Let’s Get To Work
By Alexis Ward, LMFT
Couples work at 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.
Our Process: Nine Different Stages
1. Identify what issues in the relationship are causing conflict.
2. Come to clearly understand the cycle of reactivity through which these issues are expressed.
3. Explore the core needs and unacknowledged emotions that underly these patterns of reactivity.
4. 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.
5. Cultivate self-awareness and self-acceptance in regard to your needs and emotions.
6. Develop compassion and acceptance for your partner’s needs and emotions.
7. 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.
8. Reexamine old problems from this more connected place. Explore solutions.
9. 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 exhausted from 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, or just 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.
