Not sure if couples counseling is right for you?

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• Are you feeling disconnected and dissatisfied in your relationship?
• Do you feel like it could be better but you just can’t seem to change it? 
• Are you having difficulty navigating conflict without shutting down or withdrawing? Or perhaps you find yourself getting louder, pursuing your partner in increasingly angry or anxious ways?
• Do you argue and aren’t even sure what it was about in the first place? 
• Does it feel like you and your partner are growing apart or even living separate lives? 
• Do you wonder if you really matter to your partner? Do you worry they won’t be there when you need them?

This might sound obvious but it's so easy to forget that relationships don’t just take care of themselves, they take hard work. If you said yes to any of the questions above, you are not alone. So many couples struggle with feeling stuck or disconnected. 

With advances in healthcare and technology, we live a longer life than ever before. We want to have happy and fulfilling connections that last a lifetime (or atleast a long time) but often we don’t have the tools to navigate the many changes over the course of our lives AND stay connected to our partner(s). 

It is natural for our lives to ebb and flow so it takes hard work to stay connected in this changing landscape. 

Additionally, stressful times can bring out deeper wounds. Painful past experiences, relationship patterns that tend to make things worse and not better, or even the way your caregivers treated you can come out in these times. We might start reacting from a place of hurt but may not even know why. 

You might have tried talking about it with your partner but the same conflict just keeps resurfacing.  

Counseling can interrupt the unhelpful patterns you feel stuck in. Using research-proven strategies to improve connection, we will find which tools work for your unique relationship. It is possible to feel secure and even excited in your relationship. If you have the motivation to work at it, you can create an even more meaningful connection than when you fell in love.  

The reason we so often lose that connection is because we exchange novelty and excitement for familiarity and comfort. There is nothing wrong with this but if we lean too far in that direction, we can get complacent and stop doing the things that cultivated desire. 

This can get even more complicated if there are relationship transitions that are making it difficult to connect. This could look like moving in together, having kids, opening up the relationship or changing the structure in some way, job loss/job changes, moving, and more. 

Counseling can help you identify exactly what is getting in the way of the connection, what has fallen away that needs to be cultivated again, and where the joy can be fostered in the relationship. Over time, new patterns will become more of a habit and you can experience the gifts of overcoming this hurdle to have a deep meaningful connection. 

In our sessions, we’ll start with talking about where your relationship is at right now. We’ll create common goals of what you both would like to feel and experience in the relationship. From there we will investigate what the barriers are to having this experience. As your therapist, I will provide a deeper reflection and understanding of what is happening in the relationship so you can have greater clarity on what needs to be addressed for you to move forward. 

I will explore with you questions such as when did this distance surface? What was it like when the distance wasn’t there? What parts of yourself show up in conflict? What was modeled for you in intimate relationships growing up? Are there triggers or past traumas that are showing up in the present? Through this discussion, we can find answers and develop tools that can help you reframe your thinking about the relationship and step out of self-defeating patterns of behavior.