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How I Help Couples
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I help couples turn arguments and disagreements into opportunities for intimate and collaborative conversations that strengthens their relationships. As your therapist, my ongoing internal question is, “How do I help this couple have an intimate conversation about their present dilemma?” Collaborative Couple Therapy will encourage your understanding, acknowledgement and expression of leading edge feelings with your partner. Leading edge feelings are the authentic hopes, desires, fears and vulnerabilities we all feel at any particular moment but often get lost or poorly expressed during conflict. Leading edge feelings are what is most “alive” or relevant for each person in the present moment. By learning how to understand and then express these feelings without blame or judgement, even arguments become an opportunity to deepen emotional intimacy by permitting ourselves to reveal our hidden hopes and sometimes haunting feelings.

CCT asserts that most relationship problems emerge from a loss of voice: An inability to adequately express one’s leading edge feeling. CCT attributes loss of voice to a lack of entitlement from freely expressing these authentic, vulnerable feelings due to self-critical beliefs. Inhibited from acknowledging uncomfortable feelings like shame, anxiety and self-doubt (and forgetting to express one’s hopes and desires) during conflict, people often resort to fighting with or withdrawing from their partners.

My foundational task as a CCT therapist is in helping you and your partner have intimate conversations about your problems through relating with each other as allies and confidants. In a collaborative conversation I help you and your partner talk with each other as if observing the problem from a platform, suspended high above the fray, looking down at the situation and people with compassionate curiosity, awareness, and reflection. To facilitate these conversations, I often speak for one of you at strategic moments (called doubling) to model and promote an intimate platform conversation.


For more information on marriage couples counseling please use my contact page so I may answer any questions you have.