​Coaching for couples, whether married or not, is about pragmatic skills to move forward with healthy communication and interactions. It is a type of life coaching and isn’t focused on mental health challenges. However, there are times when therapy is necessary to help heal deeper issues. As a licensed psychotherapist and experienced life coach, I offer a unique blend of both approaches where appropriate.

Most people call on a marriage counselor or marriage coach only when a relationship crisis occurs. Others call on me to simply help them improve what they know is a valuable relationship. Some call seeking to address issues pro-actively, before they get married, or when conflicts arise. But for those who are in crisis in their marriage or intimate relationship, there are five distinct categories of emotional symptoms that often arise when a marriage or relationship is in trouble.

• Anger – directed either towards one’s partner or oneself, this may be a powerful block to effective communication when the anger turns into an ongoing and simmering resentment, rage, or a withdrawal from the relationship.

• Shame – marriage troubles can lead to feeling shame about the failure of the marriage. What will you tell your family and friends?

• Guilt – related to shame but includes feelings of being responsible for the marriage problems, with feelings of remorse.

• Sadness – marriage trouble can cause you to appear as simply being “off your game” or it can swell to a full-blown depression.

• Fear – in anticipation of the many challenging consequences of a failed marriage.

I am fully prepared to help you get through your current marriage crisis or to give you a “tune-up” on how to live within an enduring loving relationship. My top priority is to help you save your relationship in a place of safety where healthy communication and healing can take place. During our sessions, I focus treatment on three entities: you, your spouse, and your relationship. Each is an entity unto itself. To this end, I often break up sessions into individual as well as couples visits, sometimes splitting one session into both couples and individual segments.

I utilize Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), one of the best documented, most substantive, and well-researched approaches to couple counseling in the world today. Indeed, EFT, developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, stands as one of the best validated couples’ interventions in North America. Whereas other forms of counseling have been shown in studies to be only about 35 percent effective in healing relationships, EFT has achieved an astounding 75 percent success rate with couples.

 

A full 86 percent of couples report feeling happier in their relationships because of EFT. And the results have been shown to be long-lasting. EFT is an experiential, emotion-based, now-oriented process of helping couples become closer. It provides a road map, based largely on attachment theory, of helping couples who are lost in a painful and often lonely cycle to learn and experience a new and healthier pattern of interaction.
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Coaching for couples, whether married or not, is about pragmatic skills to move forward – in communication and in interactions.  It’s a subset of life coaching and is not focused on the past or on mental health challenges.  Sometimes, however, psychotherapy (also referred to as therapy and counseling) is required in order to help heal deeper issues for either of the partners separately and/or the relationship itself.  As a licensed psychotherapist and experienced life coach, I offer a unique blend of both approaches where appropriate.

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Lifetime TV Interview

See link at bottom of Home Page to view videos from my Lifetime Television interview as well as  other YouTube videos including Peeling the Onion, which shows how couples can go beneath the surface of their “stuck” cycles of bickering, arguing and withdrawal, to focus on the “core” issues rather than on the repetitive symptoms of the problem.