Couples and Marriage Counseling
Targeted, structured support to restore communication, trust, and intimacy in your relationship.
A collaborator for your relationship
Grow together.
Stay together.
Whether you call it therapy, marriage counseling or couples counseling, what you’re signing up for is inviting a collaborator — a therapist — into your relationship to help you and your partner grow together and nurture a warm and fulfilling relationship.
The cost of waiting
Couples suffer a great deal before deciding to seek help
According to research by Gottman, couples wait an average of six years of being unhappy with their relationship before getting help. That’s a long time to be unhappy. Too often, conflicting viewpoints, past experiences, and the stresses of everyday life get in the way of fully connecting with your partner.
Growth is a practice
Becoming less reactive and more responsive.
Couples often complain that each partner knows exactly how to push the other’s buttons. Once those buttons get pushed, things tend to heat up — or cool down — at warp speed. A key goal of the therapeutic process is learning how to become less reactive and more responsive.
This is a complex process that takes time, because those “buttons” usually represent places in us that feel unresolved, left behind, or in some way wounded from earlier events and experiences.
Problems happen, and that’s okay. There may be hundreds of reasons that bring couples to the place of even considering the need for counseling.
Why couples come in
Common Issues Addressed in Couples Counseling
- Slow and unintentional neglect due to work, life, or kids.
- Routine becoming so usual that the comfort of the predictable wears on a relationship over time without either partner noticing.
- Communication and problem-resolution difficulties that contribute to yelling, hurtful statements, and couples feeling unheard, invalidated, disrespected, scared, or unappreciated.
- Trust issues, infidelity, or something acutely damaging and hurtful.
- Crisis, such as a death in the family.
- Changes in sex and intimacy.
- Considering divorce and needing help to decide whether to restore your marriage, move toward divorce, or take a time out and decide later.
Skills are learned
No one is born with excellent relationship skills.
If you were fortunate to grow up in a family highly skilled in communication, conflict resolution, and trust building, you had great role models. For most of us, relationship skills need to be learned through trial and error or with outside help.
Couples counseling offers the opportunity to set special time aside to work on these skills in a safe and nurturing environment.
You may not have been born with excellent relationship skills, but you can develop them with the proper support and a commitment to change.
Common questions