Unfortunately, we don’t get the manual for how to skillfully navigate intimate relationships when we are born!
We all want to love and be loved deeply and passionately. Yet being in a relationship can be one of the most confusing, challenging, and deeply humbling experiences in life. If you find yourself questioning your sanity, wondering where the love went, desiring greater support with your loved one, and engaging in countless conflicts, you aren't alone and there is a proven path for moving to a relationship of deeper trust, intimacy, love, and passion.
Often people think that reaching out for the support of a couples therapist means they’ve failed in their relationship or that something is wrong.
But this couldn’t be farther from the truth. With Stan Tatkin’s PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy), you’ll learn the skills and get the tools necessary to nourish a secure and enriching relationship with deepening intimacy, trust, and connection. Seeking support and help with your relationship is a positive step towards building the relationship you most want. While we’re biologically wired for connection, attachment, and love, unfortunately through our earliest relationships with our caregivers many of us had experiences that cut us off from these innate natural drives. In couples therapy we can relearn how to be in intimate relationship, build trust, and feel connected. We can come back into alignment with our natural desire for love and connection with the proper nurturing, support and guidance.
In our work together, you’ll learn about our natural biological survival systems of fight, flight, and freeze and how they affect you and your partner and your ability to feel safe, seen, connected, and cared for. As you learn more about each other’s history, your personal psychobiological make ups, and how to work with your natural arousal patterns, you’ll learn how to skillfully move into a more secure relationship. And like riding a bike, good couples counseling is often quite exciting, fun and rewarding (and hard work too)!
Relationship: A Path of Love
The growth that being in a committed intimate relationship asks of us can be a terrifying prospect. Yet if we’re willing to set aside our defensive personas and if we value personal growth and expanding our horizons over playing it safe, relationship is the most fertile ground for shedding outdated, child-like ways of being in the world (which were effective when we were young and trying to get our needs met as best we could). We can learn what it takes to truly love and be intimate with another person, to be loved for who we really are. To do this takes a true commitment to ourselves, to our partner, and to our faith in love.
PACT therapy’s understanding of attachment, psychobiological threat systems, and communication combined with it’s focus on experiential experimentation makes it an amazing modality that helps us realize what intimate, secure relationship can really be. Learning these tools and techniques offer us a clear path to deepening intimacy and more enriching and rewarding relationships. I look forward to the opportunity to work with you and your loved one!