
Couples Therapy
Is Your Relationship Not Meeting The Vision You Had For It?
Are you feeling unsatisfied with your relationship?
Do you and your partner experience chronic conflict, withdrawal, or tension?
Has something fundamentally shifted within the relationship, causing you to wonder what the future holds?
Humans are complex, and so are our relationships. It takes time and commitment to create a dynamic that fulfills both partners. And the more we identify and express important parts of ourselves, the more we establish an identity separate from our relationship. This is a time of tension and conflict for many couples, one that can lead to misunderstanding, hurts, and disconnection, and even thoughts of having to choose between being your true self and staying in the relationship.
What Is Your Experience?
Lately, you may have experienced hurdles in your ability to feel intimate and attuned to one another. Maybe you’re doing fewer activities together, having less sex, and missing the excitement from the early days. Whereas you were once able to see past—and even appreciate— your differences, they’re now in full view and regularly directing your interactions.
It's also possible that something happened to rupture your connection. If there was a significant stressor or betrayal, it’s understandable that one or both of you feels hurt, lonely, and uncared for. You and your partner may have different ideas about how to repair what’s broken, causing you to feel confused and unsure of if you can reconcile.
But you’re here because, ultimately, you want to create a relationship that works for both of you. In couples counseling, you can experience the support of an unbiased yet empathetic therapist who can guide you in repairing misunderstandings and injuries. Working together in therapy, we can build a strong, mutually fulfilling team dynamic that meets your needs—both as individuals and as a couple.
Healthy Relationships Often Look Vastly Different Than What We Expect
Our culture perpetuates a harmful narrative that relationships should be easy. We’re conditioned to expect great results with minimal effort and that our soulmate will naturally be able to endlessly predict and fulfill our needs. A lack of conflict or discord is so often used as the barometer for how “good” a relationship is, causing us to avoid our partners—or even run for the hills—as differences become apparent.
The fact of the matter is that all flourishing relationships require persistent effort; we are never “done” with our work as partners. Conflict is an essential ingredient for growth and vitality. And learning to let our partners be the imperfect, vulnerable humans they are—as opposed to placing them on a superhuman pedestal—is key to creating space for both individuals in the relationship to fully explore, define, and reveal themselves.
Yet, it’s difficult to approach relationship conflict with calm, level-headedness. Many of us aren’t taught healthy coping mechanisms or models for interacting while in distress. Therefore, we must learn them.
As a therapist specializing in couples and marriage systems, I am passionate about offering my clients a new blueprint for their partnerships. I will work with you to successfully navigate and manage your differences so that both of you can feel seen, heard, and valued by one another. No longer will you feel the need to avoid conflict and discomfort; rather, you will learn to view your differences as an opportunity to grow and revitalize your relationship.
I Specialize In Counseling Couples From All Backgrounds
Despite being oriented around the relationship, a big component of couples therapy is to create self-awareness. As you discover more about your role in the relationship and the type of partner you aspire to be, both of you will gain clarity on the dynamic you want to create and what it will take to make that happen.
My counseling services are available to couples of all backgrounds (including those who identify as LGBTQ+ or polyamorous) in any phase of the relationship. Whether you’re newly committed, embarking on a big change together, or trying to salvage a marriage in crisis, I will tailor therapy to meet your most pressing concerns. I also offer couples intensives, which you can learn more about here.
My Approach
I try to be very flexible in customizing therapy to the needs of each couple. Relationships evolve through a normal series of predictable stages and problems come about when the partners are not able to progress through these stages.
Generally speaking, we will spend early sessions determining where you feel stuck in the relationship, how you got to this point, and what you think is keeping you there. We won’t dwell on the past, but knowing what is getting in the way will offer valuable insight on how to focus on the future, so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
From there, we will use our time together to cultivate the vision you want for your relationship and act on making it a reality. We won’t start from scratch but build on your existing strengths and values; we will focus on developing the skills and guiding principles needed to create the change you most desire.
Much of the success in therapy will depend on the effort and practice you put between sessions. However, most therapies fall short when session time is used for insight building and goal setting while practice is left for between sessions. In my approach, practicing new skills during the session is central to producing strong and sustainable change. We will create scenarios from your life together and work through them in real time during the session. We will use role play to practice new skills–I will coach you and offer feedback to deepen your learning, so when you leave my office, you will feel confident of what to practice at home.
We will also make time for lightness and laughter, fostering play and creating soothing moments. Drawing from the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT)—a “show me” rather than “tell me” method of counseling—I will help you increase your ability to self-regulate and manage each other’s emotional highs and lows, allowing you to more calmly and effectively discuss charged topics.
How Couples Therapy Can Help You
With a deepened understanding of what you will need to do to become the loving, attuned partner you want to be, both of you can use couples counseling to establish skill sets for:
Becoming experts of each-other and strengthening your team
Nurturing mutual respect, fondness, and admiration
Responding to each-other’s bids for fun, play, and joyful interactions
Achieving win-win solutions that will end well for both of you
Repairing misunderstandings and injuries quickly and effectively
Maintaining vitality, intimacy, and freshness in the relationship
Creating meaning and purpose in being in each-other’s lives
Nurturing the motivation to persist and follow through on joint goals
With help and support, it’s possible to create a relationship where you show up as your very best self. As you learn to govern your interactions with principles of care, fairness, generosity, and collaboration, you can chip away at the disconnection growing between you, inviting more satisfaction and intimacy into the relationship.
Common Concerns About Couples Therapy
How do we know if marriage counseling will be effective for us?
A lot of the couples I work with are often unsure about what to expect from therapy, and many of them begin with the expectation that one partner—and one partner alone—is responsible for doing the learning, changing, growing, and improving.
However, putting your energy into becoming the partner you want to be is the most efficient way of facilitating positive change in the relationship. This process works best when you have more goals for how you want to grow than for how you want your partner to change. Therapy is helpful in this regard because it gives you an opportunity to practice skills and replace old, ineffective individual patterns with healthy, productive ones.
This sounds like a lot of work—I’m not sure I have the energy.
It’s often hard to do the right thing, and creating sustained improvement in your relationship will certainly require compromise and tough choices. In general, you need to be willing to trade feeling better right now for being better in the long run.
As a therapist who’s worked with a lot of couples in counseling, I find that each partner becomes increasingly energized, motivated, and hopeful as new skills and attitudes are adopted throughout the therapeutic process. The more couples get to actually experience the relationship they want in the therapy space, the more willing they are to facilitate positive changes in making that relationship happen.
What if we fight during our therapy sessions?
I understand that differences, disagreements, and conflicts may arise during therapy sessions, and I won’t let you waste your time escalating conflict or fighting. But it is important to remember that hearing—and embracing—differences is central to the growth and vitality of your relationship.
As such, my approach is designed to help you manage intense emotions and reduce ineffective behaviors that are common among couples, like blaming or attacking. Much of the work we do in couples counseling will center around communication so you can build skills that are effective and supportive.
Create A Relationship That Works For Both Of You
My aim as a couples therapist is to help you feel safe and secure in the relationship so you can better manage conflict, rekindle passion and intimacy, and create the relationship vision you both desire. To schedule a free, 20-minute consultation and find out more about how I can help, get started with me today.