Relationship, Marriage, and Couples Counseling
Healing Personal Relationships
For many people their personal relationships, whether it is a marriage, long term partnership, dating, friendships, or family systems, can bring the most joy and pain. Thus, maintaining and developing healthy relationships is something well worth pursuing. That is why at Insight Into Action Therapy, we make couples therapy a top priority. Couples Therapy is not only about communication skills. It is also about understanding how each person shows up in the relationship.
No two relationships are identical and marriage therapy is rarely about one dramatic event. It is about gradual distance, quiet anger, or parallel lives that have continued too long. People frequently seek help for these fractures:
- Repeating arguments that never resolve and keep circling the same themes
- Communication that is either sharp and reactive or shut down and minimal
- Affairs, secrecy, or broken agreements around money, sex, substances, or digital life
- Differences in parenting style that create tension and triangulation
- Intimacy concerns, including low desire, performance anxiety, or mismatch in needs
- Resentment about division of labor, career decisions, or who carries more of the load
- In law and extended family dynamics that disrupt the couple’s stability
- Major transitions such as new children, relocation, retirement, or illness
Marriage counseling at Insight is designed for couples in these positions. The goal is not about blame or to “fix everything” in one conversation. We try to reduce the relationship conflicts and create an environment for vulnerability, understanding, and empathy. This is accomplished by identifying what is happening between you, within you, where it comes from, and what both of you are willing to be responsible and accountable for to change and improve the relationship.
Some problems are best addressed with both partners in the room. Others require space for each person to look at their own patterns without performing for the other. At Insight, we use both:
- Couples sessions focus on how you interact in real time. The work targets communication, conflict, trust, and shared decisions.
- Individual sessions can focus on attachment patterns, family of origin history, trauma, mood or anxiety issues, and personal choices that affect the marriage.
Relationship Repair
Relationships can be harmed by faulty interactions, whether intentional or non-intentional. For any couple, there are numerous stressors. When work, school, and family obligations put ongoing or undue pressure on an individual, it is usually their relationships that suffer the most. This can come in many forms. For couples, both intimate and platonic, stress and assumptions can be detrimental and create distance, and can lead to demands and fears. Fortunately, counseling is a simple means through which individuals can participate in relationship repair.
No matter the situation, we strive to help couples as well as families identify, challenge, and overcome the negative practices causing division or distance in their relationships. This kind of relationship repair then brings individuals into a closer, more honest understanding of themselves as well as their partner, friend, or family.
Therapies for Couples
We utilize the most common couples therapy approaches Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the Gottman Method, and Imago Therapy to manage crises, transform the conflict, while reconnecting and strengthening emotional bonds.
There are also times when we engage in conjoint couples therapy where both members of the relationship meet together with two therapists that each member is seeing individually to work on their relationship. While our traditional approaches incorporate individual sessions with the couples sessions, this is a more intensive approach that allows for a stronger alignment because outside of the couples therapy session, each member of the relationship is working with designated therapist on attachment, traumas, family of origin issues, or whatever else may be influencing the relationship. With two therapists, there are multiple perspectives which reduce defensiveness and feeling of isolation.
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Our Difference
Couples who choose Insight are usually looking for:
- Direct feedback and progress
- Clear links between past patterns and current behavior
- Practical tools they can use between sessions to change conversations and decisions
- Clinicians who are comfortable with high conflict, high pressure situations
Progress is measured by faster recovery after conflict, more honest conversations, and a clearer path forward, together or apart. Contact our office to schedule an appointment for couples counseling and begin structured work on how you and your partner relate.