If a relationship is suffering...
Maybe you find yourself getting into the same kinds of arguments with your partner or spouse, which is frustrating for both of you. They seem to come out of nowhere and are impossible to avoid. You make up, but soon enough, it happens again.
Maybe you crave to be closer to your loved one, but you’ve been growing apart for months- even years. Your attempts to grow closer aren’t working. Maybe you’ve stopped trying, and you’re losing hope.
Maybe there’s been infidelity, or you or your partner want to explore polyamory or nonmonogamy, and you don’t know how to preserve your boundaries at the same time you expand your sexual horizons.
Maybe you feel that you’re giving up too much of yourself for a partner or family member, and you want to protect your boundaries. At the same time, you want to avoid conflict and preserve what’s good in the relationship.
If these examples sound familiar, I invite you to click the “Get Started” button at the top or bottom of this page to book a free 20-minute conversation, during which I can provide more detail on how my counsellor training and experience can support your relational goals.
How I can help
Using my experience in systems theory as a foundation, I help individuals and couples address patterns common to all relationships, in varying degrees, that affect communication, cooperation, and bonding (including sex). Below are three goals of relationship work.
Identifying patterns
As the researchers John and Julie Gottman discovered, all suffering relationships exhibit the same basic four patterns: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. I help clients identify them and ways to respond with constructive alternatives: polite honesty, emotional neutrality, responsibility, and self-regulation.
Supporting values and principles
When unhealthy patterns are present, we tend to act reactively. Thus, to help clients establish healthier patterns, I help them identify preferred ways of being (values) and ingrained codes of conduct (principles) that can guide them in the heat of the moment. The road to healing involves repeatedly relying on such values and principles.
Applying a systems approach
A key step toward healthier patterns is moving beyond blame, and that requires viewing patterns like an electrical circuit, where each person, like each electrical component, plays a part. And a key step in viewing patterns as a system is examining how our original family conditioned our behaviour.
“Two’s a crowd” in relationship counselling.
Usually, three’s a crowd, except in relationship counselling, where there’s always “a shadow of a third person,” a phrase of Esther Perel’s, in every issue between two people, which, in family systems theory, is called an emotional triangle.
Shadows can be from the past, often those of parents or siblings, when a partner unwittingly imitates them when emotions run high, the same way a partner might have related to their family (or vice versa!) as a child.
Sometimes, living people cast the shadow. Maybe the shadow is your child’s when your partner takes their side when they want something, or you take their side against your partner’s wishes. Perhaps the most painful example of a living shadow is when one partner has an affair.
Emotional triangles occur because falling back on one relationship at another’s expense serves as a pressure-release valve that works in the short term but backfires and compounds in the long term. “Triangling” happens automatically, like an electrical circuit, at the level of our nervous systems, and it’s only interrupted when partners consciously modify their habitual patterns. Furthermore, the process tends to continue until the tension fades through emotional distance or erupts in confrontation. Two people might reconcile and feel temporarily close until a similar situation triggers the circuit again.
Despite their automaticity and persistence, the patterns of emotional triangles reveal the key to improving a relationship. The point isn’t to take anyone’s side, let alone the “right” side, or pressure others to take yours. The point is to take your own side, the side of your beliefs and principles, with just enough emotional neutrality that you can listen to others in the triangle without needing to change anyone’s view or defend yourself.
When you allow that kind of freedom, you, the other person, and the shadow (!) can start to relax. I often describe such “de-triangling” as the relational equivalent of the Chinese Finger Trap. The way out is *in*. Tension and conflict will begin to lessen, and when both of you trust that your agency is genuinely yours, healthy patterns will naturally start to blossom
