Strengthen Your Relationship

Couples who communicate effectively and respect the other’s individual growth are better equipped to weather difficult times and emerge stronger.

My Approach to Therapy

Couples therapy offers a space to build a deeper understanding of your dynamics. By exploring childhood backgrounds, family histories, and attachment styles, partners can develop a shared model for a healthy relationship.

Therapy identifies the needs of the couple in a supportive, blame-free environment, fostering a collaborative future. It is a realistic way to learn how to value each other’s perspectives, leading to stronger trust and long-term fulfillment. I utilize concepts from leading couples therapy theorists and blend them with my own therapy style to help couples strengthen and improve their personal and collective lives.

Couples therapy helps navigate and repair conflict and improve communication for a healthier couplehood.

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Couples Therapy: Understanding the Continuum of Need

Over my years of working with couples, I have come to realize the various ways that couples come into therapy. My hope is that this will help couples find themselves on the continuum of need and allow for better articulation of their stage in the marriage or couple hood.

Strengthening and Improving on a Solid Base

The Goal: Personal and Couples Growth

Couples at this stage are seeking help to understand patterns of communication, repair past harms, and attain a greater understanding of themselves, their partner, and their overall dynamics.

Managing Imbalances and Repetitive Patterns

The Goal: Strengthening Foundations and Bringing Issues to Consciousness

In this stage, couples love each other and want to stay together. They are seeking help to break hurtful patterns of relating, such as unspoken communication or unskilled relating. There is a need to get at underlying expectations and assumptions, delve into unmet expectations, and understand how this can lead to conflict. The focus is on learning to introspect and communicate to your partner in more healthy ways.

Navigating Crisis Moments

The Goal: Immediate Relief, Containment, and Safety

This stage involves impactful moments of mistrust, broken loyalties, disconnection, substance abuse/addiction, or other compulsive behaviors (behaviors that are not stopping and which one has trouble recognizing the impact it has on their partner). It may involve acting out in anger, avoidance, or manipulation. This stage seeks trauma resolution, rapid intervention, and repair.

Discernment Counseling

The Goal: Deep Contemplation of the Relationship's Future

Should I/we stay or should I/we go? Either one partner or both have come to a place where, despite efforts to repair the relationship, the negative effects on the individuals and people around them have become too much. Perhaps effort has been made in previous stages and bringing the relationship back is too far gone, or one partner has had enough and needs to convey this. The couple is helped to process the health of the relationship, which can lead to reunion and reconciliation or the end of the relationship.

Uncoupling and Divorce

The Goal: A Conscious Uncoupling Process

Couples have decided to end the marriage and must decide how to proceed. The best case is staying supportive of the other and focusing on self-growth throughout this difficult phase. There are three main options:

  • Litigation: Getting a lawyer to litigate in the courts. This is often expensive and caustic, pitting previous partners as adversaries.
  • Mediation: Working with a third party to facilitate the numerous parts of divorce: personal belongings, home, finances, and child custody. This requires each to "come to the table" willing to negotiate and engage with healthy communication.
  • Collaborative Divorce: Each person has legal representation, mental health support, and a financial professional who works for both as a neutral. This 5-person team ushers the process in a collaborative way that can ease pain and lead to healthy outcomes for families and the community.
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The Path to Relational Growth

Along the continuum there are numerous other categories where you may place your situation and needs.

Inevitably, all relationships face ebbs and flows. Over time, vulnerabilities once shared in confidence can transform into triggers, resentment, and disrespect. Even in healthy partnerships, a partner’s pursuit of personal interests can feel like a threat to the other or to the relationship. Ideally, when personal interests and needs are supported, one feels freedom to develop themselves. This is healthy and can strengthen the couple bond and increase trust, if communicated and discussed appropriately. However, without self-awareness and understanding of the other, trust can erode. Small misunderstandings can spiral into deep-seated hurt.