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Marriage Counseling Can Transform Your Relationship

A Marriage Counseling Retreat Can Transform Your Relationship

Marriage and Couples Counseling can be successful given the right ingredients: readiness, right timing, and resonance with a marriage counselor (and better yet, a counselor couple) who is experienced, knowledgeable, and highly skilled. Private intensive weekend retreats with the right mix of elements can be even more successful.

The bottom-line is that giving love and attention to your marriage really WORKS. You’ve got to be committed and want your relationship to continue. Marriage counseling and couples counseling can be done via telephone, email, Skype, in-person and over extended periods of time, both in-person and remotely.

Why do couples need marriage counseling? Why isn’t love sufficient to weather the ups and downs of daily life together? Well, for starters most people enter relationships without the knowledge and tools to succeed. Even when they try their best and love their partner, they get stuck. They get bogged down in old baggage, negative emotion, beliefs and old rules. Barriers get built and bad dynamic/patterns become habit and impossible to untangle. Communication, ease, and comfort stop. It’s no wonder high divorce rates exist and reports indicate low levels of relationship satisfaction.

Often well-intentioned couples want to improve their relationship. They don’t know how to go about it or use the wrong approach. They might expect one partner to change or set unrealistic expectations for their relationship. Couples hold onto negative emotions like blame, shame and resentment yet expect their relationship to get better. Many people don’t know how to release these negative emotions.{Have you ever felt really angry despite your wish to let it go?}

Couples get stuck in negative patterns that are difficult to identify and can feel impossible to break {Have you ever sworn you’d never say some button-pushing snide remark only to find the words escaping your lips seemingly against your will? And then you’re both back at it, acting out the same bad drama you promised to stop.} Repeat these patterns enough times and most couples will lose hope and feel despairing.

What’s great about our approach to marriage counseling?

Our approach to marriage counseling and couples counseling was formulated based on 40 years of therapy experience. The principles, strategies, and techniques are laid out in our book, Relationship Transformation: Have Your Cake and Eat It Too. The work is deep, forward moving, and results driven. You won’t get bogged down in the past, diverted by he-said/she-said blame games, or delayed by analysis paralysis. Our approach to marriage counseling and couples counseling is intuitive, objective and heart-based. The work, fluid and systematic, cuts a wide swath through all the stuckness, bad feeling, frustration and despair. Couples get hope back.

In our private marriage counseling retreat and couples counseling retreat, the four of us collaborate as a team to unearth and restore the sweetness and balance to the relationship. Our line of inquiry, always respectful and appropriate for the couple, gets to the heart of the problem and brings new insights about the couple’s patterns of relating. Our clients are grateful that we are a husband-wife team, and we love this model for its magic  moments and tingle-producing results.

Getting down to specifics-   

A marriage counseling retreat gives you the right tools and strategies to make positive changes in your relationship-even if you’re in crisis or have consulted with a divorce lawyer. Here’s a guide to what can happen. The process is not linear per se. We take you from where you are and nudge you forward to where you want to go.

  • Release the negative feelings at the root of the problem.
  • Talk about your relationship needs and wants.
  • Learn how to deal with emotionally charged issues in a way that works for you as a couple.
  • Identify patterns that logjam your relationship and create a plan to get avoid getting stuck.
  • Rediscover the person you fell in love with and uncover the positive feelings buried by emotional barriers, unresolved issues, anxiety, fear and negativity.
  • Learn to set healthy boundaries, make requests, and new ways to communicate.
  • Create a new vision for your relationship as it moves forward.
  • Make a specific agreement to support your new vision.

Our Beliefs

  • All couples can benefit from a couples retreat.
  • Individualized and experiential education is the best tool.
  • Everyone can build a robust, happy relationship that lasts {caveat: a couple must want to stay together}.
  • Transformation happens in a warm, supportive space where couples feel safe to voice their deepest needs, wants and fears.
  • Couples benefit from incisive inquiry + deep listening.
  • We all need knowledge, tools and resources to create and maintain our relationship {no matter how intelligent or evolved we think we are}.
  • Everyone wants to feel loved, be seen and heard.
  • Love is the most profound experience of our lifetime.
  • Couples who devote their time and resources to give love and attention to their relationship have more satisfying + lasting relationships.

Our Marriage Counseling Retreat dives deep, is time condensed, and results driven.We get to the root of what’s keeping your relationship from thriving.

Call us if you want a better relationship and resonate with our beliefs. We’d be honored to collaborate with you to create a more satisfying relationship. You can reach us at 603-828-3649.

Or sign up here for direct in-box delivery of heart-inspired insights, tips and strategies to help you create a better relationship. It’ll take less than a minute. Promise.

Mary Ellen Goggin

Mary Ellen is a highly skilled and intuitive relationship guide. She brings over 35 years’ experience with individuals and businesses as a lawyer, mediator, personal coach and educator. She received her J.D. at University of New Hampshire Law School and a Master’s Degree at Harvard University. Mary Ellen co-authored Relationship Transformation: How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too with Jerry Duberstein — and they were married by chapter 3. Mary Ellen brings a unique blend of problem-solving, practicality, and warmth to her work. She’s a highly analytic person, with geeky and monkish tendencies. She’s a daredevil skydiver, a voracious seeker of knowledge, and an indulgent grandmother. Her revolution: helping people become the unapologetic rulers of their inner + outer realms. Read more about the retreats