Bengaluru's Nimhans wishes you happy married life...!

Bengaluru: Over 10,000 pending cases of divorce before the city's seven family courts indicate that couples are facing a tough time sailing through their married life. However, all is not lost.

The marital enrichment clinic, which is one of the services provided at the Nimhans Centre for Well-Being, helps couples with mild problems and those who want to enrich their relationship and find newer ways to make their marriage meaningful.

“The marital enrichment model used is based on the core principle of identifying and utilising strengths and available resources in the partner or partners to address presenting problems from first session itself," said Dr Anisha Shah, Professor and Former Head of Department of Clinical Psychology and Consultant, Family Therapy Unit/Marital Enrichment Clinic, National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS).

Dr Shah has been counselling the couples along with her team including colleagues Dr Veena, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology, and Ashwini Tadpatrikar, Clinical Psychologist.

“The methods are different, but the basic idea somehow is to get to strengths and capacities that these people have and overcome the negatives. We ease the process and keep the intervention brief and help these couples face their fears and anxieties," she explained.

The clinic aims to assist the couples to develop a wider and deeper understanding of each other and facilitate more effective communication patterns between the two. "Every week, roughly we see two new cases and three to six old cases. Each case takes about two hours of intense work right from the first visit itself," explained Dr Shah.

Elaborating on the conflict issues, she said, "Married distressed clients are likely to be preoccupied with dysfunctional communication, intimacy and role functioning. Hence, training needs to facilitate appropriate skills in therapists for their application in any type of session. Systemic themes included family of origin issues, wife’s financial independence, decision-making difficulties, separation / divorce-related concerns and differences in expectations or ideologies. This is culturally pertinent as families in India continue to influence the couples for a long period and the hierarchy of family of origin, as well as gender or power inequalities considerably, influenced couple’s choices."

Speaking about the trend, she said, "Earlier, the problems of the couples who walked in for therapy were very simple. Nowadays, individuals have become emotionally sophisticated in what they want. Also, they have more emotional empathy and the gender polarity has come down."