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• Are you feeling the deep loneliness and hurt that come from being in an unhappy relationship?
• What is the cost of your relationship problems spilling over into other areas of your life, such as damaging your children or reducing the energy you bring to your career?
• Do you and your partner repeatedly have harsh arguments that started out as trivial spats? Or do you live like silent strangers
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• Does your relationship lack trust, open communication and mutual support?
I love the challenges and delights that come with helping troubled couples try to repair their broken connections. Our initial goal is for each of you to voice your primary causes of relationship pain and ensure that your partner fully heard you.
In addition, I have couples take several personality questionnaires, and we explore how differences in each partner's inborn temperament and personal style can create both union and friction in the relationship.
At times, couples' distance can lead to physical or emotional affairs. Although cheating can be a devastating betrayal, it can also be a huge wake-up call that the relationship needs serious attention. After
wards, couples often can heal and achieve newfound intimacy with each other, rather than outsiders.
In the early stages of therapy, I encourage each partner to identify how you can make concrete changes that will visibly improve the relationship. Making these changes, and seeing positive results, often creates the seeds of hope that you can find healthy new ways of being with your partner lovingly and respectfully. If you like, I can suggest "homework" to do between sessions to move the repair process along.
Once therapy
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is underway, we will explore your past to uncover where and how you learned unhealthy relationship patterns and how unhealed wounds from childhood or adulthood serve as trigger points for conflict in your current relationship. Gaining insight into some of those problems is an important step in making lasting changes. Oftentimes in relationships, beneath the surface-level problems lies a flight from intimacy. Intimacy can indeed be very scary. It takes a lot of trust and courage to allow your partner to know you completely, to not only see the parts of you that you proudly present to the world, but also the fears, self-doubts and pockets of darkness within you.
As relationships progress over time, many couples get into a "pursuit-retreat" pattern, where one partner aggressively tries to make contact and the other feels pressured by the pursuit and backs farther and farther away. Each ends up feeling isolated and often unloved.
As your therapist, I can serve as a catalyst for change and somewhat of a translator to help you hear and understand your partner in ways you haven't been able to on your own. My "client" will be your relationship, and together we will explore ways you can achieve the type of connection you long for.
Ultimately, our goal is for you to create a loving, committed relationship characterized by mutual respect, joy, passion and compassion.
Call or e-mail me today to get the process underway!