Couples Therapy
Have You Grown Apart From Your Partner?
"If you want to learn love, then you must start the process of finding out what it is, what qualities make up a loving person and how these are developed. Each person has the potential for love. But potential is never realized without work." - Leo Buscaglia, Love¹
Are you and your partner wondering if it’s worth staying together? Do you struggle with communication and emotional connection? Have feelings of love, devotion, and care been replaced by bitterness and resentment?
There’s nothing lonelier than feeling abandoned in your romantic partnership. Emotional wounds from the past, whether from unresolved conflict, endless arguments, or infidelity, may not have fully healed and now make your relationship difficult to navigate. Although you wish you could turn to your partner for support, you may feel as though the chasm between you has grown too wide and you've lost the bond you once shared.
A Cycle Of Disconnection
If your needs are not being met and you feel rejected by your partner, you may feel uncertain about the future of your relationship. As you anxiously hope to reestablish a connection with them, your uncertainty may show up as anger, criticism, or resentment. This response, in turn, could be pushing your partner further away, leading them to avoid confrontation or close off emotionally. Before you realize what’s happened, intimacy has vanished and you’re leading separate lives.
But this isn’t how you want the story to end. If only you could stop the cycle of conflict and confusion with your partner and allow yourself to become fully immersed in knowing and being known by one another again.
The good news is that couples therapy can help you forge a path back to each other. With marriage counseling, you can examine the root causes of your emotional disconnection, build a bridge back to each other, and reestablish a deep, loving bond.
Relationships Are Integral To Our Mental Health
Relationships are defined by deep, tender connections with ourselves, the world, and others. How we function within our romantic relationships is central to our well-being and has a profound impact on our mental health.
Flourishing relationships that are supportive and loving can bring out the very best in us and help us realize our potential more fully. Conversely, conflict, criticism, contempt, and defensiveness can damage how we view ourselves and the world, causing us emotional pain and social withdrawal. It is within the context of our relationships that not only is our greatest pain often revealed, but also where we are able to find profound growth and healing.
Chemistry Vs. Connection
Within our current culture of "rom-coms", social media, and instant gratification, the chemistry between a couple is often mistaken for relationship. We are persuaded to believe the idea that relationships are easy and surface-level, when in fact, healthy relationships are characterized by something deeper.
Committed couples seek shared life paths, a sense of comfort and ease in each other’s presence—like coming home—and a genuine fondness for one another. Rather than reducing relationships to superficial attraction, strong coupling is based on a shared purpose in life where we can complement our partners’ strengths and supplement the areas they are still growing in.
Unfortunately, romantic relationships often feel difficult and unattainable to most of us. After all, bringing our best selves into a relationship and owning our stuff can be challenging. We often have blind spots about where we fall short. We find that it’s easier to pin all the wrongdoing on our partner rather than acknowledge how we may contribute to the difficulties our relationship is going through.
When you face difficult life circumstances and uncharted territory, relationships can be tough to navigate. That’s why couples therapy can be an invaluable way to examine the dynamics of your relationship and gain insight into what each of you brings to it.
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Couples Therapy Can Usher In A New Era Of Your Relationship
Almost all couples need help to resolve past hurts, resentments, unhealthy patterns, or misunderstandings. Unfortunately, most couples wait until conflict or disconnection has already caused immense emotional pain before seeking therapy. Even if your relationship is at its breaking point, with a commitment to working on things, you can restore trust, intimacy, and connection.
At by the willow, we love the idea that, as humans, we are connected to everyone and everything. We bring a holistic approach to couples therapy that integrates heart, mind, body, and soul. Sessions will be an unbiased, nonjudgmental space where you can consciously delve into the emotions, patterns, and triggers of your relationship as a path to healing. Meeting you where you are, we can offer a marriage therapist who is open to either faith-based or secular counseling.
What To Expect In Couples Therapy
Having you answer a series of questions upfront will help us determine the level of commitment you each have to repair the relationship. Your responses will guide the course of marriage therapy and help us narrow down what approaches will be most beneficial.
Adult relationships are vital in helping us heal our earliest wounding. When you feel deeply stuck in conflict and disconnection, the roots of these feelings most likely stem from your childhood experiences in your earliest relationships. During therapy, we will explore how you learned to be in relationship and how these patterns may be repeating in your adulthood.
The Modalities We Use
Our therapists are trained in evidence-based modalities that include The Gottman Method, Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT), as well as psychodynamic theories.
With Gottman Method assessment tools, we can accurately pinpoint the areas within your relationship where conflict exists as well as identify your strengths. PACT helps you recognize the emotion each of you carries into conflicts and how those feelings manifest in the body and mind. By helping you form a secure attachment, you will learn how to speak to each other’s wounds and reestablish your emotional connection.
Also rooted in attachment theory, EFT is an approach to couples counseling that helps you recognize the negative cycles of communication that may have formed in your relationship and how to heal those dynamics at their root.
Our long-term goal for couples therapy is to help you find the best ways to enhance and build the most loving, dynamic, and refined relationship possible. As part of our work together, we ask both partners to bravely face themselves and take full responsibility for how they show up with their partners. It is here that the most transformative couples work takes place.
But You May Have More Questions About Couples Therapy…
Do you offer intimacy counseling?
If intimacy is waning in your relationship and you’re feeling disconnected, the couples therapists at by the willow therapy can show you how to restore the romance and connection that you used to enjoy. By utilizing evidence-based treatments that represent the gold standard of couples therapy, our goal is to help you work together to co-create the relationship and life you desire.
We can’t seem to stop arguing. Can couples therapy help us?
When effective communication between you and your partner breaks down, your relationship can quickly deteriorate. Our counselors offer couples research-driven skills and tools for better communication. We also help you with neuroscience-based modalities to soothe your nervous system as we address and heal your core wounds.
What if we’ve already decided to separate or divorce?
Unlike traditional couples therapy, the short-term Discernment Counseling we offer provides you with a clear-cut method to decide whether separation or divorce is the best option for you at this juncture.
Discernment therapy sessions are structured so that each of you meets with your counselor both individually as well as together to discuss and consider the three paths you can choose. Path one is keeping the marriage status quo, path two is moving forward with separation or divorce, and path three is committing to six months of couples counseling. At the end of Discernment Counseling, you will have a clearer understanding of the best path forward.
You Can Grow Closer And Deepen Your Love And Affection
Healing the wounds of your relationship can bring you closer together than ever before. If you would like to find out more about couples therapy, please visit our contact us page or call (303) 335-0215 to schedule a free 20-minute phone consultation.
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