Couples Therapy

Is the person you’ve chosen to be your partner your biggest source of heartache?

Maybe the person you’ve shared life, kids, adventures, and growing pains with is now a complete stranger to you. The smallest things they do irritate you, and arguments are spiraling out of control. You sometimes are in disbelief when you take a step back and look at what your relationship has become, at how far you’ve drifted apart. You feel disconnected and no longer feel like your partner is the safe attachment they once were. Or maybe you’ve experienced a great betrayal at the hands of your partner, or you have hurt them in ways you didn’t think was possible. You spend all your time and energy with this person, and yet you find that they don’t know your inner world at all, nor you theirs.

“We want to work on our communication”

is the most common thing that I hear in couples therapy. Couples often find that they are repeating themselves time and time again, and are exhausted that their partner still doesn’t seem to understand them or their feelings. At some point during your relationship, maybe you two (if you are in a monogamous relationship) have forgotten how to speak kindly to each other. Now every time you try to communicate, you withdraw while your partner gets emotionally escalated, which makes you shut down even more. When you get in disagreements, you become a hurtful, resentful person that you didn’t think was inside of you. Everything you say, even to your own quiet disbelief, is an attack of the person that you once cherished.

Relationships are extremely powerful forces in our lives.

They have the power to make us feel completely safe in the middle of a storm, and they also have the power to tear us apart when the weather is calm. When we invite someone to share in the most intimate and vulnerable parts of ourselves, that person can affect us in ways that no other person can, both in profoundly positive and painfully negative ways. When things go awry, the loss of what used to be so good can intensify the pain of betrayal, disconnection, and the hurt you already feel in the relationship.

Relationships can be healed and have the power to heal.

The same reason why relationships can be so devastating is the same reason why relationships can be so transformative and restorative. Let’s say you’ve spent the last 5 years speaking to your partner in French, and they’ve been speaking to you in Korean. After time, the frustration of not being understood makes you speak louder and louder at each other, until you’re finally yelling at each other out of frustration, heartache, and desperation to be heard. When you two figure out how to finally speak the same language, you can use your newfound common language to understand one another, heal the relationship, and heal one another.

How is couples therapy going to help us?

I use Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Gottman interventions in my clinical approach to couples. As your couples therapist, my purpose is to help you two intimately connect with each other with vulnerability, gentleness, and kindness. Couples therapy can help you identify unhealthy cycles that you have been continuously reliving, take accountability for your part in the cycle, and break out of those destructive cycles to rebuild healthy ones instead. It can help you access those deep intimate emotions that you may have been hiding from both your partner and yourself, and to be connected to each other in that most intimate emotional place. It can help you communicate with one another in healthy assertive ways, and to be able to identify if you’re speaking aggressively, passively, or even passive-aggressively. Couples therapy is about figuring out why you’re hurting, why your partner’s hurting, and how you can turn toward each other to connect to dispel the pain.

“But I’m afraid that…

…couples therapy may uncover some things that are too painful to face.” Or “…our relationship is too far gone for us to recover.” Or even “…you’ll take my partner’s side and make me the villain in the story.” While it’s not a miracle drug, with willing and earnest participants, couples therapy can help people connect with one another in ways that may have felt lost to them. It can help you restore what has felt so injured and painful, and it can strengthen and give new life to your connection and relationship. And ultimately, therapy is a place of nonjudgmental acceptance. My purpose is to support your relationship, not to take sides of one person in opposition to another.

What next?

Relationships are hard work of learning how to be successful as a team, rather than as an individual. And it is a constant process of asking your partner to accept the deepest and most intimate parts of you. With the right therapist, you can learn about yourself, your partner, and how you can be in an enriching and nurturing relationship as your most intimate, vulnerable self. Finding the right therapeutic fit is the most important first step in starting your therapeutic journey, so let’s connect to see if I could be a good fit for the two of you.