client in order for change to happen and without commitment to these three areas change will not happen and marital satisfaction will not