One of you lies awake wondering whether this is already past saving.
The other one believes things are hard right now and will settle down eventually.
Neither of you has said that out loud to the other.
By the time a couple calls me, most have done therapy before. Individually, together, or both.
Take turns. Use I-statements.
And in the middle of a hard week, none of it reaches the part of you that got hurt.
Emotionally Focused Therapy is a research-backed approach built around the emotional bond between you and your partner, developed by Dr. Sue Johnson.
Anger and silence are the surface weather.
Fear, sadness and longing sit underneath, and those are what I go after.
Communication skills hold once the feeling underneath them has somewhere to go.
You’ll tell me about the argument, and I’ll be watching for the turn in it.
The moment one of you goes flat. The word that made the other one’s voice climb.
That’s where the fear lives, and that’s where I’ll take you back.
Your first sessions look backward, at what each of you absorbed about love and safety long before you met.
I’m trained in EFT.
By the second session I’ve usually mapped how you both move when things get tense: who pushes toward, who pulls away.
Some couples start with Prepare and Enrich, a formal assessment you each take separately.
It covers your communication, your conflict style, your money and your parenting.
What comes back is written: where you already agree, and where you don’t.
Before anything else, the fighting has to come down.
As long as you are enemies of one another, you won’t be able to make progress.
I say that to couples early, and I mean it as a sequence rather than a scolding.
Reconnection comes after, once it’s safe enough to tell each other what’s actually going on underneath.
Where there’s been infidelity or years of accumulated hurt, the marriage you had doesn’t come back.
What comes next is a new marriage between the same two people, with a new identity and a new chapter in your story.
There was a reason it was this person and not someone else.
You’ll come down from an argument without me in the room.
“I was afraid.” “I felt unseen.”
Those sentences start showing up where “I was just mad” used to be, and empathy lands where accusation did.
The last stage of this work happens outside my office, in an ordinary week with no session in it.
My office is in Blackwood, and I work with couples online across New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
I offer a free initial phone consultation, and I’ll be honest with you on it about whether this is work I can help you do.
Call me today at: (856) 395-9536. Or write to me at aliveandwelltherapy@gmail.com.
This is your story. I’d be glad to help you write the next part of it.
A house divided against itself can’t stand. You’ve been living inside the proof of that for a while now, and somewhere along the way you stopped expecting the rest of the sentence to be true.
The rest of it is true. A house with two people standing on the same side of it will hold up under things that would have flattened it before. That is the whole aim of the work: get the two of you on the same team, and then let the two of you go after the actual problem.
When you and I talk, I’ll tell you plainly what I make of it. I’d rather be useful to you than agreeable.
Write to me at aliveandwelltherapy@gmail.com, and we’ll set up a consultation.