Introducing… Couple’s Counseling!
ERA Wellness is thrilled to formally announce the addition of couple’s counseling with Jeni Everts Beier, LPC!
Check out what she has to say about it:
While I have been doing couples counseling for a while now, including seeing couples at ERA Wellness recently, we are ready to make it “official.” Yay!
Much like I have always felt drawn to work with women, I have also felt drawn to work with couples. In my graduate program, I mostly studied the counseling theory that was based around relationships (relational-cultural theory, for those that are wondering). Just one of those things that I am naturally inclined to enjoy!
So what is couples counseling? Great question.
Couples counseling is similar yet different from individual counseling. Sometimes my role as the therapist is to be a moderator. Sometimes I’m a referee. Sometimes I’m a parrot and repeat things back in a different way. In couples counseling, we all come together for the first session. Like an individual intake, that session is spent getting to know each other and laying the groundwork for the therapy goals. The next sessions are spent one-on-one with me, meaning each person in the couple gets at least one individual session. That time is spent in a number of ways with the focus being around more information gathering to form the couple’s therapy goals. Once the individual sessions are complete, we come back together and get the boots on the ground.
Why seek couples counseling? Another great question.
Conflict. Communication. Lack of communication. Intimacy concerns. Kids. No kids. Want kids. Don’t want kids. General relationship check-up (yes, people do this! Kind of like getting an annual physical at your Primary Care Physician, couples seek their own wellness exam). Stress. The list goes on.
I have been trained via the Gottman Institute. They are kind of the couples counseling gurus. The Institute has a relationship assessment which your couples counseling treatment may or may not use but can provide a ton of insight into what’s going on.
The general goal of couples counseling is to not end all arguments. WHAT?! Nope. All couples argue. The goal of couples counseling, in short, is to teach and give tools around resolving and recovering from arguments. Even though that may sound simple, it’s okay if it isn’t right now! That’s why I do what I do.
Want to learn more about if this might be right for you? Schedule a couples consult at the link below. We’ll chat for about 20 minutes on the phone at a time you choose.
