Couples Counseling Services
Falling in love tends to just happen, but finding your way back to love takes commitment and genuine effort from both partners.
Relationships are one of the most rewarding parts of life…and often, one of the most challenging. A partnership is a team sport. It brings together two personalities, backgrounds, and value systems. Similar to paddling a canoe, you learn how to move in harmony with one another, you develop a rhythm. This becomes the pattern of the relationship, the flow you return to both consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes the rhythm can falter, the canoe becomes off-balanced. The once-great ride is now bumpy. You will need to find a way to sync up again or risk tipping over. Both partners will need to learn a new way to paddle. For this reason, it can be extremely valuable to work in tandem with a couples’ therapist. Our goal here is to help men in every phase of life, including in your relationships, which is why we offer couples counseling in Denver along with individual therapy for men.
Couples counseling in Denver Men’s Therapy focuses on creating healthy patterns of communication.
We typically spend 8-12 weeks working with a couple. It is not an open-ended dialogue where we rehash the same issues over and over. The focus is to move you out of reactivity and into conscious responding to each other’s needs. We find that those goals can be met within a few months for most couples.
Meet Our Couples Therapists
Alexis Ward, MFT
I offer individual therapy for men and couples therapy in Denver and virtually. I help my clients find their way back to healthy communication and emotional intimacy through understand the cycle of their conflict and learning to express their needs in a more effective way.
BRANDON BOLDEN, LMFT
Couple Therapists in Denver
As couples therapists in Denver, we work with couples to prioritizes what is practical and effective. Our intent is to get a clear sense of what each person wants to address and create a plan for accomplishing those goals within a 4-8 week framework. In a partnership, it works best if both people are moving in the same direction, or one person’s growth can feel to the other like they are being left behind. Let’s work together to make sure you don’t tip the canoe!
We work with clients and their significant others on a variety of issues that affect a relationship.
Some examples include:
- Infidelity
- Communication
- Blending Families
- Grief and Loss
- Childhood trauma impacting the relationship
- Substance use and abuse
- Intimacy
- Critical decision making
- Life transitions
Individual and Couples Counseling
Depending on your unique situation, you may be needing to see an individual therapist and couples therapist at the same time. We will help your partner understand the process you are undergoing and the changes it is most likely provoking in you so that they can feel included in the process and aware of how they can support you. We will explore how your individual therapy has affected the relationship and establish goals regarding how you would like to grow together. If your partner understands why you might be reacting differently and feels motivated to support your growth because they see how it aligns with the goals of the partnership, you are far more likely to integrate and sustain what you learn in individual therapy
What to Expect in Couples Counseling
Couple’s counseling at Denver Men’s Therapy focuses on 9 different steps:
- Identify what issues in the relationship are causing conflict.
- Come to clearly understand the cycle of reactivity through which these issues are expressed.
- Explore the core needs and unacknowledged emotions that underlie these patterns of reactivity.
- Look at the areas of conflict through the lens of the cycle you have been experiencing, the intimate emotions not being expressed, and the inherent human needs that those emotions arise out of.
- Cultivate self-awareness and self-acceptance in regard to your needs and emotions.
- Develop compassion and acceptance for your partner’s needs and emotions.
- Create healthy ways of expressing your needs to one another that increases the likelihood of those needs being met. Facilitate connection through responding to one another in new, more loving ways.
- Reexamine old problems from this more connected place. Explore solutions.
- Solidify new patterns of communication and maintain the intimacy you have developed through the healthy expression of and response to each other’s needs
If you and your partner have fallen into a rut, can’t get out of resentment with one another, are exhaustedfrom having the same argument over and over with no resolution, are navigating your way through a major life transition, are trying to heal from a betrayal, orjust feel like there is a distance between you, engaging in couple’s therapy can be a tremendously healing and rewarding process.
Falling in love tends to just happen, but finding your way back to love takes commitment and genuine effort from both partners. It can be the beginning of a whole new level of intimacy and the start of a wonderful new chapter in your lives together.
