Our relationship with an intimate partner lies at the center of our lives.

When that relationship is strong, we tend to feel secure, supported, and connected. We thrive and grow together, and can meet the challenges of living with the confidence that we’ve got someone at our side.

When that relationship is in trouble, it affects everything—our work, our health, our hopes for the future, our happiness. Struggles with an intimate partner can lead to some of the most difficult and painful experiences we go through.

A large body of research continues to demonstrate that a healthy, satisfying relationship buffers us against the stresses and challenges of life, while an unhealthy one makes us far more susceptible to unhappiness and illness.

Are you unhappy in your closest relationship?

Here are some signs worth paying attention to:

• When your relationship has become a source of frequent emotional pain
• When you feel a growing distance between you and your partner
• When you and your partner get stuck in the same fights over and over, without resolving the problem
• When you experience your partner as critical and blaming
• When you experience your partner as withdrawn and/or emotionally unavailable
• When one of you is having an emotional affair, a sexual affair, or an “on-line” affair
• When you have become inattentive to one another
• You have difficulty talking openly about fertility and having children

Couples Therapy can:

• Help you reconnect, and deepen the emotional bond between you
• Help you break out of “stuck” negative cycles that cause anger, resentment, hurt, and distance
• Help you learn how to be in the relationship without losing yourself
• Help you speak to each other in ways that increase intimacy & trust while reducing conflict

Several decades of research on marriage have made two things very things clear:

1. Fighting itself is not what predicts divorce. All couples have disagreements. What predicts divorce is emotional distance and partners’ lack of responsiveness to one another
2. Success in couples therapy is not closely correlated with how bad things have gotten by the time a couple comes in. Satisfaction with couples therapy is better predicted by the couple’s level of engagement with the therapy process. So: if you’re ready to do the work, couples therapy can save your relationship, no matter how bad things have gotten

With any kind of psychotherapy, finding the right person is essential. In couples therapy, it’s even more important. The stakes are high, and you should find a therapist who’s had extensive training with couples, is very skilled, and is experienced in knowing how to help you. This therapist must be someone you’re both comfortable with.

Couples therapy is one of my primary comittments, and I've trained in a number of  approaches. In the last several years, however, I’ve focused more and more on an approach called “Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy” (EFT). The public is generally unaware that couples therapy in general has a miserable success rate—most approaches are successful 30%-35% of the time. With EFT, the success rate is 70%-75%. This means that 70%-75% of couples "move from distress to full recovery," while approximately 90% show "significant improvement" by their own self-rating.

For more information on EFT, visit: http://www.newenglandeft.com/ and http://www.eft.ca/

To make an appointment, please call (401) 709-4295 or e-mail me at: ARoberts@archieroberts.net