– Breaking Unhealthy Patterns in Your Marriage

FINDING WAYS TO BREAK UNHELPFUL PATTERNS OF LOVE IN YOUR MARRIAGE THROUGH MARRIAGE THERAPY

If you have noticed continued, unhealthy patterns in your marriage, then marriage counseling may be a productive place to help you find ways of breaking those patterns.  Every marriage gets into ruts and cycles.  It’s a part of what we do as humans.  We all long for comfortability and simplicity and finding consistent patterns for relating to our spouse is one of those ways.  Typically, the patterns we create with our spouse are usually good and helpful in the beginning.  It’s part of the way that we love each other.  We learn to know and understand our spouse, and so we repeat actions that communicate that knowledge.  As humans, we are always growing and changing, too.  So, some of the patterns that we created in the past no longer work in the present simply because we are different people.  This is a good thing!

All too often, however, we lose sight of the importance of this growth, and instead, we become frustrated and annoyed at this loss of an old connection.  Whereas we used to come home, give our spouse a kiss, and plop down on the couch for a favorite TV show and light conversation, that pattern has now become old and mundane.  Now, our spouse wants more interaction, less TV, and some help around the house.  We don’t like change, and yet we hate boredom.  It’s a fundamental tension of being human and especially being married.  Besides the fact, that enjoying a favorite TV show and simple chit-chat is not a bad thing!  It is simply that pattern has become old and stale and doesn’t provide the same level of connection it once did.

Many couples enter marriage counseling with this underlying fear that their spouse doesn’t love them anymore and the fire they once had for each other has dissipated.  The reality might actually be that they simply want new things with their spouse and they don’t know how to go about changing patterns and instilling new life into their marriage.

MARRIAGE COUNSELING AT ITS BEST

Marriage counseling can have its best effect when each spouse is willing to trust the process and each other enough to simply try something new!  Breaking old patterns is never easy, because both spouses have come to rely on these patterns as connective, even if they are frustrating and embittering.  Whenever one spouse wants to change, it means the other spouse will be affected and ultimately have to change as well.  Because we are in relationship, we can’t just change ourselves and believe that the other person can stay the same.  This is why most people are so ambivalent about change.  Our spouse is begging us to change, and so we do, but in the meantime, the one asking us to change will inevitably have to change as well.  This is often an important part of the “change process” that most people fail to consider.

MARRIAGE COUNSELING AND CHANGE

The breaking of pattern that can occur between spouses in marriage counseling can theoretically be about anything!  We can put peanut butter on our sandwich first, then jelly, if our usual pattern is the opposite.  We can say “Good evening, Honey,” rather than “Hey Baby,” when we come in from work.  It doesn’t really matter in its essence.  The point is that we are breaking perpetual patterns of how we interact with ourselves and with each other.  The impact is that both people will be affected, and this creates newness and freshness in our relationship.

If you are looking for help with breaking old patterns in your marriage through marriage counseling, then I invite you contact marriage therapist Chris Roberts at Two Trees Counseling Nashville.  Chris has experience helping couples break old patterns, and can also point you in the right direction of another therapist in the Nashville area that may better fit your needs.