Couples are navigating feeling connected in their relationship, building trust, and growing together through transition, trauma, or grief. Sessions may explore:
- Intimacy interventions
- Mindful, empathic listening
- Trauma-focused work
- Love-mapping
- Conflict management
- Relationship timelines
- Attachment-styles
Anxious Attachment
- Fear of abandonment
- History of abandonment trauma, neglect
- Requests frequent validation
- Loose/enmeshed boundaries
- Fluid sense of self/difficulty accessing self
- Indecision
- Pursuing response
- Emotional dysregulation/fawn survival response
- Stability based on how partner is doing
Avoidant Attachment
- History of invasive partner or parents including trauma
- Strong (rigid) boundaries
- Withdrawal response/Pursued
- Emotional shutdown/freeze survival response
- Decisive/authoritative
- Trusting feels risky
- Vulnerability feels unsafe or humiliating
- Emotional phobias
- Unaffected by partner’s moods; fear of partner’s moods
Disorganized Attachment
- A mix of avoidant and anxious attachment styles
- Inner turmoil and chaos
- Push and pull, love and hate, ambivalence and confusion
Secure Attachment
- Flexibility
- Trusting that one can move through difficulty into safety again
- Stability rooted in self versus external circumstances
- Able to gauge and respond to external circumstances while staying rooted in self
Common stressors for couples are balancing the business of daily life with quality time together, managing personal mental health, trauma-symptoms, acclimating to the demands of parenting, and/or reconnecting through physical intimacy. Conflict in relationship is inevitable. The question is, how can you navigate conflict to reduce pain? How can you use that tension to power what brings you both a sense of joy and fulfillment?