Couples Therapy

Do you find yourselves engaging in the same “here we go again” conflicts without fully resolving them? Have you both reached an impasse in your relationship that questions whether or not you both want to continue the relationship? Feeling like roommates rather than deeply connected loving partners? Are either of you longing for emotional and/or physical intimacy?

I have experience working with couples from a diversity of cultural backgrounds. My hope in doing couples therapy is that each partner is motivated to attend couples therapy, willing to look inward and examine their own role in the current dynamics of the relationship and take individual responsibility for their own changes. Couples therapy is not about assigning blame, taking sides or determining who is right or wrong but rather gaining the tools and skills to foster and nurture a long term, loving relationship.

We will work on normalizing conflict as representing a longing for connection and wanting to be heard, understood, and seen. We will face the reality that all relationships have inevitable conflicts and differences, and provide a safe space for each partner to share their own perspectives of the issues and have partners collaborate on disrupting negative patterns of interaction.

Examining our past relationships, attachment histories, triggers and sensitivities informs how we interact in our present relationships. Among the rewarding aspects of working with couples is witnessing them learn to be better communicators of their vulnerabilities and primary emotions to move their partner to not react but to respond in loving ways.

I have experience working with couples on the following issues:

• Trust

• Emotional and physical intimacy

• Biracial/bicultural relationships

• Repeating experiences of negative patterns of interaction

• Conflict avoidance

• Interpersonal and communication skills

• Codependency

• Repair of unresolved hurts

• Infidelity, emotional affairs

  For couples facing the challenges of infidelity, our work will focus on addressing the betrayal by first acknowledging the experience as trauma for the partner that has been hurt. By providing a safe therapeutic space, this partner has the opportunity to give voice and work through their experiences and how their narrative of the relationship is now brought into question and disrupted.

  The partner who betrayed is provided the tools to proactively initiate their availability to patiently and consistently attune to their partner’s processing of the betrayal and at the pace of the betrayed partner. The hope is for the betrayed partner to have the experience of their partner truly “getting their emotional pain" The process of repair then examines the meaning of the betrayal in the “past” relationship, while also helping the couple rebuild trust, and loving connection.