Couples Therapy
Are you stuck in negative, repetitive patterns of interaction with your partner that:
Have taken on a life of their own?
Lead to difficulty resolving conflict and keeping it from escalating?
Lead to increased friction, hurt feelings, withdrawal, and a loss of connection?
Make healing and moving forward after infidelity difficult?
Then couples therapy might be helpful to you.
Therapy can help you identify negative interactional cycles and the feelings that lead you and your partner to approach each other in ways that keep these cycles going. Understanding this can help you and your partner keep from getting caught up in these cycles, address any underlying needs that are being unmet, and forge a closer, more intimate connection.
Emotionally Focused Therapy
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) characterizes my approach to working with couples. It emphasizes the importance of emotional engagement, secure attachment, and responsiveness between partners in healthy relationships. It helps partners develop these capacities and, once developed, find new ways of being with each other that facilitate a stronger bond and a more fulfilling connection. To learn more about EFT, a couples therapy with substantial empirical support, visit: www.iceeft.com.
My experience includes working with gay, lesbian, mixed orientation, and polyamorous couples, couples practicing kink and consensual non-monogamy, interracial and interfaith couples, and couples from different cultural backgrounds.
Sessions for couples are either 45 or 60 minutes in duration and are usually scheduled on a once weekly basis unless greater frequency is desired.
Discernment Counseling
If one of you is unsure about remaining in a relationship and the other very much wants the relationship to continue, I offer a specialized form of couples therapy for couples in this situation called Discernment Counseling. Traditional couples therapy is unlikely to be helpful to you because it is very difficult for someone who is unsure about whether they want to stay in a relationship to make a commitment to work on the relationship.
Discernment counseling aims to help the partner who is ambivalent about the relationship come to a decision about how they want to approach it— remain in the relationship the way it is, leave it, or commit to working on the relationship in six months of traditional couples therapy. For the partner who very much wants to see the relationship continue, it coaches them on how to make the best case to their partner that they consider staying in the relationship and working on it.
Because Discernment Counseling sessions involve a sequence of meetings with you and your partner together and separately, sessions are 90 minutes in duration.
Intimate Partner Mediation (IPM)
Intimate Partner Mediation (IPM) helps you and your partner negotiate agreements that work for both of you in areas you are having difficulty coming to agreement. IPM provides a structured and short-term approach to resolving conflict and does so by employing mediation techniques.
These techniques involve identifying ways that partners agree over what is important to them in relation to a particular issue, even when they disagree over how to go about solving it. It then aims to open up discussion in which partners explore what are possible solutions to the problem that can work for both of them. The agreements partners come to regarding these issues are often spelled out in writing, which are then signed by each partner documenting their intent to follow through on their commitment to address these issues in accordance with what has been agreed upon.
Depending on the needs of you and your partner I would either be providing these services by myself or in co-mediation with an attorney/mediator colleague. IPM sessions are one to two hours in duration.
You may be interested in IPM if you:
Desire a more structured approach for resolving conflict than traditional couples therapy
Have a firm foundation for your relationship but find yourself at odds with your partner over specific issues such as the handling of finances, division of household chores, family planning, or opening up a relationship
Want a short-term approach that uses mediation techniques to resolve conflict and results in written agreements
How is IPM different from Couples Therapy?
Both Couples Therapy and IPM help couples resolve conflict in their relationship. The main difference between them is how they go about doing this.
In couples therapy there usually is a more in-depth exploration of what is fueling the conflict. This involves not only identifying ways partners become stuck in negative patterns of interaction but also pointing out how each partner protects themselves from being hurt in ways that frequently trigger hurt feelings in the other, which then in turn leads the both of them to protect themselves in even more ways that are hurtful to one another.
It also focuses on identifying painful episodes that occurred earlier in the relationship from which one or both partners have not yet healed and facilitating healing from these injuries. In addition, it identifies and addresses vulnerabilities each partner has brought with them to the relationship and focuses on how the partners can forge a stronger, deeper connection to one another.