Couples Counseling Archives

New Year And Relationships

January 1, 2023 by Sarah

New Year And Relationships. With every New Year, there are New Year’s resolutions. As a Marriage Counselor, the new year brings in couples who are either ending their relationships or couples who are starting new ones. The past year gave those who were thinking about staying or leaving a chance to think about whether or not it was feasible to stay. Those that are starting new relationships come into counseling to ensure they are putting forth their best efforts. The beginning of a new year is typically the time when couples either become engaged or separate and divorce. As a Marriage Counselor working with couples deciding whether to stay in their relationship or leave it, January 1st is an important deadline for ending relationships. Breaking up, separation, and divorce can be devastating. It can also provide the opportunity for self-examination and a New Beginning.

New Year 2023

New Year And Relationships. As a Marriage Counselor, I help couples nurture good relationships and let go of unhealthy ones. We may love our family, but, there are some we just don’t like and feel uncomfortable to be around. Friends who take advantage of and manipulate us aren’t really our friends. Toxic people create a bitter atmosphere that is not conducive to happy dispositions. I help individuals acquire the skills for self-care and teach others how to behave around them. Without tools for teaching others how to appropriately behave around us, how can real change occur? Asserting oneself is not always easy, but in the long run, can indicate self-love and help you feel more in control of your life.

The New Year brings about the end of relationships for some couples and the beginning for others. The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship is how well each person accepts responsibility and the willingness of each person to both reject and be rejected by their partner.

Stylish young couple fighting over luggage and playing tug of war with a large suitcase on an urban street In unhealthy relationships, two people try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves. A healthy one is when two people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other. Unhealthy relationships have poor boundaries. Boundaries help people distinguish between their own thoughts and feelings and others. They help individual’s own their “stuff” and allow other’s to see where their responsibilities lie.

Couple with unpacked boxes in new home

Healthy relationships consist of both partners being willing and able to say no to one another. Without being able to say “no” or the occasional rejection, boundaries break down and one person’s problems and values come to dominate the other’s. Conflict is normal in healthy couples and being conflict avoidant; not being able to hash out differences openly and vocally is a sure way for a relationship to deteriorate as it is based on manipulation and misrepresentation. Trust is also very important in any relationship. Healthy relationships experience conflict and should have good conflict resolution skills so communication can bring about the intimacy needed to want to remain in their couple hood. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits.

I also work with Neurodiverse Marriages where one partner is on the Autism Spectrum. Getting the communication tools to become less transactional and more relational is essential for harmony. Let this new year allow you the opportunity to learn about neurodiversity and how it affects your relationship. Being married to someone on the Autism Spectrum doesn’t have to be a life sentence to not being seen or heard. Learning how to communicate with one another makes for feeling less lonely.

If you have recently broken off an important relationship and are experiencing grief and loss or need help maintaining a new relationship please contact at (858) 735-1139 or email me at CouplesCounselorSanDiego.com to make sure you get the proper guidance to lead you to the maximum results.

As I am a certified neurodiverse couples counselor and neurotypical woman married to a man with Asperger’s, I know what is needed to move forward.

Neurodiverse Couples Coaching

March 27, 2022 by Sarah

Neurodiverse Couples Coaching.What’s the difference between coaching and counseling? Relational coaches focus on creating a new life path for the couple to achieve certain goals. Cognitive behavioral therapy and strategies are used in which to meet those goals. Counselors (therapists) focus on specific problems and look into emotional resolutions through a psychological lens, finding solutions to those specific problems, while making ‘healing’ as one of the main objectives.

Neurodiverse Couples Coaching

How are coaching and counseling similar? While coaching can be therapeutic, it is not therapy. This would also depend on the counselor’s approach; some approaches in counseling are similar to coaches in that they focus on solution-oriented change. There is room for both coaching and counseling in the service of helping others.

Coaching is a collaborative process with clients in a thought provoking and creative way that inspires them to maximize their desire to move forward or change behavior to reach their desired results.

Traditional marriage counseling is not effective with neurodiverse couples. The asperger (AS) partner, typically the husband, and neurotypical (NT) wife speak different languages and process information quite differently. The nuerodiverse coach acts as a translator interpreting behavior that may appear to be odd, unkind, and unloving to both partners. Sometimes asperger behavior can be misconstrued as narcissitic or emotionally abusive.

Neurodiverse Couples Couching

Most neurodiverse couples need coaching more so than counseling. Psychoanalyzing either partner maybe needed if underlying issues prevent moving forward. Some people have a difficult time with the objectives and may have some incapability factors. That is where individual counseling would benefit to see where and why they are stuck. The moving forward process with me, includes putting a system in place, acquiring tools, and implementation/exercising those tools. The couple states what they want for more harmony and we talk about what that looks like behaviorally.

In between session I coach the AS partner to follow through with what he has committed to and exercise being more relational than transactional. Just like be coached in soccer or basketball, there are certain “plays”/behavior that are given as a directive to the AS partner so the NT partner can feel an emotional connection. Learning a new language isn’t easy but with practice and getting positive results make it worthwhile.

For more information on Neurodiverse Couples Couching and my fees please send me your email address.

We Are Products Of Our Childhood

March 20, 2022 by Sarah

We Are Products Of Our Childhood. We see the world through personal experiences from childhood and behave accordingly. Do you have a difficult time managing your emotions? I have clients who can’t manage their emotions because they don’t know what they are. Instead, they act out through unattractive behavior, which makes them look and feel bad. We all have a narrative we created by what happened and what didn’t happen while growing up. This narrative, I sometimes refer to as the”cartoons” in our minds stir up uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, anger, and fear. These cartoons are made up of what our “inner child” thinks and feels. The inner child is who you are from birth to seventeen years, whose experiences of embarrassment and humiliation get the adult you in trouble. Our inner child still exists within us. Despite our chronological age, the inner child sometimes causes us to revert to a younger emotional age in order to manage life’s stressful situations. In essence, we revert to a lower emotional maturity, which can seriously throw our lives off balance and affect our dearest relationships.

We Are Products Of Our Childhood

The inner child often carries and conceals negative childhood experiences, and our adult selves, regardless of how emotionally developed we think we are, frequently need help addressing and resolving childhood traumas, wounds and abuse. This trauma not only affects your primary relationship, but all your relationships.

Inner child wounds:

Abandonment – feels left out; fears being left; hates being alone; co-dependent; threatens to leave; normally attracts emotionally unavailable people.
Neglect – struggles to let things go; has low self-worth; gets angry easily; struggles to say “no”; represses emotions; fears being vulnerable; normally attracts people who don’t appreciate them or make them feel “seen”
Trust – is afraid to be hurt; doesn’t trust themselves; finds ways to not trust people; feels insecure and needs lots of external validation; doesn’t feel safe; normally attracts people who don’t feel safe
Guilt – feels “sorry” or “bad”; doesn’t ask for things; uses guilt to manipulate; is afraid to set boundaries; normally attracts people who make them feel guilty

Things Your Inner Child Needs To Hear:

It’s not your fault when other people are in bad moods
It’s okay to feel
You’re a good person and I love you
You are worth protecting
You’re not alone; I’m with you
You are beautiful and loved
What happened to you was not your fault

What you can do to heal your inner child:

Acknowledge your inner child
Listen to what your inner child has to say
Write a letter
Give meditation a try
Learn to do some breath work
Bring back the fun parts of your childhood
Talk to a therapist trained to do “inner child” work

When needs for love, recognition, praise, and other types of emotional support go unmet in childhood, the trauma that results can last well into your adult life.

But it’s never too late to heal. By learning to nurture your inner child, you can validate these needs, learn to express emotions in healthy ways, and increase self-compassion and self-love.

For more information please contact me at CouplesCounselorSanDiego.com or (858)735-1139

My Perspective Your Perspective

June 27, 2022March 13, 2022 by Sarah

My Perspective Your Perspective. No one is right or wrong in their perspective, but both partners often feel misunderstood and rejected or judged and criticized for their opinions and beliefs. Depending on how your family systems operated parents are either supportive and validating or judgmental and critical. Parents do the best they can based on what was role modeled to them in their own family of origins. Often times criticisms were used to try and motivate their children so they become successful. If this isn’t obvious to being counterproductive, please take an effective parenting class.

My Perspective Your Perspective

Anyone who has been in a relationship knows the power of perspective. Good communication is key for being able to share because being able to see a situation from someone else’s eyes helps with being able to show empathy and make a connection. As a marriage counselor, I help couples appreciate how each sees situations. Who’s to say one way is better than another? When working with neurodiverse couples in therapy, one of the key elements is helping each partner understand the concept of different yet equally valid perspectives.Who’s to say there is only one way to look at things? I believe a person’s perspective is valid. In couples counseling, the husband and wife are both correct. I also interject that my own perspective is correct. Meaning perspectives are correct for the person having them.

To be successful in relationships it’s imperative to be able to respect each other’s opinions. It helps to acquire tools for communicating that respect. A tool I developed for doing just that is a three-step process I call REV. This tool helps stabilize acting-out behavior to continue a conversation productively. REV (or, as I say in therapy, REV if up?) reduces defensiveness with connection to allow space for a healthy resolution.

REV creates an emotional connectedness needed for intimacy when having normal conversations.

The three steps are as follows:

Do Reflective listening – mirror back the words you heard from your partner
Show Empathy
Validate.

The process of using REV makes conflict easier to discuss. Showing empathy for feelings and validating each keeps conversation neutral enough to come to a resolution and deescalates potential volatility. Using REV in conversations, with no conflict present, makes for a feeling of being seen and heard, which leads to a connectedness otherwise not developed. In other words, REV can make all the difference between staying calm and collected and starting WWIII.

Healthy couples know how to show each other empathy when feelings are shared. Healthy couples know how to validate each other’s thoughts, opinions, and perspectives. If you cannot or will not appreciate each other’s perspective, power struggles can exist which makes for a downward spiral which may put distance between the pair.

If you’d like more information on the REV tool and how it manages conflict please contact me at CouplesCounselorSanDiego.com or call me at (858) 735-1139.

Recovering From An Affair

March 6, 2022 by Sarah

Recovering From An Affair. Infidelity can destroy a marriage. It can also provide an opportunity to seek the silver lining that leads to a radical marriage upgrade. Depending on what you learned about healthy relationships and what it takes to be in one, acting out behavior is a symptom of the problem within the relationship. When thoughts and feelings are not expressed they can be acted out behaviorally, looking like an adult tantrum. Not effective and can feel embarrassing once you snap out of it. Poor boundaries and unresolved inner child trauma can lead to making poor choices. Engaging in an affair is a conscious choice even when alcohol is involved. That’s why it is difficult to work through.

Recovering From An Affair

The betrayal of trust and sexual infidelity require much talking together to heal. On such a sensitive topic, it is imperative that couples acquire especially strong cooperative dialogue while proceeding with caution in affair recovery. Recovery after upsetting events is a skill set that all couples need. One they especially need to utilize after the trauma of an infidelity. There is good prognosis for full recovery, even after long-standing or multiples affairs. Ideally, recovery ends up with both having learned and grown.

It’s important that the more aware the betrayed spouse becomes of his or her own role in the development of the affair, the more quickly he or she is likely to recover. I help both partners obtain the insight needed to understand why the affair happened where they both articulate their part in the breakdown of their relationship. I do this without judgement or criticism and reassure the hurt partner that whatever both contributed, the affair is never condoned.

Guidelines for recovering from an affair include:

Seek couple’s therapy with a therapist who specializes in affair recovery
End the affair (poor prognosis if affair continues)
Structure the communication about the affair
Acquire tools for communication
Being able to initiate conversation
Share thoughts and feelings
Ask for what you need and want
Have the ability to show empathy (different from having empathy)
Validate each other’s perspective
Reaffirm commitment to the marriage
Create transparency and rebuild trust
Exercise patience and reciprocation

As an Affair Recovery Specialist, I have written multiple blogs on affair recovery, affair prevention, and reasons to seek marriage counseling. The single best indicator of whether a relationship can survive infidelity is how much
empathy the unfaithful partner (affair partner) shows for the pain they have caused the hurt partner where the hurt partner is willing to find ways to manage overwhelming emotions so, as a couple, they can begin to sort out why the affair happened, and more
importantly, what needs to change so that it never happens again.

For more information about relationships and how I work with couples please visit my Blog at CouplesCounselorSanDiego.com/relationships or website at CouplesCounselorSanDiego.com

Not all marriage counselors are the same. I have been working with infidelity recovery for over 20 years and can say my couples are able to move forward in developing a new kind of marriage that works for both.

Please feel free to contact me at (858) 735-1139.