East Bay Couples Therapy
Attachment & Emotion Focused Couple Therapy, Pre-Marital & Marriage Counseling and Sex Therapy
Your relationship security is largely determined by the answer to the question:
"Are you there for me?"
"Attachment theory and research tell us that emotional accessibility (Can I reach you? Will you pay attention to me?), emotional responsiveness (Can I rely on you to respond and care about my feelings?), and emotional engagement (Will you value me, put me first, and stay close?) characterize secure interactions between intimates." -Dr. Sue Johnson, Author of Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
Learn how to practice secure functioning in your relationship with North Berkeley's Couple Therapy Center's highly skilled marriage and couples therapists.
Couples Therapy, Marriage counseling & Sex Therapy Can help you learn to be emotionally accessible, responsive and engaged in your partnership. Cultivating Effective communication and intimacy is possible.
At the core of every relationship, is the need to know that your partner will show up for you in a loving and engaged way. To feel safe in an intimate relationship, you need to know that your partner will be accessible, responsive to your needs and engaged in the partnership. This is the foundation of secure-functioning attachment.
Intimacy deepens when partners share their most vulnerable thoughts and feelings with each other.
In order to open up to your partner and share yourself in such a vulnerable way, you must know that your partner is emotionally available to respond to your feelings and needs. You may not know how to reach out to your partner and your partner may not know how to support you.
If you sense that your partner is not accessible and engaged with you, you may respond by shutting down or pushing away (fight, flight). While this serves to protect you from immediate pain, it also leaves both partners feeling alone and disconnected. This damages and often ends, many otherwise loving relationships. However, you can break this cycle and learn to communicate with your partner.
Some benefits of relationship therapy are:
Cultivate a Secure functioning partnership
Learn better communication skills
Identify problematic dynamics
Deepen and build intimacy (emotional and sexual)
Build trust
Communicate effectively in conflict
Shift unhelpful or dysfunctional dynamics and patterns.
Explore commitment issues
Work with fidelity/infidelity ruptures
Break out of your relationship rut
Work on parenting issues
Develop relational health
Reconnect to your core friendship and love for one another
Enhance connection
Repair your relationship and restore your your commitment to one another
Relight the spark and passion in your partnership (read more about sex & intimacy therapy).
Learn how to de-escalate conflict, settle your nervous system and use effective, nonviolent communication (NVC) to deepen connection.
Be in intimate partnership.
Why Partner Therapy?
Couples have particular needs that differ from individuals in therapy and whether single or partnered, therapy can help you to deepen your relationships. All of our therapists have specialized training in treating relationship and sex related issues.
Reconnect...
deepen intimacy & communication while building a strong and lasting partnership together with love & empathy with the support of North Berkeley Couples Therapy Center's highly trained relationship experts.
Susan Johnson on the importance of attachment and connection.
A Clinician's Guide to Attachment Theory Networker Symposium, 2006
