COUPLE / MARRIAGE COUNSELING
DO YOU AND YOUR PARTNER
- keep having the same argument?
- wonder what has happened to trust and intimacy?
- escalate arguments into criticism, blame, defensiveness and withdrawal?
- lack the ability to talk about feelings and needs?
- feel alone in your relationship?
- reach the same communication impasses over and over?
- have repetitive conflict over the children (even adult children)?
- think it has been too long since you have had a loving and sexual connection?
- fear the other may be having an affair (including an emotional affair)?
- wonder how long your relationship will last?
These are common questions that lead people in distressed relationships to seek therapy individually or as a couple. Relationship distress is a pathway to negative patterns of communication that include criticism, defensiveness and withdrawal, as well as to substance abuse and other harmful behaviors. As an experienced and thoughtful therapist, I can help you and your partner to unlatch these patterns and create a safe base to examine the needs and feelings that underlie them so that you can to talk to one another with understanding and sensitivity. I can help you to bring closure to painful emotional relationship events as well as to build the emotional resilience necessary to avoid relapse into negative patterns.
Sometimes only one partner comes to couple therapy to work on the relationship. In that case, you take the insight and communication skills you learn in counseling home to practice with you partner.
Sometimes a relationship cannot be repaired. In that case, I can help you to find acceptance and closure during a painful process.
COUPLE/MARITAL COUNSELING/THERAPY focuses on:
- Communication impasses – unlatching negative cycles of interaction
- Deceptions, affairs and other betrayals (emotional affairs, internet infidelity, pornography obsessions)
- Trust and intimacy issues
- Lack of affection and tenderness
- Conflicts over children (including adult children)
- New baby stress on relationship
- Divorce transition and recovery
- Emotional overreactivity
- Premarital counseling
For approach to couple counseling/therapy, go to Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy.
From Rupture to Repair: Thoughtful Points About Relationship
- Negative couple events, especially abandonment and betrayal, often cause seemingly irreparable damage to close relationships. Couples often enter therapy not only in general distress but also with the goal of bringing closure to such events in order to restore trust and intimacy.
- When a partner is emotionally inaccessible and unresponsive to the other’s needs and longings, the bond is damaged and relationship distress ensures.
- Relationship distress is a pathway to the negative patterns of criticize, defend and withdraw that predict divorce (Gottman, 1994).
- Distressed couples communicate poorly. They have difficulty in expressing underlying needs which impedes their ability to solve conflicts.
- Distressed couples often interpret their partner’s responses in ways that perpetuate their distress.
- How a couple deals with emotions is the most critical element that organizes their relationship.
- Reciprocal care and sexuality strengthen the couple bond.
“It is not the number of arguments that partners have, nor the method of dealing with angry feelings, nor even whether they successfully resolve disagreements that make a difference in defining success or failure in a relationship. The important defining factor is the ability to sustain emotional engagement and to reconnect to each other following the argument (Gottman, 1994, 1999).”
“A good marriage is one in which only one partner is crazy at any given time.”(Kohut, 1984)