marriage counseling

Bellaire Couples Therapy & Marriage Counseling

Couples come to therapy for many reasons but most frequently for one or more of the following: better communication, more trust, more emotional intimacy or more sexual intimacy.

Often, one partner wants the other to have more empathy, compassion and a better understanding of their perspective. Sometimes people don’t feel safe asking for what they need or want in the relationship. Sometimes people ask for what they want but never seem to get it. Whatever the reason, couples often reach an impasse, unable to get the empathy and understanding they need from each other by themselves.

Statistics today identify the four predictors of divorce to be:
Criticism, Defensiveness, Withdrawal, and Contempt

By eliminating these adverse coping skills and replacing them with loving and effective skills and techniques, relationships improve. Trust, communication and a loving connection can be restored and re-established.

How Couples Therapy Can Help

Therapy can provide lasting and positive results for couples to have increased satisfaction, and feel more love and connection in the relationship. Couples get faster results when both people are committed to making a positive change.

Therapy gives both people insights about what they want to see differently in themselves and what they want to see differently in their partner and the relationship. It focuses on discovering unmet needs, lost parts, and overcoming defensiveness that prevents intimacy. Therapy promotes insight to give you additional ways to perceive the problems and additional ways to get results.

Together we will:

Identify the issues and conflicts that prevent intimacy and safety.
Identify factors that you and your partner do to sabotage what you want
Help you develop insights and skills to let go of what’s not working and get what you need.
Use cutting edge communication skills and techniques to change counterproductive and upsetting behavior
Look at how you can support each other effectively and genuinely through the changes you make
Create a space where you reach a new level of success in your relationship

On the first visit, I usually ask the couple to come up with three responses to:

“This relationship would be better for me if……1)…. 2)….. 3)….. ”.

How I Can Help

I see my role giving attention, support and direction to help couples develop what they need to make a break-through rather than a break up. Most therapy is short term. I teach effective skills that you can use at home. The goal of therapy is to make changes so the couple will have increased satisfaction and feel more love and connection in the relationship.

Pre-Marital Counseling

I also meet with couples prior to weddings and holy unions. Pre-Marital counseling gives couples the opportunity to look at issues that often come up in relationships before they come up! This gives the couple the chance to see where they have differences in values and beliefs, and how they can prevent conflict when these differences arise. You don’t have to agree on everything to have a good relationship, but you have to respect the differences. I have a pre-commitment questionnaire that addresses relationship issues. These include: money, relatives, children, vacations, work, household chores, sex, dealing with crisis times of life, fidelity, romance, use of alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs, communication rules, personality differences, role of friends, physical appearance, jealousy, cultural background issues, personal goals, pre-nupual agreements and blending families. Discussing your areas of concern prior to your big day, will give you an insightful and valuable approach to minimizing future problems and maintaining respect for your partner and your relationship.

Let Us Know How I Can Help!

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BY Denise O'Doherty

The Truth About Love – The Good The Bad, & The Ugly

In Pat Love’s book, “The Truth About Love“, she shares various misconceptions truth-about-love-book about relationships. I have turned these into the following TRUTHS about relationships as a guide for evaluating yours.

Relationships are never perfect. Problems don’t mean it wasn’t meant to be. It just means you have to work them through.
Once love dies, you can get it back with noticing, giving each other attention and celebrating the love and life you have. Happiness is wanting what you have.
Relationships are more than just chemistry.
It takes more than love to have a good relationship. Particularly trust, respect and good communication.
You can be in love and still be attracted to other people. Being in a committed relationship means that you still find others attractive and enjoy others being attracted to you, but you don’t act out on it.
It’s not about meeting the right person as much as it is about becoming the right person. If you work on being the best you can be, it is likely you will attract someone who appreciates you and whose values are more likely to be like yours.

The Four predictors of divorce are: Criticism, Defensiveness, Withdrawal and Contempt.

Therefore……

1) Instead of criticizing, ask for what you want. And when your partner criticizes, ask “What do you need?” and “How can I help?”

2) When you find yourself getting defensive: Stop. Start over. Call tome out. Apologize. Ask for more information. Take a deep breath.

3) When your partner withdraws, give him/ her more time and space. Find a way to manage your anxiety until the mood shifts. Entertain yourself. Do something fun. When you withdraw, let your partner know you need some time alone and about how long you need. If your withdrawal has nothing to do with the relationship, let this fact be known. If you have a problem, speak up.

4) When there is contempt between the tow of you, note this as a sign that the relationship could be in serious distress. Take time out to restore the good feelings between you. Do those activities that always work to bring you closer together.

These ideas and suggestions are often used in couples therapy and marriage counseling.

Good relationships give incredible rewards and unlimited opportunity for love and living a fuller life. Keep this in mind for your special relationship.

Filed Under: couples counseling, Marriage Counseling, relationship counseling

BY Denise O'Doherty

Defensiveness in Relationships and Marriage

In John Gottman’s book, “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail“, he talks about defensiveness as one of the problems in marriage. Defensiveness is often comes up in marriage counseling and couples counseling. It is a block to good communication. Without a non-defensive attitude, people feel unloved, unappreciated and lonely in their relationships.

In essence, defensiveness is self-protection, a natural response to ward off a perceived attack. For example:

” It wasn’t my fault”

defensive response:

“It was your fault”

“You always get tense around my mom”

defensive response:

“I do not”. “If you’d stand up for me when she criticizes me, I wouldn’t get so tense.”

“You don’t listen to me”

defensive response:

“Well, you don’t listen to me”

Of course, the major problem with defensiveness is that it obstructs communication in relationships. Rather than understanding each other’s perspective you spend your discussions defending yourselves. Nothing gets resolved, so the conflict continues to escalate and more discussions characterized by attack and defensiveness occur. To see whether you or your spouse/ partner is overly defensive, take the following self-test, preferably soon after a disagreement.

SELF-TEST: HOW DEFENSIVE ARE YOU?

When my partner complains, I feel unfairly picked on.
I feel misunderstood.
I don’t feel that I get credit for all the positive things I do.
What went wrong was actually not that much my responsibility
To avoid blame, I have to explain why and how the problem arose.
I feel unfairly attacked when my partner is being negative.
When my partner complains, I realize that I also have a set of complaintsthat need to be heard.
My partner’s negativity gets too intense, too out of proportion.
My partner is too touchy, and gets his/ her feelings hurt too easily.
There is some truth to my partner’s complaints, but it is not the whole truth.
When my partner complains, I usually think, “I am innocent of these charges”.
When my partner complains, I feel I have to “ward off” these attacks.
I feel obligated to deny the complaints against me that are inaccurate.
It seems that all my partner can do is find fault with me.
during a hot argument, I keep thinking of ways to retaliate.

A “Yes” to several of these implies that you may be set up for a defensive stance.

The first step toward breaking out of defensiveness is to no longer see your partner’s words as an attack but as information. Your partner is trying to tell you something. Try to empathize with your partner. This is hard to do but it is possible and it effects are miraculous. Research shows that if you are genuinely open and receptive when your partner is expecting a defensive response, your partner is less likely to criticize you or react contemptuously when disagreements arise. Staying grounded may also help you feel more positive about yourself and your own self esteem, knowing that you are contributing to de-escalating an argument.

Of course, this change won’t occur overnight. But if you are consistently non-defensive, your spouse will finally get the happy message and your marriage and relationships will benefit tremendously.

Filed Under: couples counseling, Marriage Counseling, relationship counseling

BY Denise O'Doherty

How To Ruin A Perfectly Good Relationship

Several years ago, Pay Love Ed. D and Sunny Shulkin, Ph.D. two Imago trainers and therapists published a book titled How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Relationship. I used to leave this book on a table in my waiting room and often got laughs and responses from my clients.

Below is part of their list of some seemingly insignificant behaviors they identify each of which over time services to erode the love between two people. madcouple

Interestingly, a common reason couples give for separation is that they “grew apart.” You can see how these specific actions separate couples.

In reading this list of behaviors, you may be embarrassed to recognize parts of yourself – and decide to change some of them on behalf of your relationship. As Sunny and Pay say, we sometimes have to have done it wrong before we can do it right.

Countrol everything and everyone
Never take the blame yourself, instead make your partner wrong
Make it a habit to spend money than you have
Win every fight, even the ones you couldn’t care less about
Keep Score
Use threats often
Find your partner’s weak spot and use it against him/her
When your partner tries to please you, find faults with their efforts
Hold fast to the belief, “If you loved me you would know what I want”
Demand your partner remain faithful but refuse to meet his or her sexual needs
Use silence as a weapon
Pretend that you don’t hear
When your partner tries to apologize, bring up more complaints
Refuse to give information
When you realize you haven’t given your partner some important info, insist that you did
Claim to be the only one interested in the relationship
Never ask for help
Confide only in friends
Take it personally when your partner wants time alone
Discount your partner’s physical complaints
Give advice where it isn’t welcome
Never pick up after yourself
Refuse to seek help for your depression
Refuse to talk
Focus on changing your partner
Focus all your needs on sex
Take all problems as further proof that the relationship will not work

To read the entire article Visit By Betsy Bergquist, Imago Therapist

Http://www.therapyct.com/ruin_relationship.html

Filed Under: areas of practice, couples counseling, Marriage Counseling, relationship counseling

BY Denise O'Doherty

Predictors of Divorce – Four Predictors of Divorce

According to Dr. John Gottman, a well known author on couples counseling and relationship therapy, there are four predictors of divorce. These are not simply problems in a relationship, but he emphasizes, actual predictors of divorce.

They are: Criticism, Defensiveness, Withdrawal and Contempt.

Criticism is by far the most common problem that predicts the demise of a relationship. It is said that most people have had a critical parent. Continuing this pattern where you are criticized as an adult, is not healthy or good for the relationship. It can trigger old wounds. Even without a critical parent, criticism feels uncomfortable and unsupportive. To counteract criticism, try and change the criticism to a desire. For example, instead of “Your always late” you could say, “I really appreciate it when you are on time or early, that way I don’t worry about you”. Or instead of “You always leave your wet towels on the bathroom floor”, try “I like it when I walk in the bathroom and there are no wet towels on the floor. I especially appreciate you taking the time to do that, knowing it bothers me”.

Defensiveness is when we respond in a way to protect ourselves by attacking or pulling back from our partner. It’s the fight or flight response. Defensiveness is when we perceive we have been criticized and we cut our partners off. Instead, try and hear your partner out. You may want to repeat the criticism and even ask for more information. The goal is to be present, hear your partners frustration, and then discuss in a rational way, what can be done about the situation. It’s about being accountable, and coming to a solution where both are being heard and respected. For example, if your partner claims “I don’t think we’re having enough sex”, instead of attacking him/ her with how you think it’s not your fault, or how they are never available and how they are never home and always tired etc…you could repeat the perceived problem, “So, you don’t think we’re having enough sex?” and then say “tell me more” (about how they feel) and stay with this until you have heard your partners side and discuss until you both come to a better understanding of the problem and how it can be resolved.

Withdrawal is done in many ways by physically or emotionally not being present. This could be due to addiction, poor coping skills, fear of conflict, or passive aggressive behavior. It could look like anything that replaces spending quality time together. This could look like drinking, affairs, being a workaholic or spending an excessive amount of free time wrapped up in hobbies or activities that take away from a relationship. Instead, look at the effort you put in your relationship, knowing that it’s up to both people to be present and make it work. That the more you put in, the more you will benefit.

Contempt is harboring negative feelings towards your partner for a significant amount of time. It’s being mad for days and holding them in your heart in a bad place. Instead, try and resolve conflict and negative feelings towards each other quickly. Some people agree never to go to bed angry with each other. You might also think twice about complaining to others about your partner unless your friends can let you vent without holding resentment after you make up.

Being mindful of these predictors, can boost your self -esteem knowing you are doing your part in making the relationship work. Knowing how to replace the predictors of divorce with what to do instead , gives you skills to keep the relationship positive, happy and healthy. Keeping it healthy promotes better communication, trust and more intimacy.

Contact me at 713-823-4001 or fill out the form below. I welcome your call so we can discuss your specific situation and the benefits therapy may provide for you.

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Filed Under: areas of practice, Marriage Counseling