Couples Therapy
Effective Couples Therapy to help you and your partner improve communication, resolve conflict, and build a loving, secure bond that lasts!
Most of us come to intimate, long term relationships with insecure attachment strategies that make it difficult to communicate, and connect deeply with our partner.
Our misguided ideas about how our partner or our relationship should be, can perpetuate anger, reactivity, withdrawal, and feelings of discouragement and defeat.
I can help you recognize the attachment strategies that hijack your relationship, so you and your partner can get free of your distress cycle, and rekindle the joy and passion that brought you together!
My Approach:
When I work with a couple I tailor my approach to their particular issues and difficulties.
My holistic approach integrates techniques from the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), Emotion Focused Couples Therapy (EFT), and Intensive Short Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), and Mediation skills for resolving conflict.
In our work together, I will help you both to:
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- Move away from a one-person psychological system where partners try to have their needs and interests dominate, but as a result both partners lose.
- Move away from a “either I do it all, or you do it all” mindset, and toward functioning as a team.
- Understand your own and your partner’s particular insecure attachment style (Are you a Wave or an Island?)
- Recognize your triggers, and the misguided, irrational assumptions that drive the distress cycle with your partner.
- Decrease reactivity by inhibiting your “dumb vagus” reactions, and use your “smart vagus” to stay calm, and communicate effectively.
- Understand the relationship dynamics that trigger your primitive brain.
- Strengthen your ambassador brain to negotiate agreements with your spouse, and avoid communication breakdowns.
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- Develop self regulation skills, secure functioning, and a resilient couple bubble.
- Put a stop to the damaging cycle of distancing, pursuing, shutting down, and repeat
- Learn to fight well!
- Have your own and your partner’s owner’s manual.
- Manage thirds (people and situations outside the relationship that compete for partner’s time and available energy) so you can invest in each other.
- Refrain from the toxic pattern of getting polarized and adversarial in the face of parenting issues.
- Re-ignite your passion and sexual connection.
- Bring humour, playfulness and relaxation into your relationship!
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Being in an over twenty year intimate relationship, I have genuine understanding and compassion for the struggles that my couples face.
I’ve walked in the trenches of relationship conflict, and I am equipped to guide you to resolve conflict, and nurture a secure and rewarding bond with each other!
