Couples Therapy

If you and your spouse actively want to improve your marriage, I can help you look at your areas of relational strengths and weaknesses. Often, having children can change the trajectory of a marriage. Consider these facts:

• Women are more biologically oriented toward the nurture of children, and often make children their priority.
• Men are more biologically oriented toward the provider role, and often become more entrenched in their work.
• In today’s world, these roles may be reversed, and in same sex couples, they may look and be lived somewhat differently.

Given the needs of children, and both parents’ commitment to nurture and provide, marital relationships are often neglected, or minimally, not “attended to” or energized. Parents use their positive energy to move into the “business of raising a family,” and in the process can begin to experience disappointments and frustrations with their spouse.

Couples therapy focuses on issues of communication and intimacy. To do marital work, you need to commit time and energy to make the marital relationship a priority. Together we can look at the spoken or unspoken “marital contract” and the causes of marital tension, that commonly include issues of:

• money & employment/unemployment
• unbalanced power and control
• parenting & extended families
• social and community life
• addictive behavior & mental health issues
• intimacy and sex
• unspoken disappointments and angers
• productive/non-productive arguing

If you want to work on rebuilding marital trust and healing from an affair or other marital indiscretions, I can help you look at the reasons for you or your spouse having originally put your needs outside the marriage, and assess what is needed to maintain marital commitment and rebuild trust.

Maplewood is a wonderfully diverse community. I am experienced in dealing with diverse ethnicities and issues of same sex couples.