Couples Counseling in Marin and San Francisco

If you are finding that your relationship is at a crossroads it is time to seek the counseling that will benefit your partnership by giving you the tools you need to cultivate the relationship you want to have with your loved one. You may be experiencing some of the following:

• Excitement about your partnership or engagement and want to start off right by building a strong relational foundation with good communication skills.
• Feeling worried, disappointed, like something is missing in your relationship.
• Having repeated conversations that seem to go no where and make things worse.
• Something difficult may be happening - an affair, addictions, infertility concerns.
• Feeling distant or disconnected and ending up like roommates or best friends rather than life partners.
• Experiencing that your goals and values are not aligned with your mate.

A couple is made up of two individuals coming from two different family cultures. Each individual in the coupleship brings into the relationship their own needs, expectations and assumptions about how the relationship should be. Unacknowledged expectations are at the root of the difficulties most couples face together. I offer couples counseling that is action oriented and based on scientific evidence based research.

Your couples counseling begins with a warm welcome greeting to provide you both with the much needed emotional safety you need to trust the process of therapy. When you meet with me you will experience that I am empathic and non judgmental no matter how your story unfolds. I want you both to know that I understand how hard it is to make that first step in seeking a third party to help you along your path as a couple. Together we assess where your relationship is at this time. We discuss your communication styles, create an understanding of what each person is bringing to the relationship from your family of origins and begin hearing from you both about how you manage conflict.

Couples therapy I offer will provide:

• A stronger relationship foundation.
• Create a higher level of emotional safety with one another
• Build communication and listening skills that will increase the level of satisfaction and intimacy in your relationship.
• Identify your relationships strengths and areas of growth
• Learn conflict management skills that will decrease the amount of time it takes you to resolve a conflict and increase the duration of time between the conflicts you do have and will have in the future
• Strengthen the friendship between you.
• How to prioritize your relationship.
• Teach you how to sustain the changes you make in the couples therapy to last a lifetime.

In the years I have worked as a Licensed Marriage, Family, and Child Therapist the most common issues couples face are:

    - Ineffective/damaging communication
    - Repetitive fights and / or withdrawal
    - Problems with intimacy and trust
    - Feelings of betrayal
    - Questions about commitment
    - Desire for premarital counseling
    - Sexual difficulties
    - Substance abuse and codependency
    - Current life crisis and stressful life transitions
    - Cross cultural differences including religious differences
    - Parenting issues
    - Assistance with separation, divorce, dissolution of domestic partnership and co-parenting

I counsel couples who have just met and are beginning their relationship with one another, couples who have been long term partners, premarital couples, gay, lesbian and transsexual couples and couples who have been married for many years. As an experienced, supportive and interactive therapist with over 32 years experience I can help you with these concerns. Please call me at 415-515-7806 for a telephone consultation where I can answer any questions you may have or schedule your first appointment. I have offices in San Francisco located at 2182 Greenwich Street and in Marin County located at 119 Ward Street on old historic downtown Larkspur. Skype Sessions are available.