Counseling

Our Work Together

In our work together, we will address and work through your current struggles and historical resentments within a safe context.

Intake Process

Your first session is an intake session and focuses on your early family experience, including communication and conflict styles, and struggles you faced. Understanding your early history and the dynamics you grew up in helps me place your current challenges as a couple into the larger picture.

Session Structure

During other sessions, we explore and work through the pain points and challenges that you are currently facing. I move among roles of therapist, coach, facilitator, and psycho-educator, frequently proposing experiences, experiments, and container games that are similar to the issues that are negatively affecting you, so that you may relate to each other and the issue in a way that moves you forward as you are simultaneously acquiring knowledge, skills, and different ways of being with each other.

Interactive Regulation

An important part of our work together is somatic (relating to the body) in its focus, and we explore what happens when big emotions, like anger, frustration, or sadness come up. During these moments, it can be extremely difficult to regulate feelings, pay attention, and stay connected to each other. We often act out of our survival instincts, with automatic, lightning-fast reactions, which make it hard to stay present, understand, or empathize. We may not realize that we are responding reactively, and yet our partners are powerfully affected.

Together, we will work toward acquiring a deeper understanding of your automatic responses and how they affect your relationship. When you have developed the skills and are able to recognize and read your own tone and non-verbals and those of your partner, you may feel a new depth of connection.

The Couple Bubble: Emotional Safety and Security

Early in the work, we explore your current Couple Bubble, the protected space that includes the two of you, but that excludes everything else. Do you have each other’s back? What level of emotional safety are you currently feeling?

Vision, Principles and Agreements

Together, I will support you through the process of creating your couples vision and reason for being together as well as your set of principles and agreements that you co-create to strengthen your commitment to each other.

Office Set Up

In my office, we sit together on chairs with wheels that are arranged in a triangular formation, so that we are all able to see one another, and so that you are able to turn toward each other, look directly into each other’s eyes, and speak to one another while being face-to-face and eye-to-eye. For some of our experiments, I will ask you to roll your chairs closer or farther apart and to be in each other’s eyes.

Recommended Resources

I recommend the book or audio program, Your Brain on Love, by Stan Tatkin, and the book, Wired for Love, as well.