Pre-Marital Couples Counseling
Strengthen the foundation of your partnership before tying the knot
In our society, there is very little education about how to actually build a healthy, resilient, and satisfying long-term partnership. We get endless depictions of relationships and romance in popular media that can be quite misleading, and very little in the way of actual social-emotional education, effective communication skills, and ways of keeping a relationship actively connected, mutually supportive, loving, and alive.
I find it is often very exciting for folks when they learn that there are specific, concrete behaviors that can be learned and practiced that will strengthen and deepen your relationship, based on decades of research about what makes relationships thrive.
Setting this foundation before going into a marriage is the best way to proactively weather-proof your relationship, immediately reduce stress, and bring more joy and satisfaction for both of you.
My approach
I use The Gottman Method in my work with couples, a modality developed by psychologists John and Julie Gottman through decades of research studying what behaviors most strongly predict happy and healthy partnerships, as well as what behaviors predict unhappy relationships and divorce.
My work with couples is highly structured and usually shorter term than my work with individuals. We will meet for between 8-20 sessions, sometimes more depending on your needs and desires for our work together.
To begin, I will get to know your relationship history, important milestones, strengths, and pain points, and what your goals are as individuals and as a couple. We will then move through John Gottman’s book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work together, learning about each of the seven tenets that the Gottmans’ research has shown constitute a healthy and lasting bond. I will assign exercises for you to work on together between sessions each week, and we will work on how to implement new positive behaviors in your relationship to reduce stress, tension, and harmful conflict behaviors, and increase connection, intimacy, respect, and appreciation for each other.