Couples Therapy
Relationships are at the core of the human experience. Couples seek therapy together for a variety of reasons and at various stages of relational development. Most consistently, people seek out couples therapy because the relationship is important to them and they want to take steps toward attending to it in a more intentional way.
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.Ursula K. Le Guin
The most effective approach toward helping couples tend to their relationship is Emotionally Focused Therapy.
In between stimulus and response there is a space, in that space lies our power to choose our response, in our response lies our growth and our freedom.Victor Frankl
Often, when couples have conflicts, they get stuck in the details or content of the disagreement, and are left feeling frustrated and unheard. Hidden within those conflicts, however, are protests of disconnection.
The experience of disconnection from our loved one is inherently distressing. Often that distress is managed by our strategies of protesting behaviors or by shutting down and withdrawing or numbing out. While these strategies are effective in helping us manage the disconnection in those moments, they often do not send clear messages to our partners and the cycle of disconnection continues.
The most functional way to regulate difficult emotions in love relationships is to share them.Sue Johnson
By slowing things down and examining what happens when each partner feels distressed, we can begin to develop new strategies to manage the underlying fear of disconnection.
My hope is to help partners
- tune into their emotional experience,
- make sense of the strategies that they and their partners employ to manage the distress of disconnection, and
- to take risks in sharing their experiences with each other.
For many people, understanding the more vulnerable emotions underneath the protective defensive strategies is a completely new experience.
In very directive and intentional ways, I will try to help you and your partner shape your conversations in a new way so that you can both become more ACCESSIBLE and RESPONSIVE and ENGAGED with each other. These are the ingredients for safety and security in relationships.
Click here to find out WHAT TO EXPECT if you choose to start therapy.
