Couples Therapy
Are You Feeling Out Of Step With Your Partner?
Have you reached a point where you are quick to anger and keep having senseless arguments? Do you feel emotionally distanced, angry, and resentful? Is your lack of connection—whether it be emotional, physical, or spiritual—causing you to question if you should stay together or leave?
Even though you may have been in a committed relationship for years or even decades, you might feel more alone than at any other time in your life. The culmination of arguments, unresolved disagreements, and lack of intimacy with your partner has left you feeling isolated and dispirited.
Perhaps you feel less like lovers and more like roommates or friends. But as soon as you try to express how you’re feeling, your partner doesn’t listen or grows defensive. You’re stuck in a loop of disconnectedness.
Dissatisfaction With Your Relationship May Be Affecting How You Feel
As your disappointment grows, it may affect your mood and general sense of purpose. Perhaps you’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression, such as panic, debilitating sadness, or intrusive thoughts that it might be better if you weren’t even around anymore. If you fear divorce or breakup is imminent, you might be turning to unhealthy behaviors, such as substance abuse, gambling, reckless spending, or sex outside of the relationship to cope with your emotions.
More than anything, you might wish you and your partner could get back to being open with each other like you used to be before the walls of defensiveness built up between you. Fortunately, couples therapy is a place where the two of you can get to know each other again. With the emotional weapons disarmed, you can discuss your problems openly and constructively and learn how to solve them together.
We Often Think Ours Is The Only Relationship Under Strain
No relationship is perfect. We merely have to look at the statistics to realize that many marriages end in divorce, especially second and third marriages. And yet, everywhere we look, we are surrounded by images of the ideal relationship. Between social media, TV, and movies, we are bombarded by unrealistic representations of finding our soul mate, falling in love, and living happily ever after.
However, don’t be fooled—that “ideal” relationship our friends post on social media has its share of problems too. When we fall into the habit of comparing our relationship to unachievable expectations, we run the risk of holding ourselves to an unattainable bar of success.
What’s more, we live in a high-pressure society that keeps us moving at a frantic pace just to make ends meet. Between our stressful jobs and the burden of making enough money to pay the ever-increasing cost of living, it leaves little time and energy for each other. In the face of this mounting pressure, cracks in our relationship can begin to emerge.
Differing Opinions Can Lead To Conflict
No two people are ever exactly the same. Ideally, we can have differing views or opinions and still love and respect one another. But sadly, we are becoming increasingly more polarized as a society with our political opinions, religious beliefs, differing ideas, goals, and values. When we close ourselves off from other viewpoints, we become isolated from one another, even our life partners. With no common ground to share, conflicts seemingly become chronic and insurmountable.
Working with a neutral party can help you navigate your conflicts with a fresh perspective. Couples therapy allows you to bridge that divide.
Couples Therapy Provides You With The Skills To Address The Problems In Your Relationship
As a therapist with years of experience working with couples, I take no sides other than the side of reason. Couples therapy provides a safe, unbiased space where both sides of the disagreement will be heard and validated if rational and challenged if irrational.
By offering my support and expertise, together we can dissect whatever issues you are struggling with and work toward solutions. Ultimately, I aim to teach you effective techniques to self-manage conflict outside of therapy. By acknowledging that there are some problems that can be resolved and others that cannot, the goal for unresolvable problems will be conflict management, not resolution.
What To Expect In Sessions
When you begin therapy, it may seem like everything you do infuriates the other. Couples often wish they could just get back to the way things were early on in their relationship. My first priority will be helping you process the strong emotions that brought you here and ultimately, see things more clearly and justly. I will work collaboratively with you throughout couples counseling, adjusting goals as necessary.
One helpful goal we might pursue is to work toward a renewed appreciation for each other. I achieve this by going back and revisiting the good times you had together. Who was the person you fell in love with? What made them someone you loved, respected, and appreciated?
Problems often have layers, and each layer has a meaning. Like an onion, we will peel back each layer to uncover the core issue, which may or may not be apparent to you initially. By exploring how one event causes another, and so on, you will better understand what triggers each of you and what the underlying core thoughts are that lead you to react in unhealthy ways.
The Modalities I Use
I draw from evidenced-based practices such as the Gottman Method in couples therapy. This approach begins with a thorough assessment of your relationship that helps determine its problematic areas. Once identified, you will learn effective conflict management techniques to address these areas, such as the art of compromise, turning toward rather than away from each other during moments of conflict. The Gottman Method also helps build skills around creating and maintaining positive sentiment and helps you structure your relationship around shared goals and values.
Other helpful modalities such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), or Solution-Focused Therapy may also be beneficial. If, for example, coping with difficult emotions is a challenge for one of you, DBT offers helpful tools to help you better tolerate distress and regulate emotions.
No one wants to feel "stuck" in an unhealthy relationship. Couples therapy can help you get unstuck by helping you see there are solutions to solvable problems and negotiations to be made with unsolvable problems. Understanding what solutions are available to you will lead to more love, connection, and intimacy.
But You May Wonder If Couples Therapy Is Right For You…
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Sometimes in the initial stages of couples or marriage therapy, things can seem worse before they seem better. However, this is usually a positive sign that we are getting to the core of the problem. As an experienced couples counselor, I understand that when you remove your armor and allow yourself to be open and vulnerable, that’s when therapy truly starts. For your relationship to thrive, we need to expose what lies beneath the superficial problems you’re having. Once we identify what the core issue is, couples counseling offers skills and strategies to address it.
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I can't speak to your experiences with another couples therapist. As with any professional, they may not have been a good fit for many reasons. My measure of a good marriage therapist is one who will conduct a thorough initial assessment, utilize evidence-based approaches to couples counseling, have advanced training in those modalities, work toward specific measurable and observable goals, and attend continuing education to stay up to date in advances in marriage counseling.
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Although you might think that there are problems in your relationship due solely to your partner, this is rarely the case. After all, it takes two to tango. When one partner is convinced they’re inherently “right” and the other is “wrong”, it leads to defensiveness and stonewalling. In marital counseling, we explore how one partner’s negative behavior—as hurtful as it may seem—is often a knee-jerk reaction to a stimulus – that stimulus being something occurring between the two of you. Let’s look objectively at that stimulus together. It might not be what you think it is.
Finding Common Ground And Understanding Will Bring You Closer
When you learn how to manage conflict effectively, no problem is too big to overcome. If you would like to find out more about the couples therapy I offer, please call 415-710-9777 or visit my contact page.
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