Most married couples face the problem of maintaining both independence in their marriage and a relationship with their parents. Can the partners achieve a degree of detachment and at the same time reassure their parents that they will remain loyal, respectful and affectionate? Can you as partners shift loyalty from your parents to your spouse and leave your childhood with its remembered mixture of pleasure and pains? As hard as the transfer of loyalty may be to achieve at the outer level, it can be even harder to achieve at the psychological level. Your defensive self may lash out at your partner’s attempt to help you set better boundaries with your parents. The wife’s mother maybe very sensitive to the way in which her daughter is treated because the daughter symbolizes herself to some degree. In some cases, she becomes a mother-in-law at the time her own child-rearing career has practically ended. She may perceive that her role of helpfulness may not be needed or appreciated and the failure of her newly acquired son to express gratitude may only enhance her own emotional reaction.
In Pre-Marital Counseling, it becomes obvious that preparation for marriage is a joint process of counseling and instruction; enough counseling to bring understanding and awareness and enough instruction to bring appreciation and acceptance. When a couple realizes that making changes in the parental family in not the purpose, but rather increasing their own understanding and changing their own feelings about perceptions, tension is relieved. With Hashem’s help, the couple will come a long way from total dependence upon parents to a stage of independence; to live a life of self-sufficiency and shalom bayis.
CPC – Center for Pre-Marital Counseling, is endorsed by Rabbi Pikus of COJO of Flatbush, and leading rabbonim and Torah authorities in the NY community.
Moishe Herskowitz MS., CSW, is a marriage counselor and maintains his private practice in Brooklyn as founder of CPC. He is an educator, lecturer, consultant and adjunct professor at Touro College. He is the counseling coordinator for Career Services at Touro College and the At Risk Center in Brooklyn. Moishe is presently working as a licensed guidance counselor for the NYC Board of Ed. in Special Education. For more information or to obtain a free brochure, please contact Moishe Herskowitz at 435-7388 or at [email protected].
