How to Make Your Relationship Work
Based on over 40 years of research with thousands of couples, the work of Dr. John Gottman provides new insights and research-based skills that can dramatically improve the intimacy and friendship in your relationship and help you manage conflict in a healthy, positive way.
Gottman Method Couples Therapy is the best move toward improving your relationship. I am one of the few therapists in Oregon who has both received Certification Consultation Training and completed Level 3 Practicum Training in Gottman Method Couples Therapy.
Statistics show that couples typically wait six years after trouble starts to get help for their relationship. By then, they’re often so resentful and worn down that getting back on track seems impossible. Drawn from Dr. John Gottman’s four decades of research with over 3,000 couples, the skills you will learn in our work together will help to rebuild or increases your relationship’s friendship, intimacy and respect.
The Gottman’s lab and fieldwork revealed exactly what separates the “masters” of relationships from the “disasters.” That research enabled a way for therapists to teach everything we’ve learned about creating the kind of partnership we all hope for.
What Will I Learn?
You and your partner will learn how to foster respect, affection, and closeness in your relationship.
You will build and share a deeper connection with each other.
You’ll learn how to keep conflict discussions calm, how to break through gridlocked conflict, and how to strengthen and maintain the gains in your relationship. In addition, you will learn:
- How to build friendship in your relationship and express feelings of respect and affection.
- How to manage conflict and communicate effectively.
- Recognize the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and what to do if they are attacking your relationship
- Identify your relationship’s specific strengths and how to build on them together
Relationships can be up and down. Knowing how to go about getting to the end result, whether it’s a discussion or having more productive conflict, is part of the solution. Many of my couples say they want to learn better communication tools. Often, this is just a reflection of decay in the relationship. Learning how to communicate better won’t help you as much as learning how to relate to each other.
Not all unhealthy relationships are toxic. Yet lots of couples begin therapy with both people believing that their problems are caused in large part by their partners. Each person sees himself or herself as the innocent victim of the other person’s bad behavior, and each person hopes that therapy will finally get their parter to change – to listen, to express feelings or to stop nagging and criticizing.
The truth is that a therapist can teach both of you how to communicate and manage conflict. But a therapist cannot make the two of you become friends. That’s why going into therapy to “change” your partner rarely works. You have to assume 100% of the responsibility for the problem – at least for now – in order to benefit the most from therapy.
The type of work I provide is not appropriate for all couples. This includes couples with severe relationship distress, significant emotional or physical abuse, serious emotional or mental health problems, relationships where one or both partners are actively addicted to drugs or alcohol, and relationships with serious compulsive behavior with gambling, sexual acting out, and other disruptive behaviors.
