Marriage & Couples Counseling NYC
At Marriage Couples Counseling, we use Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy to facilitate seven important conversations in your counseling sessions. These conversations, described by Sue Johnson in Hold Me Tight, are absolutely crucial for a lifetime of love. They include:
- Recognizing Demon Dialogues: We teach you to appreciate how rapidly arguments can escalate as a consequence of criticizing each other’s character, denying responsibility, insulting each other, and emotionally withdrawing. These negative ways of relating, described by social psychologist J. M. Gottman as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, increase the odds of getting a divorce to 85%.
- Finding the Raw Spots: We teach you to get more in touch with your hypersensitivities resulting from past experiences that get triggered in the present when your lover neglects, ignores or dismisses you. These are the deeper hurts that fuel the Demon Dialogs and leave you feeling emotionally deprived or deserted by your lover.
- Revisiting Rocky Moments: We teach you to revisit past mistakes and take charge of how you each contributed to mis-attunements and emotional disconnections. Here you get the chance to apply what you learned in conversations 1 and 2.
- Hold Me Tight: In this conversation we encourage and facilitate a greater feeling of emotional safety in which you step away from your past ways of protecting yourselves and build a bridge between you to find a safe haven in each other.
- Forgiving Injuries: Here we facilitate a healing dialog to encourage mutual exoneration. We encourage you to speak your pain as openly as possible, acknowledge your lover’s pain, revise your script by moving from behind your protective walls, take responsibility for how you hurt each other, identify with what your lover needs from you, and create a new and better story of your lives together.
- Bonding through Sex and Touch: Here we teach you how to move from emotionally disconnected or just partially connected sex to rich, synchronous moments in which emotional openness, responsiveness, tender touch and erotic exploration all come together.
- Keeping Your Love Alive: In this last conversation, we encourage you to understand love as a language that has to be spoken again and again, to have what Sue Johnson calls ARE conversations based on Accessibility, Responsiveness and Engagement. The more you speak this language, the more easily it flows and the stronger your love will be.
New lovers are nervous and tender. They smash everything for their hearts are an organ of fire.
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
Useful Advice for Couples
- To David, About His Education
- What is Imposture Syndrome?
- Vulnerability
- Aggression Only From Humans
- The True American National Anthem
- How to Control Your Emotions in a Long-Term Relationship
- Jay-Z meets Mark Twain, James Baldwin and Scott Gallaway
- How to Keep the Spark Alive in Your Marriage
- 12 Healthy Relationship Goals for a Happy Marriage
- What to Expect During Your First Couples Therapy Session
About Marriage Couples Counseling
For lovers who need marriage, couples, relationship counseling and therapy to gain a deeper understanding of differences instead of striving for complete agreement.
Our marriage, couples, relationship counselors and therapists will inspire you to open your hearts to each other in ways you never thought possible. We’ll give you relationship tools to deal more creatively with every day frustrations, anxieties and depression.
We’ve learned from years of experience that encouraging lovers to reveal their deeper anxieties, hurts and despair in a safe emotional setting is the only true path to greater happiness, contentment and sexual fulfillment.
Top Marriage Counselors
Our staff of creative, caring counselors and therapists (including a consulting psychiatrist – see About Us page), have over 80 years collective experience and knowledge in marriage, couples, relationship counseling and therapy, premarital counseling and relationship problem advice.
We’ve helped dozens of lovers strengthen their emotional bonds and achieve happier, more fulfilling lives based on a deeper appreciation and celebration of differences.
Our services are designed exclusively for serious couples who value the importance of greater emotional intimacy and are motivated to attain it.
We work with insurance companies like Harvard Pilgrim, Cigna, Aetna, U.S. Health Care, Guardian, Mental Health Net, etc. and obtain 50 % reimbursement of what you pay us out of pocket, often more, depending on your plan. We don’t accept GHI, Blue Cross-Blue Shield, HMO’s, Medicaid, Oxford or Medicare.
Marriage and Couples Counseling in New York City is in Greenwich Village
(South of Washington Square Park between Sullivan and Thompson Streets, two blocks from the campus of NYU)
160 Bleecker Street, 9C East
New York, NY 10012
(212) 673 4618
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) protects all identifiable health information, referred to as Protected Health Information (PHI), held or transmitted by psychotherapists or their business associates in any form or media whether electronic, paper or oral. There are no restrictions on use or disclosure of de-identified health information in which real names, addresses and phone numbers of clients, relatives, employers, work associates, friends and neighbors have been removed.
