Couples Therapy
Our relationships can be full of passion, joy, and companionship, as well as heartache, despair, and loneliness. At times, they can be what make life worth living, and at times they can make life feel empty, hopeless, and miserable. Couples therapy can help you examine your relationship more deeply and make changes that can drastically improve your life with one another.
Who Do We Help?
|
Relationship problems are messy and often emerge in unexpected ways that involve:
|
|
We see couples struggling with all types of difficulties. We welcome couples weary from years of struggling in their relationship and on the verge of divorce to those seeking to improve communication, understanding, and flourishing. Some couples want to redefine their relationship after major life transitions while others want to improve their sex life, find greater fulfillment, or address conflicts involving parenting. We find that many couples are entrenched in repetitive patterns of relating that are triggered by various emotional buttons. Once these buttons get pushed, each person acts out their “script," and the possibility for genuine healing communication between partners becomes blocked.
What Makes Our Approach Different?
Very good couples therapy is like very good individual therapy: it is often painful and requires a therapist who is well-trained and experienced in understanding this. Our approach to treatment is individualized based on the various factors unique to your relationship. We do not adopt specific models or systems of treatment based on popular methods en vogue. While we value the important contributions from the research and treatment approaches represented by the Gottman method, Imago Therapy, Emotion-Focused Therapy, etc., we find such approaches are sometimes either superficial or essentially highly marketed versions of traditional psychoanalytic therapy.
Instead, based on our years of experience and training, we specialize in listening deeply in order to accurately diagnose and uncover the hidden emotional pieces that underlie the problems you're experiencing. You may have spent years relating to each other in one particular way, and altering this pattern can be a painful process. This means that during a good couples treatment, you will likely feel increased anxiety, sadness, frustration, loneliness, or helplessness in your relationship with your partner. This is simply unavoidable, and we find approaches promising avoidance of this fact to be misleading or fundamentally unhelpful to making lasting changes. Although painful and often scary, these feelings are usually a good a good indicator that you are beginning to experience the inklings of change. Since we understand that pain is a necessary part of the change process, we can help you through this process. Our hope is that you will find the rewards of change in your relationship to be well worth the risk and pain inevitably involved.
Instead, based on our years of experience and training, we specialize in listening deeply in order to accurately diagnose and uncover the hidden emotional pieces that underlie the problems you're experiencing. You may have spent years relating to each other in one particular way, and altering this pattern can be a painful process. This means that during a good couples treatment, you will likely feel increased anxiety, sadness, frustration, loneliness, or helplessness in your relationship with your partner. This is simply unavoidable, and we find approaches promising avoidance of this fact to be misleading or fundamentally unhelpful to making lasting changes. Although painful and often scary, these feelings are usually a good a good indicator that you are beginning to experience the inklings of change. Since we understand that pain is a necessary part of the change process, we can help you through this process. Our hope is that you will find the rewards of change in your relationship to be well worth the risk and pain inevitably involved.