Couples/Relationship Therapy
Learn how to understand your relational style, nurture yourself in moments of pain and disconnection, understand your feelings, heal your inner child, set kind and clear boundaries, embrace your needs, stand in your own integrity, and join in closeness to the vibrancy, vitality, and humanity of others in moments of deep intimacy.
Relationships provide opportunities for love, connection, warmth, intimacy, adventure, growth. But because love requires such intense vulnerability, relationships also tend to be a space of deep fear, dysregulation, pain, and discomfort. Our most unhealed and exiled parts tend to emerge in our most intimate of relationships, making it difficult to nurture the love and connection we seek the most.
Even though your partner is right beside you, you feel more alone than ever. The person sitting with you is a stranger to you, and you’ve become a stranger to yourself. You don’t know who you are anymore. You don’t know what this relationship is giving you anymore. You try to reach out, but you don’t get the response you’re looking for. There is no intimacy, connection, or vibrancy between you. You are merely…existing together, in parallel. You don’t know how to get through to teach other. You don’t know how to renew your relationship. You question if this is what it’s always going to be like. You feel powerless and hopeless about it ever changing.
You feel alone
You feel rejected
You just want connection, closeness, and intimacy, but every time you reach out to your partner, they pull away. You long for a partner that desires you, cherishes you, wants to spend time with you. But instead your partner is consumed with work, parenting, working out and there isn’t any room left for you. The more you reach out, the less you get back. This isn’t what you wanted from your relationship. You simultaneously think you deserve more and worry this behavior is an indication of your unlovability.
You feel blamed and judged
You can’t seem to do anything right. Every time you try to show up for your partner, you get attacked, criticized, blamed. You feel inadequate and helpless. You feel like you’re walking on eggshells around them, waiting for the jabs that inevitably come when you do something that displeases them. You wonder if you’re really as bad as they make you feel. Maybe, actually, they’re the problem. You feel righteous indignation in their treatment of you, comfortable blaming them for being too critical, controlling, frigid, rigid. You emotionally withdraw from the relationship to protect yourself. The more they criticize, the more you pull away and feel justified in doing so. You don’t know what else to do to keep yourself safe from the pain.
You feel frustrated and angry
You don’t feel like you’re asking for too much, but each time you try to initiate sex, your partner turns you down and makes you feel like the bad guy. You wish your partner would desire you, want to have sex with you. But, instead, sex doesn’t happen unless you initiate it, and even then it only happens under very specific circumstances that your partner requires. You feel controlled. You feel let down. You feel deprived. This isn’t what it’s supposed to be like, you tell yourself. There must be something wrong with your partner or with you for the way they consistently reject you…
…You feel pressured, cajoled, and—at times—coerced into having sex when you don’t want it. You don’t feel like your “no” is ever truly respected. You feel there are consequences when you don’t have sex; nothing ever overt, but things like a partner who is more cold, less helpful, and more irritable with you. You don’t feel safe or emotionally connected to your partner, and yet are expected to be physically available and ready for sex. You feel used. You feel exploited. This isn’t what you expected a partnership to look like…
What is couples therapy?
Many people come to couples therapy thinking it’s a space where a neutral, third-party (me) plays referee and decides which one of you is more wrong, more bad, and more culpable for the state of your relationship. Many people come to couples therapy with their guard up, ready to stand trial in a court that determines your goodness. You are often an expert on everything your partner does wrong—all the ways they’ve let you down, violated the (often unspoken) social contract within your marriage, been unreasonable and overreactive, and are not pulling their weight—and want to make sure the therapist knows all of it. You are ready to do battle for your ego, determined to convince the therapist and your partner that your partner is the one that needs to change.
Well…I have good news and bad news for you.
The good news is I hear you. I understand your need for this. I, too, feel this need. And I see your goodness.
The bad news is I’m not going to play this role for you.
In couples therapy, I see the relationship as the client (not you, not your partner). Because of this, our work will center on unpacking the ways each of you contributes to the relational dance. We focus on the co-creation that emerges between the two of you. My job is to compassionately but clearly help you center your attention not on your partner, but on yourself, and commit to making the changes you need to step out of the current relational dance. Whenever anyone does or says anything that impedes relationship health, it will be my job to help you notice it, understand it, and transform it. Instead of getting stuck in the pain hierarchy (my pain is more legitimate than your pain), or the relational tug-of-war (I won’t make any changes until I see you make changes), I will help you each stand in your own integrity and commit to being the person you want to be in this relationship. Couples therapy works best when you engage meaningfully in therapy and commit to doing the work you need to do outside of the session as well.
We start off by meeting for a conjoint session where we explore what brings you to therapy, your understanding of the problem, the story of your relationship, and your goals for therapy. I will then meet with each of you for an individual session to get a better understanding of your personal histories and how your past may be showing up in the present. We will then meet for ongoing conjoint sessions (with individual sessions as needed to support the couples work), where we work to meaningfully address your goals. We will work together to process any of the blocks or stuck points we’ve encountered in your relational dance by rewriting personal and relational scripts that don’t work for you anymore, helping you connect more meaningfully with yourself and your partner, and learn specific techniques to navigate these stuck points in new and effective ways. Some of the techniques we might explore together are:
Intimate conversation skills and emotional attunement
Self-soothing during conflict
Building a culture of appreciation
Creating rituals of connection, especially around your relationship values
Learning the process for effective apologies
Learning how to accept apologies from your partner
Identify problematic styles of communication, how to recognize them in yourself, how to implement their antidotes
Expressing and receiving feedback
Setting clear and kind boundaries.
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Difficulty navigating conflict
Healing from betrayals/infidelity/affairs
Rebuilding trust
Communication challenges
Setting boundaries
Sex concerns
Ambiguity about the future of the relationship
Exploring ENM
Enhancing emotional intimacy
Navigating resentment
Forgiveness and apologies
Distribution of labor
Financial stress
Parenting challenges
Observe and transform the relational cycle between partners
Love languages, communicating needs and preferences
Navigating natural differences
Building a culture of appreciation
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Navigating changes across the lifespan
Caregiving and aging
Caregiving and cancer
Conflict management
Building emotional intimacy and attunement
Forgiveness and apologies
Setting boundaries
Communication skills
Navigating natural differences
Understanding the role of history
Observe and transform the relational cycle
Roles within the family unit
Building rituals of connection
Creating a culture of appreciation
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It certainly can be! In fact, when there isn’t any particular crisis in your relationship, it is often the perfect opportunity to learn more about your relational style, as well as deepen intimacy and connection in your relationship. This is because so much of couples therapy has to do with creating an environment of safety to allow for the deep vulnerability of relational work. When you already have a felt sense of safety, you’re in a perfect position to build on that and enhance areas of your relationship that might need a slight fine tuning.
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My answer here is similar to the my answer above. Going to premarital counseling can be one of the biggest gifts you give yourself and your partner. Premarital counseling allows you to learn more about what makes relationships work and not work, explore your relational style so you better understand what happens inside you and between both of you in moments of disconnection, learn strategies for repair, and build rituals that renew your relationship and allow for a life of love and connection.