COUPLES COUNSELING
Intimate relationships provide some of life’s richest pleasures and, much to our chagrin, greatest challenges. I work with couples to rekindle intimacy by resolving old fears and bitterness and by risking greater vulnerability and open-heartedness. Couples often get stuck blaming each other for the feelings their relationship evokes. I help couples to use these often unwanted feelings and challenges as doorways into their own selves, allowing mutual empathy to flourish as each partner comes to see the other in increasingly vulnerable and human ways.
Individuals are often terrified (or just plain tired) of feeling hurt and disappointed in familiar old ways. Early in life, they develop self-protective strategies that insure against these painful experiences, including criticism and pursuit, silence and withdrawal, defensiveness and contempt. Tragically, these strategies undermine couple intimacy and deaden a couple’s desire for connection.
I work with couples in all stages of relationship to understand these strategies and to mitigate their impact. Many couples in my practice have learned communication tools in prior therapies, but to little or no avail. They find that they still feel threatened in the same mutually debilitating ways. I work proactively in the moment to help couples track in their own and their partner’s nervous systems the arising and waning of feeling threatened.
By learning to focus on states of arousal beneath the content of fights, couples empower themselves to co-regulate their relationship intimacy, whatever the issues. Over time, they learn to share the vulnerability behind their self-protective strategies and develop a nuanced and rich empathy for what the other must endure on the inside to be related. |
