INDIVIDUAL & COUPLES PSYCHOTHERAPYFrom trauma to transformation
Individual Psychotherapy
Have you experienced this?
Having been sexually or otherwise used and exploited as a child, resulting in mental and emotional constriction that shows up as depression, anxiety, and disabling shame.
Suffering from your attempts to escape emotional pain and overwhelm, which may include addictions to food, alcohol, numbing drugs, and compulsive sexual behaviors.
Depression, anxiety, shame and addictions all deserve to be understood as attempts at self-care and self-protection under stress that end up costing too much, and call for better soutions
If this describes you, I can work with you to find better solutions.
Abuse survivors with any level of post-traumatic stress typically suffer from:
A fear of re-experiencing the vulnerable lack of power, consent, and control they experienced as children, even when the connection of this fear to early trauma is not conscious.
Interpersonal expectations of further harm after abuse and body memories that are easily and unpredictably triggered and sabotage healthy and satisfying relationships in adulthood.
A lack of self-worth and self-care that results from having been overpowered and mistreated
This lack of self-care leaves many abuse survivors trapped in just surviving — at the expense of feeling alive and able to love themselves and others.
“My husband and I saw Bill for marriage counseling. We went for a year and a half and it was totally worth it. It's been a couple of years since, and we are still doing fine. He was so wonderful for us both.”
- Anonymous
Couples Psychotherapy
My approach to working with couples
When I work with couples, I am the therapist for their relationship.
Though I communicate with each partner individually and may prescribe a few simple communication techniques, my primary role in the session is to create an experience that feels safe enough for each partner to risk communication they have been avoiding because it feels too vulnerable and dangerous.
When one partner (or both) is holding and attempting to heal trauma, I may work separately with that partner while supporting the other to be a silent, compassionate witness.
Being married or in any other committed partnership has a way, once established and stable enough to continue, of raising and intensifying difficult interpretations, beliefs, habits, and behavior patterns inherited from parents and others who could not resolve and heal them.
The pain and toxic projection of that pain is communicated less in conscious messaging - the ‘what’ of a couple’s interaction - than in the tone of delivery - the ‘how’ - which may perpetuate unconscious patterns of communication going back generations.
This toxic residue of what we are raised with is not what we expect when we get married or even partnered, but it is what brings most couples into therapy.
Why couples come to therapy
Here are some tools I like to use with couples
-
I have a particular fondness for the Imago Couples Dialogue, which I often facilitate practice within couples’ sessions as a core tool for communicating safely and respectfully outside therapy.
-
I also focus on what goes well and feels positive and hopeful because what we focus on in one another is what we tend to get more of, and if a couple’s communications are overwhelmingly negative — judgemental, accusing, blaming, attacking, disrespectful, controlling, on the one hand, or uncaring, disengaged and abandoning and the other — something very different has to take its place for the couple to heal.
-
I also work with partners to voice requests (rather than demands or ultimatums) which their partner needs to remain free to respond to in their own way and in their own time. When the requesting partner perceives that the other is attempting to respond positively to their request, they thank them so that the responding partner gets validation for what they offer and motivation to keep trying.