Couples therapy is a step towards improving your relationship and your life.

A healthy relationship, in which each partner feels loved, understood and supported, is intimately tied to one’s overall life satisfaction. The converse is true as well: an unhappy relationship can impact all areas of one’s life. It adds stress, anger, sadness and distractions. Many couples can recall a happier time and are sometimes confused as to how they have landed in disconnection and pain.

 Some of the reasons couples seek treatment with me include:

• loss of intimacy (sexual and emotional)
• communication problems
• infidelity
• financial disagreements and betrayals
• illness
• decision making styles
• parenting
• relationships with in-laws or extended family
• traumatic betrayals
• coping with one or both partners’ mental health or trauma from childhood
• relationship strains due to infertility or family building

I am certified as a therapist in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT), a powerful, empirically-supported modality.  EFCT integrates what we know about how people build trust and bond with effective interventions that are experiential and humanistic.  As humans, we learn and change most effectively through experiences that occur in a safe and caring context. The EFCT model is based upon that premise: that means therapy is an active exchange between you and me, focused on increasing awareness of the process unfolding between you, combined with developing new ways of engaging in caring and supportive ways. Instead of getting stuck rehashing old hurts in the same painful and unproductive manner, we will focus on how you both react to and impact each other along with what is going on under the surface.

My approach also considers the impact of one’s family of origin and past patterns in the unfolding of relationship difficulties. Often, we are unaware of the ways that early and sometimes subversive messages about love, commitment, autonomy, and support have shaped our responses to our own needs and to our loved ones. New self-awareness and empathy for self and other can then be leveraged to (re)create healthy interaction cycles. By opening up new ways of understanding oneself and one’s partner, the couple can forge a new, previously unknown, way forward.