Relationship Intensives Offered

Four Hour ‘Kick-Start’ Mini-Intensive

This type is geared toward teaching you more about how to better understand your underlying struggles and how to begin addressing them on your own. This type of mini-intensive is a fantastic way to get a strong start in weekly couples therapy if you opt for that. 

Trauma Recovery

Unresolved trauma for one or both partners can act like an invisible anchor holding couples back. There is far more to say about why than I can put down here (see my blog entry about trauma for more specifics). Often, doing work focused on resolving past trauma is the key to moving a struggling relationship in the right direction. One thing that keeps people from addressing trauma is the fear (sometimes validated by experience) that they’ll end up simply re-hashing what happened and end up bringing those feelings to the surface, where they’ll be more intense and linger, unresolved. In a focused trauma resolution intensive, that will not happen. You will have to talk about the trauma once, but usually no more than once. The work we do will not involve continually recounting the bad past events, rather it will lead to them not holding you in their grip any longer

Affair Recovery

Infidelity is one of the hardest things for couples to navigate on their own. I tell all my affair recovery clients that the deck is stacked against you. If you’re in therapy you’re intent on salvaging your relationship. However, all around you you see and hear about people who’s relationships ended, almost always painfully, after and affair. You hear feedback like ‘once a cheater, always a cheater,’ or ‘if they really loved you they wouldn’t have cheated.’ That causes a misconception about what is possible if you apply yourselves to working through an affair. The couples who do that work, and persevere, don’t tend to talk publicly about it, so you never hear their stories. There are many, many couples who have worked through affairs and developed a far stronger, better, and more trusting relationship than they could ever have dreamed of.

Discernment Counseling

If you’re reading this, your relationship is in trouble. The decision to come to couples therapy is not one to be taken lightly. In many cases, one partner wants to do that work but the other wants to end the relationship. Couples entering therapy in that state of ambivalence have a very hard time making progress (imagine one person pushing the car but the driver leaving it in park the whole time). Discernment counseling is a specialized process to help you each determine which of three paths to take in your relationship. You can either leave things exactly as they are (no one wants that), called Path One; choose to end the relationship, called Path Two; or choose to pursue couples therapy, called Path Three. Whichever choice you make will be well informed and understood. If you choose Path Two, you’ll proceed with ending the relationship in a way that allows for a clear divorce narrative. This leads to a much more harmonious split and is tremendously helpful for moving into a coparenting situation. If you choose Path Three, you’ll enter couples therapy with very specific understanding of what you have signed up to work on, and will be very well set up for success.

Again, if you’re reading this your relationship is in a difficult spot. You both likely feel a great deal of pain, hurt, and perhaps doubt that things can get better. I can’t promise you any specific outcome, but I can promise you that regardless of your situation, there is hope. I’ll be happy to help you find that hope and learn how to move toward it. The outcome of good couples therapy is usually a relationship that is stronger, healthier, and happier than either of you could have imagined.