Couples therapy aims to help you and your partner communicate more clearly and authentically with each other, deepen or rebuild your connection, and ultimately find collaborative ways of breaking out of the patterns that are keeping you stuck. For some couples this means repairing broken connections and addressing acute stressors, while for others therapy is an opportunity to strengthen an already satisfying relationship. Couples therapy creates a context to build on your existing relationship strengths, explore points of concern with your therapist’s support, and establish new ways to communicate and connect with each other. Couples therapy puts you and your partner back on the same team so that you can work together to deal with life’s inevitable challenges.

Many couples wait until patterns of negativity and conflict are deeply engrained before they come in for therapy. On average, couples spend around 7 years in an unhappy relationship before they seek help. In reality, any couple seeking to nurture communication and mutual understanding can benefit from couples therapy. Being proactive is often what’s best for the relationship, and couples therapy can benefit relationships at any level of satisfaction or distress.

Individual therapy can be deeply transformative, but our ability to create positive change in relationships is limited without everyone in the room. If fostering connection or addressing issues in your relationship is a priority, couples therapy may be a good fit. Close relationships have a significant impact on quality of life and individual mental health, and clients often see ripple effects in other areas of their life as they deepen their understanding of their own communication patterns.

Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy (IBCT) is a therapeutic approach based on integrating both change and acceptance to strengthen a relationship. IBCT cultivates a sense of intimacy and acceptance in the relationship while simultaneously exploring ways to create mutual change and ease reoccurring points of tension. IBCT prioritizes a holistic view of your relationship and focuses on understanding cultural and contextual factors, you and your partner’s past experiences, the current stressors you each face, and the history of your relationship. Your therapist will help build an understanding of how these factors may lead you and your partner into narrow, repetitive, and counterproductive ways of interacting with each other. By identifying patterns and gaining wider perspective, couples find freedom to interact with each other in new and more fulfilling ways. Ultimately, IBCT aims to help couples find a new narrative — instead of replaying the same sequences over and over, you are free to write a new chapter together.