Relationship/Marriage Counseling

Relationship therapy provides education, clarification, insight, suggested behavior change, and support for growth and change in the areas that are troubling you. It is not always easy and often takes longer than expected. Relationship challenges, common to all of us, tend not to get better on their own. The habits and patterns in couples and families are often unconscious and ingrained in all parties and active intervention is necessary to help those involved achieve their goals. In addition to resolving an immediate crisis, new skills in conflict management, trust-building communication, resolution of individual issues undermining the relationship (like addiction and co-dependency), and boundary setting are needed.

All of our important relationships need our attention. Just as you cannot neglect regular maintenance of other parts of your life like your car or home, neglecting the quality of connection with your partner or family member is a setup for these relationships to falter. People in healthy partnerships spend hours a week attending to their relationship – talking, listening, sharing, being intimate, having fun together. It is crucial is make time for each other. Engaging in therapy is one very important way to give that attention. Just like most of us need an expert mechanic for our car maintenance, expert help is often needed and important for relationship health. Even if just one person in the relationship is unhappy, that’s a call for assistance.

Over time the counseling I provide helps people develop greater trust and warmth towards their partner as they understand each other better. Our work together promotes the feeling of safety and happiness in your partnership by developing self awareness, learning new communication and negotiating skills, resolving knotty issues, and clarifying roles and boundaries. Effective marriage and couple’s treatment yields great dividends for the individuals involved as well as for their family members in terms of safety, satisfaction and love. In family therapy, changes in communication patterns and conflict management may help resolve many presenting issues.

Sometimes relationship counseling doesn’t work to save a marriage or relationship. Perhaps the marriage is already too empty or too conflictual and neither party is actually very interested in saving it – but for any number of reasons, can’t quite face that knowledge. Other times even with a very strong desire to save a relationship, there just isn’t enough of a loving connection and compatibility to stay together. In these situations, treatment helps both parties face their difficult reality with honesty and work to determine how to go forward with as much ease as possible given the circumstances.

Family Counseling can pay huge dividends for everyone involved. Often it involves improving communication between family members, learning effective limit setting, dealing with individual issues challenging family health, setting appropriate boundaries between people, and sorting through and processing various other complex issues, such as extended family issues. Each family is very unique. Our first order of business is determining what the issues are and what the family wants based on their personalities, cultural background, stage of development related to the ages of children, and needs.