Couples / Marriage Therapy
When couples contact me for counseling, they tell me they are stuck – they’ve lost their way, they’ve grown apart and they don’t know how to get back on track. Someone … with much courage will then volunteer, “We just aren’t communicating.”
I help couples learn to communicate more effectively, become less blameful, express feelings / desires more appropriately, and ultimately find their way back to intimacy.
I work with couples to tackle all kinds of challenges including:
- Anger
- Depression and Anxiety
- Financial stress
- Infidelity
- Intimacy
- Isolation
- LGBTQ challenges as a couple and family
- Negative and positive impact of pornography
- Parenting and blended families
- Sexuality
- Workaholics
I integrate several modalities into our work such as Multi-Generational, and Solution-Focused theory however I primarily work with Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) an experientially and attachment focused therapy that has been empirically proven to be one of the most successful modalities for couples therapy.
EFT works on the basic principle that to change, people cannot leave a place until they have arrived. Clients therefore need to reclaim disowned experience before they can be changed by or change that experience. In this process, it is not that people simply discover things they did not know but rather that they become aware of and experience aspects of themselves they have not consciously felt or may have previously disclaimed, dismissed, or pushed away.
Through empathic understanding and the use of experiential methods, clients learn how to make healthy contact with feelings, memories, thoughts, and physical sensations that have been ignored or feared and avoided. By accessing adaptive emotions such as healthy grief, empowering anger, and compassion, people are able to use these as resources to transform maladaptive emotions such as fear, sadness of abandonment and shame of inadequacy that have developed from past negative learning or traumatic experiences.
“Change is possible in each of us; we just need some guidance along the way”