Upcoming Couples Workshop: The Power of Healing in Intimate Relationships. Read more by clicking here.

Drawing by: Sarah Jameson

Couples Counseling

In couples counseling (also known as marital counseling) your relationship becomes the focus of the counseling process.  Counseling becomes a place where both you and your partner can find and rest in the deeper connection of love you both share.  Healthy committed relationships are about balancing connection/intimacy with independence/autonomy.  Ideally, each influences and helps the other.  Couples therapy helps to achieve this balance in your relationship.  Couples counseling seeks to slow down your interactions so you can begin to identify how you get triggered and set off in your relationship.  You gain clarity about certain past wounds and injuries that can often show up in your current relationship, thereby obstructing the intimacy and joy that is wanting to happen.

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vvWho could benefit from couples counseling?

Who could benefit from couples counseling?

Couples that would like to:

  • Learn to communicate in a more constructive and connecting way
  • Be light and enjoy each other’s presences
  • Discover how to relax into intimacy with each other
  • Reestablish & rekindle your connection with each other
  • Gain clarity and understand before making a larger commitment to each other through marriage or other life-commitments
  • Seek support for very intense and challenging life circumstances and/or transitions (such as death, divorce, retirement, or infidelity)
  • Expand their support network for couples with special needs children

What to expect in couples counseling?

Couple counseling sessions are 90 minutes long and happen weekly.  After meeting with me for the first time as a couple, I may request that I have one session with each of you individually.  I typically incorporate a mindfulness approach to couples counseling.   This means that you and your partner may be asked to close your eyes at various times during the session in order to bring your awareness internally.  Practicing mindfulness helps reduce defensiveness and foster closeness.  Couples counseling seeks to go beyond the challenging emotional cycles of anger/rage and shame /criticism that often painfully arise in relationships, especially around difficult issues.  Over time, couples counseling can help you and your partner to feel and express the underlying and unacknowledged emotions of fear, hurt, loss, and sadness.  This deep sharing can reestablish trust and cultivate a sustaining intimacy.  Along the way, you will also learn skills and techniques that you and your partner can practice in-between sessions and integrate into you relationship.