Couples Therapy and Family therapy can help people deepen their understanding of one another. Couples and families bond in unique ways. Relationships are intensive, and wounds cut deep, generating feelings of resentment, distrust, lack of safety, and loneliness.

Thoughts and feelings aren’t always put into words: understandings are unspoken; rules are conveyed with a certain look, a turning away…things said, but as often as not, things that are left unsaid.

A healthy relationship is one in which individuals are able to acknowledge and respect their own thoughts and feelings, while also acknowledging the thoughts and feelings of others.

Sound hard? It might. In therapy, individuals in couple relationships and families can learn to separate what’s real from one’s own projections (assumptions about others based on self-talk).

Learn to identify and lessen blame, or inappropriate advice-giving. Demystify the notion of personal responsibility. I recommend 1-3 sessions at my Walnut Creek office, minutes away from neighboring cities Pleasant Hill and Concord, for evaluation, and goal-setting, to see if working together may be a fit.

A secret is not that which is known or unknown. It is that which is not talked about.