Couples Therapy

Improve Your Relationship with Couples and Marriage Therapy

Couples and marriage counseling can help you strengthen your emotional connection as you learn to better understand yourself, your partner, why you are struggling as a couple, and what you can do about it.

You might be wondering…

  • What would couples counseling look like?

  • Is it too late to save my romantic relationship?

  • Do we really need professional help?

Marriage & Couples Therapy

If you are considering marriage and couples therapy, you most likely have a list of things you wish were better (or at least different) in your relationship. You may even have a specific list of things you wish your partner would do differently or something your partner has done to hurt you—but feel that emotional injury (i.e. attachment injury) to the relationship has never been adequately repaired . You may feel distant, resentful, jaded, bitter, checked out, insecure, unloved, undervalued, or just bored and unfulfilled.

I try to focus on getting your romantic relationship back on track. With so many external stressors and responsibilities like work, finances, family, and friends, it can be overwhelming to try to balance everything—let alone carve out time to work on your romantic relationship. But if you feel like you're losing yourself, your partner, or the relationship—then it might be time to consider couples counseling.

I will help you look at yourself, your partner, and your relationship in new ways—so that you can gain confidence and clarity about the next steps toward finding healing in your relationship. I have advanced training (PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy and AAMFT Approved Supervisor) in helping couples strengthen, restore, and build relationships that last and are worth wanting

A part of you might think that couples and marriage counseling seems intimidating, but it can be an empowering experience to get some direction on how to enrich your relationship. You and your partner might feel stuckness—unable to move forward or get past old hurts and/or feeling neglected—this is a very common experience in different phases of romantic relationships. Every long-term relationship will feel strain at times, and couples often find themselves out of sync with one another. But. It doesn’t have to stay that way.

Do you find yourself stuck in a negative emotional or communication cycle?

  • Do you avoid each other or certain conversations because you know nothing good ever comes from those conversations?

  • Do everyday conversations instantly turn instantly into defensiveness, criticisms, bitter arguments, or personal attacks?

  • Do one or both of you take things personally more often than not?

  • Do you end of assuming and assigning your partner with the worst motivations for their behavior?

  • Do you feel like you're spinning your wheels, that you never make any progress on resolving the important issues that divide you?

  • Are you afraid you’re living more like roommates, or have you been living like roommates for years?

  • Do you no longer feel connected and wonder what happened to the intimacy you used to share?

  • Do you find the frustration and lack of patience you experience in your relationship is spilling into other areas of your life?

  • Do you feel stuck and unsure if there is a way forward?

  • Has the revelation of an affair turned you and your relationship upside down?

  • Do you wonder if it’s too late for your relationship, or if there’s just too much hurt to work through?

All of these concerns (and more) can be addressed and overcome in couples counseling, if both partners are willing to self-reflect and work on improving the relationship.

Still Not Sure if Couples or Marriage Therapy is Best for You and Your Partner?

If you find yourself asking the questions mentioned above, then couples counseling might be the right path forward for you and your partner. Whatever the issues troubling your relationship, I most commonly hear partners who feel desperate for better communication to work through misunderstandings and hurt in their relationship.

Often couples present with a negative conflict pattern that is usually a cycle on repeat—and usually, both partners are doing something significant to perpetuate that cycle. If you’re thinking about your own relationship patterns, you have probably tried what feels like a million different ways to curb this cycle, sometimes perhaps even going to extremes like the silent treatment, yelling to drown your partner out, or just trying to avoid certain topics forever. Unfortunately, many of the tactics partners use when they feel desperate are ineffective and often harmful to the relationship.

We work with couples to help them understand ineffective and negative conflict patterns and provide each partner with a new level of awareness of how to change those patterns. We often hear partners discuss specifics of what they feel their partner is doing wrong, which is normal and makes sense, especially if you feel hurt or rejected. We strive to help our couples learn ways to better understand their partner’s pain and unmet desires and become more self-aware about their own ineffective reactions to their personal pain and unmet desires. In better understanding your conflict cycle, emotional pain, insecurities, fears, and emotions, you and your partner will be better able to work through issues using the skills our clinicians will help you develop.

So What Can Bryan do to Help?

Hopefully, after your first or second session, we will have a clearer understanding of what you and your partner are doing to inadvertently keep your ineffective and negative conflict cycle alive and well. After getting clearer on your ineffective patterns, you basically have two options:

Option 1: Focus on Your Partner's Role

You can try and remind your partner of their misdoings whenever you see them happening, and hope that your partner magically changes. This assumes that if your partner can change their bad habits, THEN our dysfunctional cycle will be fixed…because they are “more” at fault, and after they stop what they are doing, you also will magically stop repeating your own bad behavior. In other words, your bad behavior only came into existence in reaction to something your partner did to upset you—and if they would only stop what they are doing, then our relationship would be just fine.

Option 2: Focus on Your Role

You can try and focus on yourself and the role you play in fueling the conflict in your relationship, and hope and trust that your partner will do the same. You can try and remain invested in your own growth and change, recognizing that you will be much less likely to change if your partner is forcing you to… versus you choosing to make these changes.

Honestly, I only work with Option 2. Why? Simply put—I  believe that humans need to be personally invested in their own growth and change. When our partners try to demand that we change or always point out what is wrong with us, we likely become defensive and/or hurt—which becomes its own dysfunctional emotional cycle. But, when each partner is in charge of their own self-improvement, and then they work on fighting the pattern, instead of fighting each other—and the changes that take place tend to be longer-lasting. Thus, I encourage my clients to see their dysfunctional pattern (not their partner) as the enemy, which means each person is responsible for their behavior (not their partner’s behavior!).

I believe that each of us can contribute to the goodness in our relationships (after all, how did the relationship grow in the first place?), and we also have a part to play when things aren’t going as well. I’ll help you understand your unhelpful and ineffective patterns and the ways that you each contribute to these predictable patterns. We will then develop the mindset and tools to create new, more effective, and preferred patterns and ways of communicating that lead to deeper connection and intimacy.

I will work collaboratively with each of you to start self-work within your partnership to explore what areas you are willing to try and change.

What’s another name for self-work?

  • Self-improvement

  • Self-confrontation

  • Increasing self-awareness

  • Self-discovery

What should I aim to learn about myself?

  • What annoys me and why?

  • What hurts me and why?

  • What things am I doing as a partner that pull me away from being the best version of myself?

  • What is some of the hardest things for me to do in this relationship?

  • What am I most afraid of specific to this relationship?

  • What am I most insecure about?

  • How do my insecurities show up?

  • What negative assumptions do I make about my partner?

  • Which of these things did I start practicing or witness from my family of origin?

What Bryan will be doing:

  • Helping you clarify your values, growth areas, and goals

  • Noticing patterns in your relationships—and helping you explore the unmet emotional needs often driving these patterns.

  • Untangling those patterns to help you see the forest for the trees.

  • Meeting you where you’re at, but pushing you to grow

  • Helping the partners mutually attend to and repair the unresolved emotional hurt that drives these dysfunctional patterns.

  • Teaching you some new communication guidelines and skills

  • Helping you develop an increased capacity to self-soothe, stay calm, and be the best version of yourself—even when you are heated

How Couples Therapy Works with Bryan

My Process

The ineffective patterns we develop in our relationships aren’t created overnight—and neither are new, more effective, and connecting patterns. Most couples find that it takes a minimum of 3 months of meeting weekly or bi-weekly before permanent changes take place. There is no microwave setting for restoring a relationship.

Step 1: ID Negative Conflict Cycles

I always start from a place of curiosity. I want you to teach me about the complaints that you have about the patterns that you see, and from whence you think they came into being. I’ll want to know about your family of origin—specifically about the ways your parent(s) resolved conflict and showed affection, as well as what you came out of your family believing about yourself. The initial couples therapy session is 2 hours, because I want to front-load the process of me learning about your negative emotional and communication cycles, and where they might have originated.

You ever wonder why your family is so good at pushing your buttons? It’s because they installed them! And when you leave your family of origin with unresolved tension, then you’ll undoubtedly remain sensitive to those SAME lingering issues when they pop-up with your romantic partner, roommates, children, etc. Because that old family stuff follows us, and oftentimes we inadvertently end up battling our same family of origin issues “by proxy” in our other relationships.

We often repeat the same dance steps we observed in our family, and inadvertently carry that particular type of “Macarena/Foxtrot/Do Si Do” into the world. So by thoughtfully, intentionally, and directly leaning against that learned familiarity, you can interrupt that well-trodden pattern (perhaps a generational pattern), and create new pathways in your relationships. And as couples move toward a deeper understanding of the pain, fears, and insecurities that feed into these cyclical behaviors which drive the conflict, we start untangling the patterned intricacies in your relationship.

Step 2: Determine the Path Forward

It is at this point where you and your partner start to identify where you personally can make changes to decrease conflict. This will provide a path forward to by changing communication patterns, attending to emotional wounds, and intentionally fighting those old patterns (not each other!), so that you and your partner can work to increase positive connecting moments with each other.

Step 3: Build Your New Skills

Once you and your partner feel like you have an understanding of what you can personally do differently to decrease conflict, we will likely work in a combination of individual and couples therapy sessions to build skills around how to communicate about strong emotions such as anger, betrayal or hurt. This includes gaining a deeper understanding of the type of partner you want to be, where you personally want to improve, and establishing goals for yourself that you work on together with your partner. As both partners actively work on smoothing out their rough edges, the relationship dynamics can start to change in drastic and positive ways. I believe the persistence of small changes makes a big difference—and I’m here for it!

Couples Therapy — The Next Step

Take Your Next Step

If you and your partner are ready to get back on track, then it’s time to take your next step. Talk to your partner to figure out whether or not you think Bryan might be a good fit for you, then contact me for a free consultation—and if you still think we might be a  good fit, then we’ll set up a time for your first couples counseling session. (If I’m not taking any new clients, I am happy to refer you to some of my esteemed colleagues.)

My Rate

My therapy hour rate (50-55 min) for couples counseling is $200. Visit my FAQ page to learn more.

Contact me today for a free 20-min consultation. I’m here to help.