Marriage Coaching
Can Marriage Coaching help you?
Marriage coaching is not for everyone. But it can help the great majority of couples who are looking to improve specific areas of their relationship, like communication, conflict resolution, and intimacy. Marriage coaches can help you set goals and create agreements around things like money management, parenting, and relationship roles. Coaching is forward focused and solution oriented. Marriage coaching is not the same as counseling or couple’s therapy. Coaching is for individuals who are emotionally and psychologically healthy and who want to make changes and move forward in their lives. A good Marriage Coach will be your cheerleader, educator, and support person. The value of having an unbiased third party who is able to see your marriage from the outside in and reflect those insights back to you is significant in helping you gain new perspectives. A coach will help you to set and work towards goals to create the life you two envision for your marriage. A marriage coach will challenge you, push you, and hold you to the goals you have set for yourself. Sometimes that’s not easy, but the results will be worth the effort!
Are you struggling to communicate? Do you feel heard?
Do you feel loved? Respected?
Is Intimacy missing?
Is your home a place of peace or a house of chaos and conflict?
Is it finally time to take some action?
- Resolve Conflicts
- Create new understanding
- Become a better listener
- Express yourself without wounding your spouse
- Increase emotional, spiritual, and physical intimacy
- Learn a simple tool to help you solve problems and make unified decisions
Do you know all marriages have unspoken agreements? We play out the same actions and responses over and over expecting different results. Learn to create new strategic agreements together that will work for your relationship! What will you choose to do differently to get different results?
If we keep doing the same thing, we can expect the same outcome. Do something different!
Do you keep having the same arguments with no resolution? Or, worse yet, bury issues “under the rug” because they have become “off limits” areas? Have you lost your connection? Have your attempts to reconnect left you feeling alone and frustrated? Are your conversations limited to what’s for dinner, and who’s taking the kids to soccer practice?
We are willing to put time, effort, and regular maintenance into many other things of value in life: our careers, our home, even our ‘toys’. But often we allow our relationships of greatest value to simply drift along, assuming it will be fine. The reality is, left alone, relationships will naturally drift apart in the busyness of life. You may wake up one day feeling like you have become more like comfortable roommates or business partners than married lovers! Intentional work to move toward one another and connect is needed to keep that creeping separateness at bay! If you fail to nurture your marriage, even good marriages can become stale, and hurting marriages can simply implode.
Marriage takes work! It’s not easy, it requires effort, honesty, and vulnerability. True Intimacy (In-to-Me-See) is risky and difficult. But it’s worth it. When you connect at that level and let each other in, well….now you’ve got something rare and beautiful. No, there are no perfect marriages, but there are happy, growing marriages and couples who have learned the secrets to loving for a lifetime.
How Marriage Coaching works
Marriage coaching seeks to facilitate both personal and couple growth. You are unique, both as individuals and as a couple. Your coaching program should be as individual as you are. We will start right where you are at by discovering what the two of you hope to create in your marriage. Every relationship has areas of strength and agreement, as well as areas where focused attention is needed for relational growth to be possible. You will start by taking an on-line questionnaire called the Prepare/Enrich Assessment. There are no right or wrong answers when completing this assessment. The results simply give a place to start, a “snapshot in time,” and are based on your honest answers and how you are feeling at the time you complete the assessment. Using the assessment report, we will begin a process of building on your strength areas and learning specific tools and skills to cultivate growth. You will set goals as a couple for what you want to work on in your marriage. We will assess your issues, identify and agree on new approaches to these issues, and develop strategies together to help you achieve your relational goals.
Throughout our coaching relationship, the conversations will be direct and personal. As your coach, I will be honest and straightforward, asking clarifying questions an making empowering requests. You will have homework to practice the skills you are learning and to facilitate closeness and intimacy. My basic marriage coaching program is designed for 9 to 12 sessions of approximately two and a half hours each. I enjoy welcoming couples into my home for in-person coaching session if you are in the Cottage Grove (near Eugene) Oregon area. For couples in other areas, the Zoom platform is my preferred meeting place for virtual coaching. Marriage coaching begins a journey of lasting change and growth in your marriage, and I am thrilled to come alongside to help you on the way!
FAQ
No…..and yes! I am a Christian. I have lived by faith for most of my adult life, and because it’s such an integral part of who I am, my faith certainly shows up in my coaching style. Nothing that I teach or coach will ever go against Christian principals. I believe that God’s Word contains the blueprint for marriage as He created it to be, and principals found in the bible such as selflessness, forgiveness, and repentance are necessary to a thriving marriage. However, my coaching program is not specifically faith-based. It is based on practical tools and skills that lead to healthy, strong, satisfying marriages. Coaching is essentially client centered and directed. Some clients want more spirituality built into our sessions, and some request less. While I will never take my faith completely out of what I do, I am happy to respect my client’s preference in this regard.
Coaching is future-oriented and assumes that both husband and wife are psychologically whole, capable, and have a desire to move to the next level in relational fulfillment. Clients are usually committed and desire to move into a better, more fulfilling and mutually beneficial place in their relationship. Coaching takes you from where you are to where you want to be. While coaches may spend some time working with the couple’s past history in order to inform current behaviors and choices and facilitate new awareness, no therapeutic techniques are used to promote healing of past hurts. Coaches are not trained or licensed to practice therapy of any kind.
In contrast, counselors have many years of training to help identify and heal past wounds and traumas that may be affecting the current relationship. Counselors are trained to diagnose and use more of a medical/psychological model to help their clients.
Sometimes, coaches will identify issues that are beyond the scope of their training while working with a client, and should then always refer the client back to a trained mental health professional.
Individuals and couples who are experiencing untreated clinical depression or other mental health issues, ongoing addiction issues, or abuse in the relationship are not good candidates for coaching and should instead seek out a counselor or other mental health professional who can provide more specialized help with these issues. Once these issues are addressed, coaching may be an appropriate follow up for the couple.
While there is much that a husband or wife can do to to influence the marriage for the better, my marriage coaching program is specifically designed for both the husband and wife to participate. I do offer individual coaching that can help you change the dynamics of your relationship by changing your responses and reactions to the specific situations, and this can have a powerful effect on your overall relationship as you make personal progress and address your own issues. However, this is not the same as the coaching program I use when couples participate together.
My marriage coaching program is designed to be completed in nine to twelve 2.5 hour sessions. Why nine to twelve? Because this allows room for couples to help design their own program based on their own needs, the goals they wish to reach, and the issues they want to focus on. Some topics may take more than one 2.5 hour session to fully explore and address, necessitating additional sessions to complete the full base coaching program.
The base price for marriage coaching is based on nine sessions, or 22.5 coaching hours, for $799. This excludes your Prepare/Enrich assessment ($35) and workbooks ($10 each). After nine sessions, each additional session is $85. We will discuss payment arrangements as part of your initial consultation.
Marriage coaching is extremely affordable compared to counseling, which is often $100 – $200 per hour. Coaching is an investment into the future of your marriage, and its value is immeasurable compared to the cost in stress and heartache of a troubled marriage.
I can’t guarantee that marriage coaching will work for you because I’m not the one doing the work! I provide you with my very best coaching, and teach you the skills to put in your relational “tool box” but the real work happens at home, in between sessions. If either partner is unwilling to do the work, commit to the process, and put in the time, then the likelihood of success goes down. However, if you will commit to the process, marriage coaching has a very high success rate.
Yes, of course. I understand that life happens, and you may not be able to finish the program. Or you may simply find that it isn’t a good match for you. My request would be that we meet to discuss any issues, but as long as you let me know at least 24 hours before the next scheduled coaching appointment, the unused portion of your payment for the program will be refunded.