As long as you and your partner hold opposing views on life, talking about ‘who-said-what-and-why’ in marriage counselling will never fix your marriage problems!”
Beyond Marriage Counselling
B
y the time a couple enter marriage counselling, each have usually made the decision to give their partnership time, attention & money. With mutual commitment and a professional counsellor in the lead, you would expect finding matrimonial harmony together at this stage shouldn’t be difficult.
Unfortunately many people’s experience of marriage counselling is not what you would imagine. Instead of bringing couples closer, many people watch their marriage counselling sessions turn into a kind of battle.
As each partner tries to get the counsellor onside, the couple can end up squaring off in opposing corners. Rather than bring them closer together, the sessions become an all out battle of ‘two against one’, with the counsellor negotiating (or advocating for) a divorce or separation, instead of helping the couple live peacefully together.
Beyond this type of ‘marriage counselling tug-o-war’, a healthy view on relationships grows from the wisdom known in the social sciences as emotional intelligence. Sometimes simply called maturity, emotional intelligence is the wisdom of understanding our emotions.
Emotional Intelligence Training as an Alternative to Marriage Counselling
Research has shown that developing Emotional Intelligence improves a persons quality of life in every way science can measure.
Since peaceful and healthy relationships are central to quality of life, developing your Emotional Intelligence will of course help bring harmony to your home life.
Scientists following thousands of test subjects throughout their lives have discovered people with 4 major emotional competencies (central to a healthy view on life) do better on every scale of success devised so far by science.
Emotionally competent people live in better homes, in more peaceful suburbs, make more money, enjoy higher rates of job and marriage satisfaction and experience lower rates of divorce and mental illness in their families. Along with their children they do better at sport, school and work and enjoy better health and social connections (1).
Most important of all these competencies is good vagal tone(2) which, simply put, means being able to calm down quickly after an upset. Vagal tone is the most important indicator of happiness and success in life and can be improved with a few simple exercises.
I shared these exercises with you in our free intro tutorial. Do you remember what they were? If not please go back and review them now under the heading “My First Glimpse of Hope”;
Vagal Tone Exercises:
(1) Emotional Intelligence - Daniel Goleman -