Couples Therapy

My work with couples is significantly based on the training I received from Dr. David Schnarch, author of Constructing the Sexual Crucible, Passionate Marriage, Resurrecting Sex, and Intimacy and Desire, and the most masterful clinician I know.  

The Crucible Approach is the first, and to the best of my knowledge the only approach to integrate sexual and marital therapy while maintaining a non-pathologic view of emotional gridlock and challenges to intimacy and desire within marriage.  The underlying assumption is that whatever is happening or not happening within your marriage – it is doing so for a reason.  

My intent is to enable each spouse to discover or acknowledge those reasons, to find the fortitude to understand their respective roles and motivations regarding those reasons, and then to choose to operate from a place of integrity and solidity as they choose to move forward towards the best in themselves and each other.  

Although the approach specializes in the intimate issues of marriage, it is not limited to that area.  It truly excels in addressing systemic issues that arise in most marriages by seeing them as an intrinsic and even welcome outcome of the processes by which all intimate relationships evolve.  These issues may not feel so “welcome” when you are going through your personal and joint hell-on-earth – but very often couples can look back on these turning points and recognize them as having been true blessings in the evolution of their marriages. 

Couples arrive with a package of concerns that might include sexuality, money, in-laws, parenting, communication, etc, which very often serve as windows to the soul of their relationship with each other, and each with their own selves.  These windows often illuminate who we choose to be and why, how we choose to run our lives and why, and the degree to which we are willing to live from integrity and our solid selves or, alternatively, from a place of violation of our integrity in collusion with our own fear, childhood wounds, and our less solid sides.  Presenting issues are the stage on which a couple live their relationship – but I have found that people are often much more profound than their issues and deserve an approach that respects and values the more fundamental personal struggles and triumphs which run silent and deep beneath the surface.   

Although what I wrote above may appear abstract, please accept it as but a glimpse at part of the theoretical underpinnings and clinical perspective which inform what is a very dynamic, human, and often very intense, real-time conversation in my office.  Philosophy is great – but it’s not good therapy if it doesn’t generate living traction which clients feel in their lives.  In other words, don’t take my word for it or believe in me. Try it and trust your own best judgement.