Couple’s Counseling
A happy, healthy relationship blossoms when each person feels secure in sharing their longings and needs without fear of rejection. Setting clear expectations, healthy boundaries, and trusting one another’s intentions creates the environment for your bond to strengthen and your love to deepen.
Relationships should be a safe haven where each person can express their feelings and needs, knowing that they are valued and loved. However, in the moments when you feel disconnected or fearful, established unhealthy behavioral patterns can be counter-productive to attachment and bonding. I use Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Intimacy from the Inside Out (IFIO is IFS for couples), which are short-term therapies to help each person better understand themselves and each other to form a more secure bond with improved communication.
In your journey, you will move from isolation to connectedness as you:
Identify issues of concern and set goals for the relationship you desire.
Shift focus from blaming your partner to seeing how each of you makes it difficult to respond with love and care.
Move from self-protection to openness by showing compassion and acceptance toward your partner when they share their fears, longings, and needs.
Celebrate your closeness and bond while also setting up strategies to address issues as they arise.
Recognize negative patterns such as nagging, disapproval, and withdrawal are behaviors rooted in unexpressed feelings of disconnection.
Move from alienation to engagement by being emotionally available, vulnerable, and bravely sharing your fears, longings, and needs.
Establish new communication skills and strategies to create new solutions to old problems. New ways of being and relating evokes new responses from your partner.
Research shows EFT as highly successful with 70-75% of couples reporting moving from distress to recovery and 90% making significant improvements.
Here Dr. Sue Johnson explains how Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy works
Love in the Time of Neuroscience By Helen Fisher
New York Times Feb. 7, 2014
Sue Johnson, a clinical psychologist and couples therapist states that “relationships are a basic human need and that “a stable, loving relationship is the absolute cornerstone of human happiness and general well-being.” To repair ailing partnerships, she has developed a new approach in marriage counseling called Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT, which she introduces in her book, “Love Sense.”
EFT draws on the work of the psychiatrist John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory, who argued that humanity has evolved a strong, physiologically-based attachment system that drives the infant to attach to the mother. In the 1960s and ’70s, he and the psychologist Mary Ainsworth put forth the idea that children develop one of three basic styles of attachment that they carry into their adult relationships. Secure individuals grow up knowing they can count on their primary caregivers, so they don’t obsessively worry that they will be abandoned by their partners. However, if one’s primary childhood caregiver is inattentive, unpredictable or abusive, the individual forms one of two “insecure” attachment styles. Anxious individuals worry constantly that they will be abandoned, so they cling to their partners, seeking reassurance. The avoidant, meanwhile, eschew deep connections to protect themselves from being dependent.
Sue Johnson believes EFT can help couples break out of patterns, “interrupting and dismantling these destructive sequences and then actively constructing a more emotionally open and receptive way of interacting.” She aims to transform relationships “using the megawatt power of the wired-in longing for contact and care that defines our species,” and offers various exercises to restore trust.
Intimacy From the Inside Out (IFIO)
IFIO (Intimacy From the Inside Out) applies Internal Family Systems (IFS) principles to relationships. The approach supports deeper connection by helping partners feel safer, more emotionally open, and more attuned to one another. Through IFIO, couples learn to interrupt negative communication patterns, access emotional vulnerability, and build more secure, authentic connections.
You don’t have to be in crisis to benefit!
IFIO can help couples at all stages of a relationship- whether navigating challenges while dating, preparing for long-term commitment, or well into marriage- it’s for anyone who simply wants a deeper connection.
Why is the IFIO approach effective?
- IFIO helps couples better understand the emotions and reactions that create conflict, distance, or misunderstanding.
- Many couples get stuck in re-occurring cycles — such as criticism, withdrawal,
defensiveness, contempt, or shutdown. IFIO helps identify the deeper emotions and protective responses underneath these patterns. - Rather than blaming or “fixing” one another, IFIO encourages curiosity, emotional understanding, and connection, creating a more compassionate way to navigate conflict.
- IFIO recognizes that previous relationships, family dynamics, and earlier emotional wounds can influence how people react in partnership.
What are the benefits of the IFIO approach?
- Do you struggle with emotional and physical closeness or vulnerability?
IFIO can help partners explore fears around intimacy, trust, rejection, or emotional safety in a supportive and non-judgmental environment. - Do you want to feel more connected and understood?
The model helps couples strengthen their emotional and physical intimacy by learning how to listen, respond, and relate from a calmer and more grounded place. - Do you and your partner want healthier ways to handle triggers?
Instead of reacting automatically during moments of stress or conflict, couples learn how to pause, reflect, and respond with greater awareness. - Is it difficult to rebuild trust after a betrayal or a period of disconnection?
IFIO can support couples working through a breach of trust, emotional distance, resentment, or difficult transitions in the relationship.
Why is IFIO so transformative?
IFIO is a non-pathologizing and collaborative approach to couples therapy
IFIO does not label either partner as “the problem.” Instead, it helps both individuals
understand the protective patterns that arise in a relationship and transform them into a shared experience of discovery that creates a secure bond.IFIO encourages personal growth as well as relational growth
IFIO encourages each partner to better understand themselves while also improving the relationship dynamic as a whole.
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