Want to rekindle your marriage and make your love last?

• Has the busyness of daily life gotten in the way of feeling connected to your partner?
• Wish you could talk and share with each other like you used to?
• Miss the closeness you had before the kids were born?
• Wish you could have your best friend back?
• Has the spark faded?
• Feel taken for granted?
• Feel like your partner doesn’t understand you?
• Wondering what happened to your dreams for this relationship?
• Keep rehashing the same problems over and over?
• Does talking things over seem useless?
• Feel lonely?
• Feel like you’re living parallel lives?
• Thinking about getting a divorce?

You are not alone. The good news is that help is available. What is the key? Emotional intelligence, which is the ability to understand, honour, and respect one’s own and the other’s emotions.

Happily married couples are not smarter or wealthier than couples who are struggling. In their daily lives, happily married couples display emotional intelligence – they prevent their positive thoughts and feelings about each other from being overwhelmed by their negative ones, which all couples have.

Emotional intelligence is a skill that couples can be taught. As with learning any new skill, it requires some effort and commitment on your part.

Why save your marriage?

People have different reasons for wanting to save their marriage. Here is one reason cited by world-renowned relationship and marriage expert Dr. John Gottman:

“People who are happily married live longer, healthier lives than either divorced people or those who are unhappily married.”

The stakes are high for everyone in the family. Research shows the physical and emotional health effects:

• People who are happily married live 4 to 8 years longer than people who divorce.
• People in unhappy marriages have a 35% increased chance of getting sick.
• Happily married couples have lower rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicide.
• It is harmful for children to grow up in an environment of hostility between their parents, whether their parents stay together or divorce. Children raised in homes with parental hostility have higher levels of stress hormones and experience far more truancy, peer rejection, depression, aggression, and low academic achievement in their teens.

To learn more about the health benefits of being married, read Dr. John Gottman’s article Debunking 12 Myths About Relationships.

To hear Dr. John Gottman speak about the health benefits of a happy relationship, click here.

Benefits of marriage counselling with me:

I use the research-based approach of Drs. John and Julie Gottman to create stronger relationships. Dr. John Gottman has spent over 40 years studying what works in relationships, interviewing more than 3000 couples, and has written over 40 books. The core of Gottman Method Couples Therapy is strengthening the friendship and trust upon which a marriage is built. Gottman Method Couples Therapy helps couples:

• Enhance the foundation of friendship and intimacy in their relationship
• Identify and replace their ineffective communication patterns
• Strengthen their conflict management ability
• Identify and communicate their sense of purpose (creating a system of shared meaning re: how they move through time together)

I also use James Framo’s Family-of-Origin Therapy to help couples:

• Examine how each partner might be repeating familiar childhood roles and attachment styles from their respective family-of-origin in their current relationship

At the outset of couples therapy, I conduct an assessment and create a treatment plan tailor-made for each couple.

To learn more about the format for couples therapy, click here.

To read about the effectiveness of the Gottman method, click here.