My approach to working with couples and families is to focus on helping people talk to one another with honesty and clarity, while also helping them identify the patterns of communication or behavior that have caused them pain, confusion, and anger. I help my clients discuss the events happening in the “here and now” of their lives, while simultaneously exploring the historic reasons that problems developed.
I believe that we all have old blueprints for how to be in an intimate relationship that were constructed over the years of our childhoods. Some blueprints work well for us, and some do not. In couple therapy sessions, I help my clients discover what the “blueprints” have taught them, and then help them explore how to alter, improve, edit, and enrich their own patterns of developing attachments and intimacy within their romantic relationship.
While some couples are unable to find peace and emotional health if they remain together, many couples find therapy both enlightening, and helpful in concrete ways. They find that treatment helps them learn how to talk openly, how to fight productively, how to renew their sexual desire for one another, and how to better cooperate in all the areas of their relationship. When couple therapy is successful, couples report a deeper sense of intimacy with one another, and a greater sense of calm and confidence in the world – as individuals, and as a couple.
My Background in Couple Therapy
I have specialized in working with couples since I was in graduate school during the 1980’s. I trained with Dr. Clifford Notarius for many years, an expert in the field of marital relationships and the author of We Can Work It Out. For several years, Dr. Notarius and I offered weekend workshops for couples that focused on improving their communication, enriching their connection, and helping them deepen their sense of intimacy.
During the later 1990’s, I developed particular expertise working with families in conflict, and working with married partners who were struggling to integrate children and parenting responsibilities into their couple relationship.
More recently, I have continued to work with couples – both heterosexual couples, and same sex couples – in all phases of their relationship growth. I see couples who are newly married and struggling to integrate their lives, as well as couples who have been together for years and are suffering from distress in their communication, their attachment, and/or their intimate connections. I have also worked with many couples who have suffered from an infidelity or other kinds of betrayals within the relationship, and have helped them navigate the way forward.
Feel free to email me with any questions you may have about how I work with couples to improve their relationships.