Pre-Marital Therapy in Salt Lake City, UT

What is the next step for your relationship?  You want to make sure you are both on the same page before the wedding or before moving in together.  Pre-Marital Therapy has proven to help couples start their marriages off on the right foot.  You are planning the biggest day of your lives, and it makes sense to also plan the biggest commitment of your lives.

Engagement season is full of excitement and logistics, and it is easy for the deeper questions - how the two of you will handle stress, money, in-laws, and each other on a bad day - to stay politely unasked.  Pre-Marital Therapy is where those questions finally get asked out loud, in a way that brings you closer together instead of starting another disagreement.

You have talked about the venue, the guest list, and the budget for the reception far more than you have talked about money, in-laws, or what a hard week is going to look like for the two of you.  The conversations you keep meaning to have get pushed to after things settle down - and things rarely settle down on their own.

Most couples walk into marriage carrying unspoken assumptions about how it will all work, learned from the families they grew up in, and neither person realizes the other is playing by different rules until the first real conflict shows up.  It is not a lack of love - it is simply that no one ever taught you how to have these conversations.

Most couples find out in the first session that they have never actually said certain expectations out loud.  Couples come in for Pre-Marital Therapy because they're:

• •Moving in together and unsure how to split money, chores, and time
• •Blending families, kids, or very different lifestyles and traditions
• •Getting a lot of opinions from family about how their relationship should go
• •Carrying patterns from home that you do not want to inherit
• •Coming from families that handled conflict in completely different ways
• •Unsure how you will handle money as a team versus separately
• •Wondering how faith, holidays, and traditions will get decided

You don't have to inherit the patterns you grew up watching, and you don't have to figure any of this out on your own.  Couples who prepare before the wedding start their marriage already feeling like a team, and the hardest conversations become the ones you are glad you had.  Change is possible, and it is far easier to build the marriage you want now than to repair one later - the future you both want is well within reach.

You do not have to walk into your marriage guessing, bracing for the first big fight, or hoping the hard topics somehow work themselves out.  You do not have to repeat the patterns you grew up watching or find out after the wedding that the two of you were never on the same page.  Couples who prepare together walk into married life already feeling like a team - with less anxiety, fewer blowups, and a real sense of confidence about the life they are building together.

What you can expect from Pre-Marital Therapy:

• •A shared language for the hard topics like money, sex, in-laws, and kids
• •A plan for how you fight and how you repair, so conflict brings you closer instead of tearing you apart
• •Expectations finally out in the open, instead of silently assumed
• •A clear picture of the marriage you are both signing up for before the wedding day
• •Confidence handling stress, money, and a bad week as a team, instead of finding out the hard way
• •Patterns from your families named and left behind, so you start your marriage with a clean slate

In Pre-Marital Therapy, the first sessions get concrete.  We take stock of your strengths as a couple, because most couples underestimate theirs.  We identify the areas of concern before they become arguments.  We put expectations into words - about money, roles, sex, kids, time with family, and what support looks like when one of you is struggling.

I have worked with several couples in the Salt Lake City area and I will work with you on expectations, finances, family, intimacy, and the patterns you don't want to inherit.  Utilizing Gottman therapy, I will guide you to discuss your fears and anxieties as well as your excitement for the next step.  You will build a shared plan for conflict before conflict shows up uninvited.

So let's get started! Any worthwhile journey starts with a single step.  Come see if I am a good fit for you!