Build Healthy and Supportive Relationships
Our relationships with others have a huge impact on our mental wellness. Difficult relationships can cause huge stress and worry, while strong and stable connections provide support through life’s challenges and offer mutual love and care.
At GIA Boca Raton, we offer couples therapy to help you identify and resolve conflicts between you and your partner. Our professional therapists create a safe space where you can work through issues together, avoiding escalation and ensuring that both voices are equally heard. Together, we help you build mutually supportive relationships that help you heal and lay the foundations for lasting mental wellness.
How Does Couples Therapy Work?
Couples therapy offers positive interventions that help you build a stable and supportive relationship with your partner. Your therapist works to maintain a non-judgmental space where you can express your feelings to one another. They ensure that discussions do not escalate into arguments so that you can properly communicate your thoughts.
Your therapist may also give you exercises to practice between sessions to help you develop certain skills. At GIA Boca Raton, we offer couples therapy on an outpatient basis, so you can work through these exercises in your home environment and provide meaningful feedback to the therapist in the next session.
Over time, couples therapy can help you develop your communication and problem-solving skills, build trust, and nurture caring attitudes and behaviors towards each other. It helps lay the foundations for a long-lasting, healthy, and balanced relationship
Couples Therapy and Addiction Recovery
Addiction can put a strain on any relationship. You may lie to cover up addictive behavior, act secretively, or neglect your friends and family in favor of pursuing drugs. At the same time, it can cause extreme stress, worry, or codependency for those around you.
Relationship conflict is also a major source of stress which can drive addictive behavior. Substance users can end up in a destructive cycle where substance misuse and relationship difficulties reinforce each other.
Couples therapy can help break this cycle. Extensive scientific research shows couples therapy both reduces substance use and improves relationship satisfaction. It can facilitate a constructive cycle where mutual support helps you stay away from substance use, which leads to further relationship improvements.
In general, couples therapy in addiction treatment has three aims. These are:
- Ending drug and alcohol misuse
- Helping a partner be supportive in the recovery process
- Developing behaviors that foster lasting abstinence
Signing a Recovery Contract
Therapists often use a recovery contract to help couples develop skills and tools that support addiction recovery. A recovery contract is a document that sets out certain duties and responsibilities for both partners. Each partner signs the document during the first therapy session.
These duties and obligations may include:
- The substance user affirming their desire to stay sober at the start of each day.
- Both partners attending regular support group meetings.
- Avoiding discussions of the past except during the sessions themselves.
The partner who is not using substances records the completion of these tasks every day.
Couples Therapy and Mental Wellness
Couples therapy isn’t just effective in addiction recovery programs. It can also be an invaluable part of mental wellness treatments for depression, anxiety, and other conditions.
A clinical study found that emotional-focused therapy for couples was just as effective as pharmacotherapy in treating major depressive disorder. There was some evidence to suggest that for females, it led to greater symptom improvement. Coping-orientated couples therapy also led to significant improvements.
At GIA Boca Raton, we offer couples therapy as part of our individualized treatment programs. We combine it with a variety of other evidence-based treatment approaches, including transcranial magnetic stimulation therapy (TMS), cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and group therapy. We design your therapy sessions according to your unique circumstances and continually evaluate and adapt your program throughout the process.
