Couples Therapy
Couple therapy can be a lot like individual therapy, meeting once a week more or less, learning to communicate and become intimate with yourself and your partner. It can be focused on managing children or step-children, or having a better sex life.
It can be instrumental and a lot like coaching – handling money or aging parents – negotiating desires that don’t fit together at the moment or any of the stuff of life that is not working well right now.
And couple therapy can be the most rewarding thing you do, empowering your partnership to be renewably supportive and challenging, the truly wonderful source of inspiration and personal growth that you might imagine it to be if a miracle happened. Intimacy, authenticity, self actualization can be goals in this sort of couples work. Some participate in couples therapy early and throughout their relationship or marriage, staying out of trouble and making the best of their lives together.
Sometimes the work starts in crisis, when there is high conflict over sex or money, infidelity or abuse – physical, emotional, sexual. Positions can become entrenched and it seems the worst of each of you faces the worst of the other. Sometimes the couple is just barely holding together by the time they get here, and intensive therapy is indicated. Intensive couples therapy requires commitment and hard work and makes sense when the stakes are high. I offer a program of 2 1/2 hour sessions.
Specific program design and scheduling requires initial 90 minute intake meeting.
The 2 1/2 hours sessions are split into two parts: a 50 minute hour with one of you, then 80 minutes with both of you together. When you return for the next session, the first hour will be with the one of you who was not with me individually the previous time. We will meet up to 3 times a week for 6 to 9 of these 2 1/2 hour sessions, and on a very limited basis, this can include Saturdays. It’s the only client work I do on weekends.
Maybe it’s over. With help, you can get through the unavoidable pain of this to a brighter future. You can minimize the financial cost and collateral damage. You can transform a potentially scarring experience to one of learning, development and personal growth.