Connection

​

Couples Therapy to Strengthen or Heal Your Relationship

 

“No one can dance with a partner and not touch each other’s raw spots. We must know what these raw spots are and be able to speak about them in a way that pulls our partner closer to us.” —Dr. Sue Johnson, author of Love Sense and developer of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy

 

You can remember the times when you and your partner really connected and being together felt great. Now it seems like the demands of life have overwhelmed your relationship. Even though you are still together, you often feel lonely and yearn for those good times. A close and supportive relationship is possible.

 

You can learn to interrupt the negative cycles that lead to disconnection and reach for your partner in ways that help the him or her respond supportively. You can have a strong, loving relationship again!

 

My work with couples includes:

• Strengthening or healing a relationship during a difficult life transition

• Helping couples recover from loss

• Coming together to help a partner heal from medical crises or injuries​

• Navigating intergenerational or cross-cultural challenges​

• Recovering from an affair

 

I work with couples or individuals at all relationship stages, including:

• Premarital counseling

• People who are tired of repeating the same negative relationship patterns over and over, who want a healthier, more satisfying future relationship.

• Couples thinking about divorce

 

My focus is to provide a highly effective roadmap to help couples clarify the emotional signals they send to one another, de-escalate, and move out of the negative interaction patterns that threaten their experience of security and connectedness.

​

For adult love, the attachment to an intimate partner is the emotional bond that provides security and soothes anxiety. Attachment theory suggests that negative interactions between couples arise when the security of the couples’ emotional bond is threatened. In distressed relationships, the key issue is a lack of accessibility and responsiveness to emotional cues leading to disconnection.

​

My aim is help couples learn to notice their thoughts and emotions, look at those thoughts and emotions through the lens of attachment and personal values, and practice new ways of opening up and sharing these key relational needs with their partner in a way that brings them closer to one another.