Premarital Counseling
I offer non-denominational premarital counseling based on research-based approaches to help you create a strong relationship that thrives. Investing time and effort in preparing for marriage can contribute to a strong and lasting relationship. Set up a secure foundation that can bear the weight of life’s ebb and flow.
Premarital Counseling serves several purposes, aligning with key principles such as building friendship, managing conflict in healthier ways, understanding your communication styles, establish principles of how you will ‘conduct business’, and create shared meaning while supporting each other’s dream.
A healthy relationship is a survival unit. High-quality relationships are consistently associated with improved mental health and physical health. Being in contact with a trusted, loving other, diminishes the perception of pain and its physiological effects. This is partly through lowering stress-related hormones, such as cortisol, and increasing good feelings through oxytocin (the “boding” or “love” hormone/neurotransmitter).
Here are some reasons why premarital counseling is often considered beneficial:
Enhancing Communication Skills: Effective communication is a crucial aspect of any successful marriage. Premarital counseling provides a platform for couples to improve their communication skills, understand each other's communication styles, and learn how to express themselves more effectively.
Conflict Resolution Training: Learning how to navigate and resolve conflicts is vital for a healthy marriage. Premarital counseling can equip couples with conflict resolution tools and strategies, helping them address disagreements constructively and prevent conflicts from escalating.
Setting Expectations: Premarital counseling allows couples to openly discuss and set realistic expectations for various aspects of married life, including roles, responsibilities, finances, and family planning. Understanding each other's expectations can help prevent misunderstandings in the future.
Building Intimacy and Connection: The counseling process often involves exercises and discussions aimed at deepening emotional intimacy and connection between partners. This aligns with the principle of building a strong friendship as a foundation for a successful marriage.
Exploring Values and Goals: Premarital counseling provides an opportunity for couples to explore and align their values, goals, and visions for the future. This contributes to the creation of shared meaning in the relationship.
Identifying Strengths and Challenges: Through counseling, couples can identify both their strengths and potential challenges. Understanding each other's strengths allows them to appreciate and support one another, while addressing challenges proactively.
Sexual Exploration: Couples who have more discussions about sex tend to have more enjoyable sex lives. Desire and intimacy can be nurture. As life goes on, aging changes take place, and just the busy, daily routine starts to settle, keeping the flame alive requires intention. Where attention goes, connections grow. Many couples transition to being great at tackling life's challenges as a team, but when it comes to sexuality, they start feeling more like roommates than lovers. It's easier to set up good habits than to change the patterns after they're ingrained!
My approach integrates principles from neuroscience, biology, and psychology to understand and address issues within a relationship. Establishing a securely-functioning relationship- regardless of what your individual attachment styles are- involves creating a strong and stable connection between partners. It requires to start thinking as a two-person system- us, we, and ours; not me/I/mine or you/yours.
It is about making your relationship a priority. Setting up actions and behaviors you’ll each live by to assert your commitment everyday. Regardless of how you feel on a given day. It is about agreeing on principles and values you will each live by each day to preserve the trust and safety within your relationship and how you will protect your couple bubble.
Learn how to be in each other’s care, manage stress responses, and developing healthy coping mechanisms and strategies to address ruptures. These emotional regulation strategies may include learning how you can manage your stress and emotions on your own (self-regulation) and with your partner (co-regulation). I help couples explore each other’s way of thinking or information processing so they can identify where there might be points of miscommunication and how they can provide more clarity so they can get to the same page. It is also important to recognize the brain’s hardwire biases and how they might impact your day-to-day communication, perception, memory, etcetera.
As a somatically-oriented practitioner, I prompt my clients to pay attention to what’s going on in their bodies. Body-language is the first language we learn to speak. It is often processed at an unconscious level, gestures, changes in tone of voice, and certain small somatic shifts may greatly influence the perception of treat and safety in a relationship; especially during conflict! The role of different types of touch is also very important to the maintenance of physical closeness and intimacy.
I also help couples observe the context in which they live in exploring how their day-to-day life looks like. These can create dynamics that greatly influence how they present themselves in their relationships, like when they had a long day at work and need to go home to decompress and turn off their brains while doom-scrolling social media. Using tools like breath, practicing being present, and learning how to take care of each other helps couples stay attuned to each other and reduce reactivity during challenging situations.
I combine this with lived experience from 10+ years of marriage, raising children, and moving out of our country away from family. Living together, shared responsibilities, and building a good life together takes a lot of effort! My serious joke is are people are difficult, where there are people together there is conflict, and things hit differently when you start sharing the dishes and the toilet. No way to run to, baby!
Through premarital counseling you have the opportunity to explore a wide range of principles and relationship skills. From the philosophy of why we get into relationships, the biology of the attachment system, and practical strategies to communicate, problem-solve, to keeping your sex alive and pleasurable in a long-term relationship, I am here to support and offer insight.
In summary, by integrating this knowledge, couples can develop practical skills and strategies to build a strong foundation for a healthy and resilient marriage. Investing in premarital counseling can help you establish a solid foundation and set the stage for a successful and fulfilling marriage. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Click here if you’d like to submit your information to request a free 5-10 minutes free consultation or schedule an appointment.
I am a PhD in Clinical Sexology candidate at Modern Sex Therapy Institutes and have a Master of Science in Educational Psychology. I work with individuals, couples, non-monogamous relationships, and groups in topics related to sexuality, emotional regulation, communication dynamics, and changing behaviors.
I am bilingual! (Spanish/English)
