Your Voice

• We have never been in marital therapy but I would like to be because I would like my husband to learn how to communicate his feelings better to me and understand what things are important to me, even little things, like telling me when I look nice or showing me affection for no special reason.
  
  
• We have being to counseling because of my hot temper and because my husband gives mixed messages at times. We also have been to counseling over how to set boundaries with my husband's adoptive mother. He has learned how to set bounderies and does not give mixed signals anymore and I have been better about asking for what I want. Well let's not mention anything more about my hot temper!!! I love going from time to time.
  
  
• No, but yes I'd like to be because we need it now to work through some problems and learn how to communicate better.
  
  
• We have currently reconciled after being separated and I had filed for divorce. We are both going to individual counselors. I have learned a lot about myself and my husband is just starting to. He came from a highly dysfunctional family. His mother had been married 6 times with seven children by different fathers. There was also a lot of alcoholism in their family. There has been a lot of interference from his siblings and he is learning how to deal with that and how to be himself. It has done our marriage good and we are just starting.
  
  
• We have no problem so at the moment cannot say yes or no.
  
  
• Open and honest communications, trust, teamwork.
  
  
• I am in my fourth marriage. My first wife refused to go counseling, my second wife did not stay long enough; my third wife and I went to two marriage counselors and neither proved successful. We argued more after counseling than before we went. She was a very dominating woman, and that is not fiction or imagination. I am now married to my fourth wife and she is wonderful, even though we have some differences. Four marriages has been a lot of baggage for a person to carry, especially one who thought he was at first called by God into the ministry and who has remained in the church. Within two years after my first divorce, my children, both boys came to live with me. I was a single parent with two children to raise. It was tough raising my boys, but I would do it again.
  
  
• That communication is the most important thing in a marriage. If you can't communicate with each other, you really have no ties to hold you together.
  
  
• We learned my husband has Attention Deficit Disorder, which had never been diagnosed. Learning to accommodate for his disability was easy. All these years I had been griping about his selective listening, when all this time he just needed modifications. Teaching special education now works at home too. Many of our fights centered around, "I do this all day, I shouldn't have to do it at home," when actually, I have to for our sanity. Counseling was the best thing for our marriage.
  
  
• I would like to try counseling because my husband and I cannot resolve an issue important to me concerning finances. This is a second marriage for me, and we live in a house that belongs to me. We have 3 of my 4 minor children living with us, while the 4th is away in college...I pay all the monthly bills that pertain to running our household except for 1/2 of our food budget. My husband pays his personal expenses and feels he doesn't need to contribute anything more to family expenses other than what he does for food, because he says he has no investment in the house...It's as if he only wants to take care of himself, while I am left to take care of everyone (him, me, and the children). I feel I must get an objective opinion, given the facts as I see them, about how or if we can work this out.... (Abridged)