Couples Counseling Services
Growing Together: Support for Couples
Relationships hold the space of two individuals with different personalities, attachments, and history, including any past hurt, trauma, learned responses, and conflict within self. As these individuals merge into a couple, they must navigate their own stories. Noticing, sensing, and acknowledging their internal struggle as they step into that shared space.
Couples therapy creates a space for the individual to explore and discover the complexities within self. While highlighting and addressing the pain and uncertainty, learning tools for communication, regulation, and coping. By embracing this journey, couples can forge a path towards greater intimacy.
When Love Hurts: Finding Healing Through Couples Therapy
Couples in crisis may have gone through couples counseling where the issue has not been resolved but only were told to follow certain steps to decrease the amount of conflict or tension. Or couples may have experienced a transition where it highlighted the conflict that was already there but for a time it was covered by other priorities like busy schedules and kids. Or couples may already have a history of broken relationships. This could be their 2nd marriage. The unresolved, bubbling up conflict add tension that it creates more complexities or layers in the relationship.
Contemplating Divorce
Infidelity
Estrangement
Grandiosity
Power Struggle
Two individuals faced with the decision of compromising more of myself in this relationship or letting go of the fantasy of having a "happy marriage". When we are in a crisis situation, it is very black and white. As we can only see two options. One that loses more of their self into the relationship. And the other giving up hope in the marriage. Both that only lands on the idea that marriages only serve the purpose of you vs me. Two individuals conflicted constantly being in the reactive position.
Strength for the Journey: Nurturing Self
For one to be in a shared relationship, healing begins within self. A person, in a crisis, constantly asks the question, "am I safe?". When that person does not feel safe, there is that need to self-protect. Self-protection can look like stonewalling, avoiding, controlling, egocentric, and shame. For the two individuals to go into a You and Me relationship not a you vs me relationship, there is a process.
Discovery
Healing
Restoring
This framework leads the client through discovery, healing, and restoring in their relationship with self. This process helps rebuild the relationship with the other. We go through a rhythmic flow to create more of a regulated self that can invite the discovery of what is behind the presentation, the mask, the pain, the struggle. This is a dance, a rhythm within self that creates a rhythm in the relationship.