Couples Counseling

Your Voice Goes Up and You Hear It Happen

It started over the weekend calendar, and you are four exchanges past the calendar now.

Your partner is still talking, and your next sentence is already built and waiting for a gap.

You hear your own voice go up half a step, and you hear it while it is happening.

Then comes the part you both know by heart: the turn back onto you, the flat silence, or the door.

You have said it louder, then more carefully, then not at all for a week to see if silence worked better.

It is the same thing over and over, hoping for a different response, and your needs go unmet, again.

By now there is a list of subjects the two of you route around, and the routing has become the marriage.

What you want is simple: your partner listens all the way to the end, and what they do next tells you it landed.

You are a hard working professional, and hard work has always been the answer at the office.

You built the life the two of you said you would build, and the only thing missing is the happiness you do not feel with your partner.

By the time most couples call me they describe a point of “no return,” and they want to know whether the relationship is salvageable.

Every ounce of that effort has been going toward getting your partner to respond differently.

This work is uncomfortable, and it asks you both to be honest in front of a stranger before either of you feels ready.

Together we take those conversations one at a time, starting with the plainest question there is: what did you feel while it was happening?

Under the feeling sits a thought you had before you decided to think it, learned somewhere well before this relationship.

You made that thought, and what you made you have the authority to change.

With that, you can feel yourself going up in the middle of a hard conversation, and stay where you are anyway.

You practice it here, with each other, in front of me, on the subjects that actually set you off.

I will “nudge” both of you toward ways of saying things you have never tried, and you hold yourselves accountable for it.

The weekend calendar comes around again, and underneath it is the harder thing neither of you has said.

You hear your voice start to climb, you recognize the sound, and you let it settle before you answer.

The ask gets made plainly, with the values the two of you share, and the one listening knows what they will do about it.

That is the aim of this work: the two of you finishing a hard conversation feeling regarded, and closer for having had it.

One of you goes looking first, and today that is you.

Your partner does not have to have agreed to anything yet, or even know you are on this page.

That call is yours to make alone, and it commits neither of you to anything.

Fifteen free minutes, and we spend them on one of the subjects you route around. (805) 491-4429.

Life is better lived free of hesitations, so you can be your authentic self, speak your mind, and be heard.

Start with a free 15-minute call. It's our time to talk briefly so we're less like strangers when we meet.

I am eager to meet you!