Couples Therapy & Marriage Counseling
Having repeated arguments that go nowhere?
Feeling distant from your partner after physical or emotional affair?
Problems with affection and sex with your partner?
Most couples come to counseling because they are having difficulty managing conflict in their relationship. A well-trained and skilled couples and marriage therapist will get to the bottom of these difficulties, and will help you work through unresolved hurts that keep the relationship from moving forward.
Our contracted therapists will teach you SKILLS to keep your relationship healthy, happy, intimate and satisfying. They don’t just talk about skills. You practice these proven relationship skills in the office until you feel confident that both of you can use your new skills to turn toward each other instead of turning away.
Healthy relationships are emotionally rich without being dramatic, addictive or abusive. If you want to create a conscious, healthy, emotionally connected, mutually-supportive, happy, intimate relationship, our research-based approached to your relationship challenges can help you guide your relationship to where you’d like it to be.
Our therapists understand that you are looking for practical solutions that work. Couples therapy requires specialized training to be effective. A well-trained couples therapist understands that your relationship is your therapist’s primary client. You can be confident that our therapists won’t take sides. They will skillfully work to heal your relationship by actively guiding the process.
The Gottman Method
According to John Gottman, PhD, world-renowned couples researcher, healthy relationships that last are based on:
Commitment
Trust
Managing conflict (this is a BIG one!)
Knowing each other’s world
Sharing fondness and admiration
Turning toward each other when you’d rather turn away
Focusing on the positive aspects of your relationship
Helping each other’s dreams come true
Creating shared meaning about your relationship
John Gottman identifies four negative qualities and behaviors of a relationship that indicate danger. They are the biggest predictors of relationship failure. Gottman calls these the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They are:
Criticism – identifying a problem as being inherent in the character of your partner
Defensiveness – blocking the influence of your partner
Contempt – looking down on your partner as being inferior to you
Stonewalling – withdrawing from the interaction in an attempt to remain calm
Healthy relationships tend to have far fewer of these behaviors than relationships that are in trouble. When people in healthy relationships use these behaviors, they know that they are off track and work to use more helpful behaviors.
The good news: you can learn skills that are antidotes to these relationship-killers. With the right couples therapist, you will practice and learn these powerful antidotes to create an emotionally connected, mutually-supportive, happy, intimate relationship.
If you are experiencing any of the Four Horsemen in your relationship, contact us to schedule and appointment with one of our specially-trained, contracted couples and marriage therapists. Your relationship is worth the effort.
How to Choose a Couples’ Therapist
It is important that you have confidence in your counselor and that he or she has the knowledge, training and skills to help you make the changes you desire. Many therapists who practice “couples therapy” do so without specialized couples therapy training.
This is unfortunate because Couples and Marriage Counseling is VERY different from individual therapy and requires specialized skills. It is wise to seek a couples therapist who has had training in skills-building, changing communication patterns and habits, who gives insightful feedback, who knows how to help you rekindle trust and loving feelings, and who encourages you to practice, practice, practice until you become the expert of your own relationship!
Couples therapy is not about hiring an “audience” to watch you have conflicts. It’s about helping you make positive changes in your relationship.
To do this, your therapist must be actively involved in helping you make the changes you want, and you must feel respected and liked by your therapist.
Think of your couples’ therapist as a coach, and you and your partner as the team. The coach is part encourager, part teacher, part comforter, and part confronter. You want a therapist who can evaluate your strengths and challenges and knows how to help you build on the strengths and transform the challenges.
Questions to ask when you are seeking a couples’ counselor:
What sort of specialized training do you have in couples counseling?
What is your approach?
How long have you worked with couples?
Approximately how many couples have you worked with in your career?
How long does therapy take?
That depends on the time and energy you have to devote to making changes. It also depends on the number and complexity of your challenges and areas for improvement.
One of the first tasks of therapy is to evaluate your relationship and to give you an idea as to how long it will take you to get the results you want. We tend to tackle issues in a pretty methodical way while, of course, making allowances for things that might come up during the counseling process.
You will be amazed at how good it feels to transform your relationship for the better!
