Available Services

At our initial meeting, we will discuss the current demands that you are facing at home and at work. After sharing your ability to work on these issues outside of the session, I will suggest a solution-focused plan that will bring about the changes you and your partner would like to see in your life. 

Sexual functioning can be influenced by a number of factors: our early experiences, family life, cultural and religious values, sex education, anxiety, and feelings of self-esteem. After physiological or medical issues are ruled out, we develop a solution-focused plan that involves an integration of counseling and behavioral exercises that you do at home.

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Just a FEW of the concerns that have been addressed within this practice: 

• Sexual Orientation

• Lack of Sexual Desire

• Difficulty with intimacy

• Inability to Experience Orgasm

• Erectile Dysfunction

• Premature, Delayed or Inhibited Ejaculation

• Pain During Intercourse or Orgasm

• Vaginismus 

• Compulsive Sexual Behaviors

Pre-marital counseling offers you and your partner an opportunity to talk through sensitive issues, set

realistic goals, develop conflict resolution skills and improve your relationship before you get married.

Many people enter into marriage believing that all of their emotional, social, intellectual, and intimacy

needs will automatically be met through their marriage.  Pre-marital counseling is a proactive and a positive approach that will help prepare for your marriage and maintain better outcomes in keeping

your marriage healthy by teaching you how to identify your needs, share your concerns, and negotiate 

your expectations in a positive manner.    

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Pre-marital counseling is offered over 12 weeks and covers such topics as:

• Beliefs and values*

• Roles in marriage

• Communication

• Decision-making

• Dealing with anger

• Family relationships

• Finances

• Affection and sex

• Children and Parenting

• Social life and time spent together

• Managing online involvement

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* Beliefs and values can include deeper or more extensive discussions of faith based practices for couples and families, if this is desired.

Whether you are in a new relationship or a long established one, attempts at intimacy and closeness can become stuck in failed communication and behavioral patterns.  Individuals will tell me that it feels like the "same argument over and over again." Relationship counseling will help you identify what it is that is causing the block and then help you resolve it. 

We can lose our ability to value others or lose the feeling that others are truly valuing us.  We may even be drawn to establishing emotional or physical intimacy outside of our primary relationship. When infidelity has been part of your past (either your own or your partner's) finding your way emotionally and physically back into the relationship can be painful, but not impossible. 

We can get caught in a style of responding to one another that may be hurtful and our relationships can lose their meaning and luster. Maintaining a position of defensiveness, sensitivity, needing to be right, or assigning blame, will not help the relationship. Learning new ways of communication, resolving problems, and caring for our partner is not always easy. With new tools we can learn how to more effectively care for ourselves, as well as our partner, as we work out needs, desires, and differences in opinion. One of the ways in which we can move to that place of caring is to learn how to really pay attention to shifts in the way in which we think and feel while we are with our partner, and more importantly, to pay attention to how our partner is responding to us. 

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It can be challenging  to get started in relationship counseling. It is difficult and sometimes awkward to identify or talk openly about what has led to your experience of increased distance and avoidance. You may even find that your initial experience in therapy may be similar to your experience of the relationship. For example, if you have been avoiding intimacy, or situations that produce uncomfortable feelings, it is not unusual that you may find yourself avoiding therapy. It is important to share these concerns with your therapist so that you can work together in helping you and your partner to remain engaged.

There are a number of theoretical approaches that have been helpful in guiding individuals to a place that is warm, nurturing, supportive, and intimate. I have been influenced by therapies that allow me to develop an individualized approach that will be a good fit such as, Schema Therapy, Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), and Gottman.