Marriage counseling can be a number of experiences to different people: powerful, stressful, enlightening, emotional, insightful, connecting, upsetting, etc. It’s what you do with the experience that can be very powerful for you as an individual and as part of the relationship; you can choose to grow, change, and heal the hurts. It’s not always easy to talk about the difficult issues in your relationship with a counselor. Some sessions may evoke strong negative feelings, some may involve silence; there may even be a fight during a session. However, counseling will help to mediate the situations and also help you to cope with what you are feeling during the session. Counselors often share with clients that things often get worse before they get better in counseling. Counseling will bring up hurt, pain and problems in relationships and dealing with those emotions and issues can be difficult and painful. Yet on the other side of that pain is healing and reconciliation. Once you have walked through those difficult emotions and issues in counseling, you will find that you experience positive connection and decreased stress! Many individuals end up quitting counseling when it feels bad. But know, it will get better; counseling will not always be difficult and painful. There is great hope on the other end; it just involves a journey to get there. Yet that counseling journey is often what makes individuals and relationships much stronger and better able to weather future storms!