The Couples Center is dedicated to providing a safe, positive and hopeful place for couples and individuals who wish to restore or enhance the love and intimacy of their relationship. Despite the special feelings that brought them together, in time, most couples have to deal with some loss of the closeness of being in love. They begin to face problems and disillusionments that differences inevitably bring. This is a natural part of relationship development.
Even with their best intentions and efforts, most couples eventually get stuck in repetitive negative patterns and find it very difficult and discouraging to avoid these painful interactions.
Instead of feeling heard and understood, their communication leads to finger pointing and blaming. Predictably the responses to feeling criticized and invalidated are to become defensive, angry and/or emotionally withdrawn. Conflicts will tend to either quickly escalate with impulsive and angry reactivity, or will cause couples to become emotionally distant, or to give-in reluctantly to "keep the peace".
Slowly and gradually couples begin to wonder, "Whatever happened to our love and intimacy?" Weary from these cycles of negative interaction, many people feel they’ve gone from feeling like “soul-mates” to being "roommates" or sparring partners. Many couples come for help because they have lost that being "in love" feeling, some because of a break in trust, others tell us they are on the verge of splitting-up and are seeking help as a last resort. Some others come who have learned to recognize their part in the problems (even post-divorce), and want to try to restore the closeness that once was.
Recognizing and admitting that there’s a relationship problem is the first step to becoming unstuck from repeating the old negative cycle and to finding new options for revitalizing the relationship.
Click here for more information about the Couples Center approach.
The Couples Center welcomes all partners who have a desire to enhance the quality of their relationship or to reduce the negative patterns, whether heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender couples.