After years of working with parents and families, it has become brutally clear that couples counseling is a critical piece of the puzzle in helping individuals, families, and children move toward healthier relationships. Whether you are married, coupled, dating, in a non-traditional relationship, or considering divorce or splitting up, couples counseling can help each individual involved work toward healing both within themselves, within the relationship, and with everyone their relationship touches.
Intimate relationships are difficult. (And if you are early in your relationship and considering pre-marital counseling and thinking that your relationship seems easy and good… just wait.) I am not being a Debbie Downer here, but rather, when we consider what we know about Attachment and how our intimate relationships end up being a proxy for every past relationship (especially with our early care-givers/ mom/ dad), we know that intimate relationships will inevitably stir up old wounds. You might be scratching your head and thinking “but couldn’t it just be that my partner is being a _?” Actually, no. While it may look like that, your therapist can help you see through the patterns, take charge of the pieces you have control over, and heal the wounds that are being stirred up by your partner’s behaviors and choices. The therapist, with their outside perspective, can see what you cannot. The therapist has the road map that seems so elusive to you when you’re zooming along, perhaps careening toward a crash.
We hear from many couples that their last therapist just let them fight the whole time. At Center Counseling, we are more interested in stopping the patterns than merely watching and observing them. While it may be important for your therapist to watch you and your partner ‘get into it’ in order to see how you interact, it is never productive to go to therapy for an hour a week to fight and feel more hurt. The goal is to heal alongside and with the person with whom you’ve chosen to live your life. The partner relationship is the most powerful place in which to heal. It is also why it hurts so much when it isn’t working.
We work with couples to:
- Deepen connection and heal old wounds (either from the relationship or from before)
- Shore up parent-dyads to help improve child behavior and model healthy, loving interaction
- Discern whether splitting up or staying together makes the most sense
- Build skills BEFORE the going gets hard (premarital counseling)
Our counselors use a variety of strategies and have attending trainings with Sue Johnson (Emotionally Focused Therapy), Stan Tatkin (PACT), Terry Real (RLT) and Esther Perel among others. Reach out to Evan to talk about which counselor and strategies may work best for your situation. We look forward to supporting you.
Learn more about our counselors who work with couples:
Call or text Evan at (406) 599-5355 to chat about what is going on and to schedule an appointment with one of our counselors, or send a message through the form below. We look forward to supporting your relationship.