Great Couples Counselling in Milton, ON. Therapy to heal relationships.

Intimate relationships can be the most rewarding, and at times, the most painful relationships we experience. Couples often engage in pattern like communications which prevents them from expressing the love and tender emotions they feel for one another on a deep and intimate level. The goal of couples therapy is to enable partners to reconnect and express themselves, stepping outside of negative interaction cycles. Couples therapy helps willing participants to feel heard and understood by their spouse. Learn to listen with your heart and find each other again.

Our most intimate relationships are where we are often challenged the most to grow. Much of my work with couples is helping each person feel entitled to their feelings and feel able to advocate for their needs within the relationship. So often we have expectations of how our partner or spouse is supposed to be, how we are supposed to be with them and there are unspoken expectations to navigate between us. These assumptions can easily lead to very destructive patterns that we act out with the person we want to feel the closest to. Our work is to strengthen ourselves from the inside out so that we can meet our partner "full of ourselves" and then find ways to be together that are a win win!

Over the course of your relationship, you are going to face its ups and downs. Learning how to meet all that life may throw at you, together as a couple and grow stronger in each experience are just some of the many benefits of couples counselling I provide. I help you develop the tools you need for when your relationship goes through a tough time. You'll learn how trust and open to your partner and feel safe, how to respond to your partner's needs during the good and the bad times, keep moving forward and blooming as the time goes by.

My approach is to help people recognize that relationships are two-sided and understand how each individual contributes to the couple’s dynamic. With that understanding, we work toward reaching a win-win situation, aiming to restore the satisfaction of the relationship. Together, we create a safe space for you to grow past the areas of “stuckness” -- that is, the old patterns that are learned when we are young and are brought to our current relationships. This is true for all of us. Therapy enables us to form new and healthy attachment patterns that are nourishing and nurturing, providing opportunities for new growth and satisfaction.

Dr. Van Blyderveen offers Emotion Focused Therapy for Couples. This approach is evidence based and has a greater success rate than traditional couple's therapy. Therapy will focus on improving communication through creating and strengthening your emotional bond with one another. During therapy sessions Dr. Van Blyderveen will guide you and your partner through emotional conversations with one another with the goal of improving closeness, connection, and acceptance of one another.

Being part of a couple comes with its challenges. The stress of everyday life can result in conflict that seems unsolvable. Couples counselling can help partners interact better, work through problems together and move past them. Collaboratively we will work on your therapy goals as a couple. Using emotionally focused therapy (EFT), we will look at skills and techniques of changing patterns of communication, interaction, and emotional connection.

Working with couples is assessed on a case by case basis in my practice. This is to ensure each person in the relationship wants to engage in couples therapy and establish if they believe I would be a good fit. I believe that each person deserves to be heard, seen and respected. Being in a relationship can be joyous and filled with tensions big and small. Working together, I will bring my unbiased professionalism to help you identify reoccurring issues, dynamics, and patterns that can be dysfunctional. You will learn communication and conflict resolution strategies to help restore compassion, trust and intimacy as well as rediscover the strengths in your relationship.

My Couples' 12 Emotional Needs Survey will allow you and your partner to compare your individual emotional needs in your relationship. You first must understand each other's emotional needs before you can dance in synchrony. Clients often are surprised to learn which emotional needs their partner rate as high or low priority, for example, conversation, admiration, affection, power-sharing, emotional closeness, and sexual intimacy. Excellent enrichment exercise for couples!

We do couples therapy differently..........If you go to our web site and read our history you will find we were in the worst of marriage relationships. We have now been married 42 years in 2020 and are having a great relationship with each other. The secret of our success was in how we dealt with the resentment and bitterness which was keeping the arguments alive constantly.

This service is not solely for romantic partners, which is why I use the term 'Relationship Counselling' and not 'Couples Counselling'. The relationship involved may be between co-workers, family members or two individuals in a professional or business arrangement. Relationship counselling involves guiding the members of a human relationship in order to enhance what is working, improve communication, and address areas of disconnect or conflict.

Couples Counselling Most relationships will become strained at some point and will begin producing maladaptive patterns. Relationship problems are rooted in our distorted egos, insecure attachment, emotional immaturity etc., which create to the many issues that develop for couples - infidelity, financial stress, poor communication, ill health, sexual divergence, household responsibility conflicts, addictions, etc., .... or just simply growing apart. Relationships can often be restored if help is sought soon enough. A counsellor can help reorient perceptions and emotions (how we look at a situation and how we feel about it) and assist the couple in adopting conscious structural changes.