EMDR Certified
EFT Trained
You both love each other and want to feel closer- but you're stuck in the same arguments that lead nowhere.
You love your partner deeply, but somewhere along the way you lost the ease you once had.
Maybe there’s a past resentment, letdown, betrayal or disconnection lingering in your relationship. Or perhaps there’s no one thing- maybe somehow you just found yourselves struggling to resolve conflict many times over, eventually creating a self-reinforcing cycle of hurt, loneliness and confusion.
Regardless of how you got here, you don’t know how to get through to your partner anymore and feel further apart than ever.
You’ve tried, but no matter what you say, you end up feeling dismissed, judged, invisible, not good enough, or like you can never get it right. It’s like your words don’t land, or worse- get used against you. Sometimes it feels like you’re speaking entirely different languages
Perhaps this has gone on long enough that it’s beginning to feel like you're each “just too different” from one another. Or that solving your problems is impossible. You may even be considering separation or divorce. Ultimately you both feel undervalued, unloved and incapable of getting it right for the other.
When your relationship is under stress, it doesn’t stay neatly contained- it spills into every other area of life.
You might find it harder to focus at work, feel more irritable or withdrawn with friends, or struggle to be present with your children. The emotional weight of the constant tension, can drain your energy, lower your self-confidence and leave you feeling isolated, even when you’re surrounded by loved ones.
I utilize Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) to assist couples in restoring their relationship
EFT Can Help with:
Long-standing patterns of communication issues
Create a shared understanding of what is happening between the two of you instead of two separate often contradictory narratives.
Ruptures in trust, safety or betrayal such as past addictions or affairs
Discernment in whether to stay in or leave the relationship/marriage
Reshaping your relationship to one in which both partners feel safe, respected, connected, valued and loved on a deep level.
Lack of sexual desire
I’m here to help you feel connected, loved and safe with your partner again.
Therapy is an opportunity to get “unstuck” from repeating the same patterns which ultimately lead to unsolvable conflict in your relationship and to instead find new creative ways of being together without having to compromise who you are and what matters to you. It’s not uncommon for couples to leave successful therapy feeling not only like they’ve “got their old partner back”, but also with a deepened love, security and aliveness in their relationship.
My goal for the first part of therapy is to help you and your partner slow down and really make sense of where the two of you get stuck.
Most couples have a predictable pattern of communication when conflict emerges. It doesn’t matter if you are talking about sex, parenting, finances, inlaws or any other issue. This pattern is a background to the content of what you are fighting about. Until this pattern is addressed, solving problems becomes difficult or impossible. This is why you might notice that you and your partner struggle with most or all disagreements to varying degrees.
In the first part of therapy, I will help you and your partner:
Understand your relationship’s specific unhelpful pattern of communication also known as a “negative cycle”.
Help you and your partner address the roadblocks to empathy and teamwork.
Stop fighting about what happened and who’s to blame and instead, construct a shared narrative about what is causing the problem, honoring both of your experiences.
Guide you in practicing effective ways of dealing with conflict and your “negative cycle” in real time.
We will repeat this process numerous times throughout the course of therapy until this new way of addressing conflict becomes second nature and you are consistently able to stop arguments with your partner before they get out of hand. By the end of this stage of therapy, many couples stop seeing one another as the problem and instead, feel like they are a team solving a problem. This is also when solutions to previously solvable problems become possible. Many couples also feel much closer than they did at the start of therapy.
Once the negative cycle has softened, and both partners feel they can discuss disagreements without feeling hurt by the other, we move on to restoring a culture of safety, connection, deep trust, love, pleasure, play. This part of therapy is about more than addressing surface level communication problems. It’s about addressing the root cause of said communication problems and creating relief and connection on a deeper level. This additional part of therapy is what sets EFT apart from other types of couples therapy. It’s also the reason why EFT is the only form of couples therapy proven to create long-term change consistently.
Therapy for Couples and Relationships Can Help You…
Improve communication skills and find new more empowering ways to work through conflict
Feel like your on the same team” again
Reignite the “spark” in your relationship
Break the cycle of having the same fight in your relationship
Repair wounds, hurts and ruptures from the past
Address issues with intimacy and sex
Help you feel secure, loved, valued and important in the eyes of your partner.