You are not alone in your new marriage or with your new baby.
As experienced couples therapists in Bethesda, MD, we often work with couples who have been experiencing years and years of intense conflict, deep emotional wounds, and numbing distance. We often ask them, “what were the early years of your marriage like?” Often we hear “we got along great–there was little fighting, good sex, and lots of fun.” But sometimes we hear “the seeds of our problems now were present then– we took each other for granted, sex changed after our first baby, and we got busier and busier.”
Couples that seek marriage counseling to repair current challenges and prevent future problems are far more successful in reaching their relationship goals than couples who are seeking services in a last attempt to avoid a divorce. Newlywed couples and new parent couples deserve a couples therapy experience that strengthens their sense of teamwork and partnership– counseling that teaches both communication skills for empathy and conflict resolution skills for problem solving, how to form relationship habits that foster connection and manage stress, and proactively maintain a loving and fulfilling relationship.
What Services Do You Provide Specifically for Newlywed Couples and New Parent Couples?
- Adoption
- Anxiety
- Attachment and connection with infants and young children
- Birth trauma and complications, including feelings of disappointment with labor and delivery
- Blended families
- Coaching
- Couples counseling
- Creating a cohesive co-parenting team
- Communication skills for empathy and understanding
- Conflict resolution and problem solving skills
- Emotional affairs
- Family therapy
- Fertility challenges and baby-making sex
- Grief and loss, including perinatal loss
- In-law issues
- Postpartum Depression (PPD)
- Parenting style differences
- Pregnancy Issues for Mothers
- Pregnancy Issues for Fathers
- Sex therapy
- Stress
- Trauma
- Transition to parenthood
- Wedding let down
- Wedding stress
How “New” Do We Need to Be for This Kind of Therapy?
Generally, we’re referring to marriages younger than 10 years, but this isn’t as much of a set time period as it is a developmental stage. When we say “new” we’re referring to the newly married couple who experienced their first huge, blow-up fight and feel scared. When we say “new” we’re referring to the couple married only 2 or 3 years who are thinking about separating or already threatening divorce. When we say “new” we’re referring to a couple trying to get pregnant or just found out about a pregnancy. When we say “new” we’re referring to a couple with a young infant struggling with personal, relationship, and family changes.
This type of support is for ALL families.
Our experienced team of couple therapists, parent specialists, and relationship coaches can help you:
Manage stress as it comes. Especially in today’s world, even the strongest of relationships faces stress over time. The changes causing this stress may come from major life events, personal lives and relationships, professional journeys, and outside events. This means that every couple deserves support handling these stressors when they are new or change rather than waiting for them to build up and become overwhelming. Couple therapy can help you notice how stress is impacting your experiences together, tend to your health with regularity, build skills to meet the challenges you face, and keep your connection strong and intentional.
Build on the good in your relationship. Your relationship may be tasked with adjusting to transitions such as new or growing children, cohabitation and marriage, career changes, family members moving or aging, family loss, blending of family cultures, and more. In any of these transitions you will likely find your relationship already has strengths and skills that can serve as a foundation for maintaining connection and compassion. Your couple therapist can support you in identifying what already works for you in times of stress or transition, what needs you help each other manage, what you appreciate in each other, and what supports and resources you have available to you so that you can use this foundation more intentionally and skillfully over time.
Heal from difficult experiences. One of the reasons humans form relationships is to be there for each other when times are hard. That means sometimes you and your partner will experience hardship together. Whether your hardship is trauma, family conflict, infertility or child loss, difficult birthing or postpartum experiences, affairs, changing resources, new responsibilities and roles, grief and loss, or anything else, you have a chance to support one another and help each other forward. Seeking help early on in hardships allows couples opportunity to maintain their connection and manage distress in purposeful ways together. In couple therapy, you may process how this hardship felt to each of you, create shared meaning of what happened and be together in holding your story, practice skills for caring for yourselves and each other, build a map of resources you can rely on, and gain understanding of how you each heal.
Don’t wait to seek help. Addressing and resolving relationship issues as newlyweds or new parents sets a strong foundation for a stable, satisfying, and healthy relationship for years to come.
Read more about how to get started with Bethesda, MD marriage counseling for new couples. Or request a consultation right now, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.