Relationship Counseling
Do You Want To Enrich The Quality Of Your Relationships?
Are you having trouble connecting in meaningful ways with your romantic partner, family members, friends, or colleagues? Do you feel stuck or unfulfilled in your intimate relationship and want a supportive, collaborative approach to improving your situation?
Perhaps you want to work on healing and confronting any feelings of anger, frustration, betrayal, or hurt that are getting in your way of making true connection. Maybe you simply desire to better understand yourself and the dynamics you bring to the table so that you can interrupt unhealthy relationship patterns that you feel trapped in.
Connecting With Others Can Be Challenging In Many Ways
For instance, you may yearn for greater intimacy and satisfaction throughout the spectrum of your relationships. You may struggle to set healthy boundaries or find yourself sacrificing your needs on behalf of your partner, career, or creative ambitions.
In romantic relationships, you may get angry or defensive easily—or quickly feel hurt or injured. You might have trouble expressing yourself and your needs. Or maybe you’re questioning your relationship, wondering if your partner is the right person for you.
Whatever brings you to therapy, I believe that counseling can help you better understand yourself, your needs, and the internal dynamics that influence your experience with relationships. Together, we can work on navigating conflict, improving communication, and achieving a greater sense of intimacy and satisfaction in your relationships with others.
Everyone Has Relationship Problems At Some Point
Connecting with others can be difficult, no matter how successful, confident, or loving a person is. Sometimes, relationship issues work themselves out on their own. Other times, many of us can use support for overcoming obstacles, achieving greater intimacy, and better understanding difficult feelings that emerge in relationships, such as anger and insecurity.
For many people, relationships are encumbered by patterns and expectations that can be difficult to break out of alone. Hurt, betrayal, and trauma from the past can all have a lasting impact on a person’s ability to connect with others. Some people feel generally satisfied in their relationships but seek greater intimacy, connection, honesty, energy, and spontaneity within their existing relationships.
Everyone Can Benefit From Working On Their Relationships
Unfortunately, our culture doesn’t always value personal vulnerability, which is incredibly important when it comes to human connection. Instead, we are often encouraged to abide by a code of rugged individualism—an unrealistic valorization of strength that prevents us from asking for help.
However, working with a relationship therapist can help you to slow things down, peel back the layers, and figure out what you feel and where those emotions come from. It gives you the chance to increase intimacy, identify what you truly want from relationships, and break any negative cycles from the past.
Relationship Counseling Is About The Broader You
Sometimes, discussing and confronting emotions can feel threatening—especially if they are painful. However, working with a relationship therapist gives you a calm and caring environment that helps contain your experiences. Together, we can support you to build a deep understanding of your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors in a space where you don’t have to feel threatened by those aspects of yourself.
In the process, counseling supports you in exploring what rests beneath any self-doubt, worry, or anger—addressing any underlying problems through the perspective of your relationships. Ultimately, I want counseling to increase your capacity for internal stillness, self-awareness, and deeper connections.
In time, I believe that therapy can help you become a more emotionally-integrated person and cultivate the relationships you seek in your life.
What You Can Expect From Relationship Counseling Sessions
Each person’s situation is different, so therapy can move in many directions. That’s why I like to take a fluid, organic approach to counseling, following the conversation’s thread wherever it takes us.
To get started, we can explore your relationships, how you feel in the relationships and beyond them, and what you would like to accomplish. We can work on feeling and expressing emotions, building intimacy, being more present in relationships, and attending to your needs—and to the needs of your partner. We can even explore aspects of your spirituality or faith and how that may play a part in your healing.
My goal is to help you understand and address deeper feelings and experiences that underlie your relational experiences, cycles, and concerns so you can feel more secure with yourself and at ease in your connections with others.
Some Of The Tools I Use In Relationship Therapy
Typically, my sessions are not structured in advance, as I use a number of therapeutic frameworks to tailor the healing process to each individual’s needs.
I work from a contemporary psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspective, drawing on relational approaches, intersubjective systems theory, Control Mastery, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), EMDR, attachment theory, and a range of other therapeutic strategies for achieving sustainable, comprehensive progress.
One of the most powerful tools that therapy offers is the sense of containment that it provides. It can grant you the feeling—the inner awareness—that you can experience emotions, explore thoughts, and move through the process of healing, even when it’s uncomfortable.
There are many pieces to any relationship, often including unhealthy patterns and automatic responses that can get in the way of happiness. However, once you start sinking into your emotional experience and become aware of underlying factors, this allows you space and freedom to interrupt those cycles.
When people want to work on their relationships, either because of pain, frustration, or the desire to deepen their connection, they often think of coaching or couples counseling. Those can be wonderful and very powerful resources.
However, working on your relationship in individual therapy can also be extremely helpful and meaningful (either on its own or in conjunction with couples counseling). So, whether you are having trouble recovering from a breakup, setting boundaries, or more broadly connecting with others, counseling can help you feel more secure and satisfied in yourself and your relationships with others.
Perhaps You Are Considering Relationship Counseling But You Still Have Some Concerns…
I don't know if therapy for my relationship is worth the time or money.
Doubt is a natural hesitation when it comes to therapy, but counseling can benefit your life in myriad ways—from supporting deepening your relationships and setting healthier boundaries to expressing yourself better and healing wounds from the past. It enables you to know yourself better and become more emotionally grounded and integrated. That, in turn, can lead to a more satisfying and authentic experience with yourself that carries over into your relationships.
I’m not sure where to start or what to talk about.
We can start by talking about whatever feels the most urgent or natural to you, whether it’s about the past, the present, or something on the horizon. It’s also okay to be quiet together. I believe that all paths tend to be connected, so we’ll cover everything we need to organically, no matter where or how we start. And together, we’ll get to where we need to be.
My relationship isn’t broken—I just want to breathe more life and excitement into it.
Counseling is a great tool for repairing relationships that feel like they are in trouble. However, it’s equally good for deepening connection, increasing intimacy, and cultivating greater satisfaction in relationships that generally feel good or intact.
Therapy is also about the broader you—understanding and addressing your feelings, experiences, desires, and dislikes. Through this collaborative, shared process of introspection and support, it is possible to feel more secure in who you are as a person and to breathe more life into your relationship.
Let Me Help You Deepen Your Connection With Others
If you are looking for greater intimacy, meaning, or connection in your relationships, I want to help. Please call 510-500-9722 for your free, 20-minute consultation to see how my empathic and holistic approach to counseling can help you find peace within yourself and your relationships with others.
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