Marriage counselling helps couple/individual to overcome their immediate problems and also to equip them to meet future problems. Marriage Counselling has to be specific for each couple/individual since it involves unique problems and expectations. Specific marriage counselling goals are unique to each couple/individual and involve a consideration of couple’s/individual’s expectations as well as the environmental aspects.
The marriage counsellor has the aim of understanding the behaviour, motivations and feelings of the couple/individual. The marriage counsellors have different goals at the different level of functioning. In simple terms, the immediate goal of marriage counselling is to obtain relief for the couple/individual and the long-term goal is to make a couple/person as a“fully-functioning couple/person”.
The immediate goal of marriage counselling refers to the problems for which couple/client is seeking solutions, here or now. Couple/Person fails to utilize the capacities fully and, therefore, unable to function efficiently. The couple/person could be helped to gain proper self-understanding through self-exploration and be able to appreciate strengths and weaknesses through the marriage counselling process.
The long-range goals are those that reflect the marriage counsellor’s philosophy of life and could be stated as self-actualization, self-realization and becoming a fully-functioning individual. The couple/person may have certain inhibitions and self-destructive patterns of behaviour which eliminate through marriage counselling to enable the couple/person become a fully-functioning system/individual.
We are summarizing the above by saying this that the first immediate goal of marriage counselling is to motivate the potential couple/person to make an appointment with a marriage counsellor and go through the marriage counselling process till the mediate goals are realized. Mediate goals are the specific steps contributing to the realization of general goals. So, through the realization of mediate goals that the long-term goals of self-understanding, self-realization and self-actualization can be reached. The process of self-exploration perhaps sets the marriage counselling process in motion.