Couples Counseling 

Good couples therapy has many components.  However the following is a good description of my approach.

The Key: A Safe Place

When people feel alienated and estranged in their intimate relationships, each comes into the counselor’s office wondering, “Will I be understood? Will I be accepted?” Sadly, many people abandon couples counseling because they feel the process becomes unsafe – that the counselor is siding with their partner. This will not happen in my office. In my work, both people – with their needs, frustrations and fears - have value. Nobody is blamed in my office. Nobody is judged. It is my very strong belief that, unless both of you can feel accepted and safe with the therapist, you will not achieve what you came in for. After a meeting or two, you will both know if you have come to that safe place. Understanding and supporting each of you within the pain of your estrangement is my first, very important, goal of therapy.

Thinking About Systems

My initial education and training was in family systems.  This means I immersed myself in the study of couples and families - people who loved and related together.  A couple’s therapist trained in family systems has an eye for how people in conflict or stress react emotionally to one another.  “React” is a very important word, here.  Many times one person will say “I do this because you do that,” while the other might say, “I do that because you do this.”  It can be a very painful dance, and a third person, with an eye for the most common steps, coupled with compassion for each person and their struggle, can help a couple disengage from these kinds of hurtful interactions.  Being able to understand the steps of your own particular dance and how automatically you both snap into it when you are hurt, angry or distressed, will help you start to get control of the dance and to change the steps. In the words of Susan Johnson, who has strongly influenced my work, the dance becomes the enemy, rather than your partner.

A Solution Focus

Solution-focused therapy asks, “What has worked in the past?”  We don’t spend time looking for mental illness or pathology.  This is a type of “cognitive-behavioral” therapy that tries to bring our attention to what we are actually doing.  What is working and what isn’t.   It’s important to move away from the vague complaints (“He isn’t attentive enough” or “She’s too critical”) to understand what is being done or said and what we want to happen that is different.  One of the wisest statements I have heard is that a complaint needs to be accompanied by a request.  What is it, positively and specifically that you want the other person to do?  It’s got to be specific so that both of you will know when it is being done.  It has to be something you want them to do rather than to not do.  Couples therapy without having some component of solution-focus is like a painter with a great idea, beautiful pigments, a broad canvas, but no brushes.

John Gottman’s Insights

We are lucky in Seattle to have one of the world’s leaders in the understanding of couples - how they go wrong and how they go right – right here at the University of Washington.  Dr. John Dr. Gottman has studied couples for decades and his insights are central to how most couples therapists’ understanding a healthy relationship and constructive conflict with your partner (over sometimes really painful issues).  I incorporate much of Dr. Gottman’s observations and interventions into my own work.  The couple’s story of their meeting, the unfolding of their relationship, the bumps in their particular road and all the specific ways they have allowed themselves to become estranged from one another - these are all richly described by Dr. Gottman and form another pillar of the work I do - both in understanding you as a couple and working with you to devise avenues of healing.  What is particularly useful about Dr. Gottman’s work is that he provides many great bits of homework that couples can use to find deeper friendship and shared meaning in their relationship outside of the professional’s office.

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy

Probably the greatest influence on my work is Dr. Susan Johnson.  In her widely recognized and universally praised approach, called “Emotionally Focused Couple’s Therapy,” she has been able to create a very powerful, healing approach to supporting couples in distress.  She describes both the deep personal need that we experience with our closest intimate relationship - the individual piece - and the dance we join as a couple - the system piece. 

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy is one of the most rigorously studied approaches to couples therapy in the world. Research has shown that from 70-75% of couples who have experienced this approach have shifted from being distressed to recovery and over 90% show significant improvements. Follow-up research showed these improvements to be stable two years after counseling ended.

Major goals of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy are to:

• Expand and re-organize key emotional responses–the music of the attachment dance.

• Create a shift in partners' interactional positions and initiate new cycles of interaction.

• Foster the creation of a secure bond between partners.
  

This process, generally, takes between 5 and 20 sessions. For more information, you can visit the International Center for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy.