Great Couples Counseling in Spring Valley, CA. Therapy to heal relationships.

My approach to couples and marital therapy includes several components which are: relationship enhancement skills, communication and conflict resolution strategies, increased awareness of relationship needs and empathy development. It has been my expericence that when couples are committed to improving their relationship and apply the tools taught in therapy, they find that communication improves significantly and appear more motivated to meet the needs of their partner. As each person committs to meeting the needs of their partner it tends to generate good feelings and respectful behavior bewteen the partners, which can result in greater relatinship satisfaction.

I've been a licensed Psychologist for 30 years, been married for 30 years, and know both professionally and personally what it really takes to make a relationship succeed. I've worked with hundreds of couples to help them have happier, more satisfying relationships, turning tug-of-wars into teams that pull together. I'm practical, straight-forward and results-oriented. It may not be easy to be happy as a couple, but it's definitely possible. Let's work on it together, so your tomorrow will be happier than today..

There are countless models of healthy romantic relationships, from monogamous to polyamorous, and unique variations between partners. The scripts for dating and longterm relationships of our parents’ generations may not be applicable to your relationship, and there is no formal education in how to be a good partner or how to identify unhealthy relationships. But there is psychological research that shows that effective communication, emotional openness, intimacy, and other factors contribute to healthy relationships. Creating these conditions are skills that can be learned. I practice brief humanistic and emotion-focused therapy (EFT) to help my LGBTQ and hetero clients learn these skills.

Couples counseling is an area I specialize in and have helped couples repair and rebuild their relationships. I start with what are the goals that the couple wants to accomplish during therapy (usually repairing or strengthening their relationship). Next we look at each persons areas of strengths and weaknesses as well as their reasons for the difficulties in the relationship. I then help the couple through a "atonement, attunement and attachment" process that repairs and strengthens the relationship along with achieving the established goals of the couple.

Loving, successful relationships need to be carefully and skillfully nurtured in the following five areas: Emotional, Intellectual, Spiritual, Sexual, Financial. Couples who are ready to do ongoing work on their relationships are richly rewarded with a loving, meaningful and joyful life together. Committed relationships that have the possibility of morphing into long term relationships benefit greatly by being guided by the Gottman research on relationships as well as Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Premarital Counselling prepares a couple for a new stage in their relationship by identifying potential areas of conflict and strength and developing tools to create a strong foundation.