Marriage counseling

Relationship counseling
Intervention
ICD-9-CM	94.4
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Relationship counseling is the process of counseling the parties of a human relationship in an effort to recognize, and to better manage or reconcile, troublesome differences and repeating patterns of stress upon the relationship. The relationship involved may be between members of a family or a couple (see also family therapy), employees or employers in a workplace, or between a professional and a client.

Couple's therapy (or relationship therapy) is a subset of relationship counseling. It may differ from other forms of relationship counseling in various regards including its duration. Short term counseling may be between 1 and 3 sessions whereas long term couples therapy may be between 12 and 24 sessions. An exception is brief or solution focused couples therapy. In addition, counseling tends to be more 'here and now' and new coping strategies the outcome. Couples therapy is more about seemingly intractable problems with a relationship history, where emotions are the target and the agent of change.

Marriage counseling or marital therapy can refer to either or some combination of the above.

The methods may differ in other ways as well, but the differences may indicate more about the counselor/therapist's way of working than the title given to their process.

Marriage counseling originated in Germany in the 1920s as part of the eugenics movement. The first institutes for marriage counseling in the USA began in the 1930s, partly in response to Germany's medically directed, racial purification marriage counseling centres. It was promoted in the USA by both eugenicists such as Paul Popenoe and Robert Latou Dickinson and by birth control advocates such as Abraham and Hannah Stone who wrote 'A Marriage Manual' in 1935 and were involved with Planned Parenthood. Other founders in USA include Lena Levine and Margaret Sanger.

It wasn't until the 1950s that therapists began treating psychological problems in the context of the family. Relationship counseling as a discrete, professional service is thus a recent phenomenon. Until the late 20th century, the work of relationship counseling was informally fulfilled by close friends, family members, or local religious leaders. Psychiatrists, psychologists, counselors and social workers have historically dealt primarily with individual psychological problems in a medical and psychoanalytic framework. In many less technologically advanced cultures around the world today, the institution of family, the village or group elders fulfil the work of relationship counseling. Today marriage mentoring mirrors those cultures.

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