Questions To Ask When Choosing A Marriage Counselor | Paul Friedman

Questions To Ask When Choosing A Marriage Counselor | Paul Friedman

Before you select or visit a marriage counselor, learn what questions you need to ask when choosing them.

Traditional counseling is often very expensive, time-consuming and takes a lot of your energy. Remember, the months (or years) you spend with a marriage counselor is time that your marriage is deteriorating. You need to make sure that whomever you work with has a track record of success and will be able to help you as fast as possible.

Paul discusses the right questions for you to ask a marriage counselor so you can select the right one for you and your spouse.

Most people who go into their first session discover right away that the therapist wants to
know “What’s up?” I call it the what’s up questioning, and it can come out in different forms of course, so what brings you here, what’s going on, etc. You don’t want to answer that.

Your very first session with the therapist should be dedicated to you and your spouse vetting them. You need to make sure that you’re not going to waste your time. I honestly don’t care about your money because if it works who cares what it costs, I care about your time because the time that you spend starting now when you’ve decided, you’re going to do something about your marriage; it’s very important. You don’t want to be discouraged. You don’t want to waste your time and energy or you’ll give up, and we don’t want you to do that.

The first session is dedicated to you asking questions of the therapists. Number one question should be, what do you base all of your teachings on?

Basically, they’re going to be teaching you about marriage. You’re not going in there just to solve this issue or that issue. You want your entire marriage to improve. It’s been trending in the wrong direction so you need to understand who’s guiding you. You don’t go up on a mountain. You don’t conquer Everest with someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing so you want to ask.

What do you base your principles on? Are they based on spiritual principles? Are they based on scientific principles? Can you give some examples of the principles that you base your teachings on?

I want to know. We need to know this. Then, you want to ask about their process.

How long typically do you spend with couples or with individuals? How do you do it? Do you want to meet with both of us? Do you want to separate us? How do you want to do it, and why?

You have a right to know this. If you go into the doctor and you have an infection and it’s coming out with all kinds of symptoms, you’re not going in just to deal with the symptoms. You wanted to deal with the internal infection and a good doctor is going to explain exactly what he sees, why it’s indicating this particular infection, and how he’s going to heal it, what protocol, what medications, what he’s going to expect you to do on your part. You have the same thing here.

Your marriage is sick. The issues are merely symptoms. Now, you also want to ask, “How many marriages have you saved in the last six months?” Trust me. If he says, “Well, I have one couple that’s have been seeing me a year.” Head for the hills, your marriage should be turned around very quickly that’s what real marriage help does for you so you want to find out. You don’t want to know about the client’s satisfaction. This is a diversionary tactic. You want to know about successes.

What kind of clients came in to see you that were they experiencing and what are they experiencing now? Are they happy? Is it working?

You want to get into it. You want to know how they work, exactly how they work so you know what to expect. This is very important. Now, what you really don’t want to do is you really don’t want to get into the issues — you don’t, and I’m going to get into that in another video because it’s very very important.

If you got something out of this and I’m sure you did. Then sign up for the mailing list. We need to stay in touch. We want to get your marriage on track. People who look at these videos generally don’t have the perfect marriage yet, and you should. Marriage is supposed to be perfect. You may not be perfect, your spouse may not be perfect, but your marriage can be.

#marriagecounseling #marriageexpectation #marriage #communication #marriageprogram