How to get your man to go to counseling

This isn’t about me forcing him to do anything he doesn’t want to. I have hardly brought it up to him but I know it will be beneficial to him. If not counseling, how do you let someone you love deeply understand that if we can’t fix things on our own, be honest, etc., how can a marriage survive. Asking advice from ppl that have done counseling, who know how to communicate etc.

So. I’ve been in a relationship with my bf for 5 years. He’s the sweetest, most loving, genuine man I’ve ever met and have had the pleasure of knowing. His mom and dad divorced when he was 2 and she never remarried so it’s always been them. Him and his dad have a good relationship as well as his dads big family. I love them all! My BF and I both have a parent who we couldn’t be honest around, scared to piss them off etc. we did what we needed to keep the peace. Well, he’s still that way with his mom. I’m big into self improvement and fixing your shit if you recognize there’s a problem. From the beginning we didn’t have good communication. He was actually worse then me. You could see the terror on his face and the walls go up and mind you, I didn’t yell or scream or speak condescendingly to him. He just didn’t want to deal with it. We also avoided important issues like when we’d like to get married, it felt awkward to talk about children (maybe just me), what we’re going to do when I go back to school, etc. We’ve held off on marriage because I finally made the decision to go back to school for something I’m passionate about, 3 years into the relationship. I’ll be moving 6 hours away. Our communication sucks, although getting better, but his walls still go up. I feel that he needs to set boundaries with his mom as she’s very controlling and needy of him. We live on his dads acre of property and his step mom is horrible. She corners him and talks mad shit on his family and it upsets him so much but he won’t say anything. He’s so nice and a people pleaser that he can’t be honest with those around him or himself. It even causes me to not trust him because, is he really okay with whatever I ask or tell him? Like any time someone asks him a favor or to do something he says “sure sounds good!” When he’s actually bitching about it. Take for instance when I made the decision for myself to go to counseling, I said “what do you think about couples counseling?” He replied “sure we can do that.” And 10 min later when it got brought up he was like “I’m not going to counseling that’s dumb.” We have a lot of work to do together and I want us to work if it’s meant to be. This isn’t something to breakup with over but at the same time, we can’t have a marriage built on a rocky foundation. There’s so many issues he deal with within himself that I’d hate to see it eat him alive. I feel like I’m doing what I can for myself, which helps, but would like him to be on the same page and work on this together