What is Couples Therapy?

Couples therapy aims to teach couples how to connect more deeply and better navigate conflict by improving communication and enhancing emotional intimacy. If you are considering couples therapy, you’re likely feeling hurt, misunderstood, unheard, or distant from your partner. You may have gotten stuck in a cycle of defensiveness, blame, avoidance, or escalation. Couples therapy can provide a safe environment in which you and your partner can break these cycles by guiding each of you to share your internal experience and unmet needs and actively listen to one another.

How Couples Therapy
Can Help

Reducing Conflict

Couples therapy begins by focusing on reducing conflict so that you are able to hear each other more fully. This can include work on skills for de-escalating and resolving arguments and disagreements. Increasing your time together without conflict also helps to build up resilience and patience in your relationship.

Improving Communication

Once you have successfully reduced conflict in your relationship, couples therapy shifts to examining what underlies the conflict. At this stage, we emphasize active listening, addressing emotions, and vulnerable communication. When you’re truly able to hear your partner’s perspective and you feel heard in return, the door to connection and empathy opens.

Building Connection

As you feel more safe and secure, couples therapy will focus more on increasing positives in your relationship in order to build up your reserves of pleasant experiences, joy, and intimacy. Taken together, couples therapy can help you and your partner feel closer, experience more emotional and physical intimacy, be better co-parents, and solve problems together more effectively.

How Couples Therapy Works

In your first few sessions, you will identify the challenges in your relationship, discuss your history as a couple and your histories as individuals, and establish treatment goals. Your therapist will work with you to develop a roadmap of how your relationship challenges came to be and why they continue to arise or worsen. Throughout treatment, you will use this roadmap as a guide to achieve your goals.

You and your therapist will then determine the most appropriate type of treatment based on your relationship. At NYCBT, we specialize in understanding the unique needs of each couple and providing the type of couples therapy that is best-suited for you. We offer the following types of evidence-based couples therapies that are designed to be short-term (on average, 4-8 months):

Integrative Behavioral
Couples Therapy (IBCT)

In IBCT, you and your partner will develop an in-depth understanding of your relationship difficulties and the unhelpful patterns you fall into. With this understanding, you will identify the things you wish to change and improve how you interact and connect. For the things you cannot change about your partner or your relationship, IBCT teaches strategies for increasing acceptance.

DBT-informed
Couples Therapy

In DBT-informed couples therapy, you learn strategies from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to manage intense emotions, communicate effectively, and resolve conflicts. This approach emphasizes validation and acceptance of each other’s experiences to improve your relationship.

Infidelity
Treatment

If you’re recovering from infidelity, this treatment focuses on rebuilding trust and repairing your relationship. It helps both of you understand the impact of the affair and foster empathy to facilitate healing.

Conjoint Behavioral Couples
Therapy for PTSD (CBCT)

If you or your partner have PTSD or are recovering from trauma, this therapy focuses on improving communication, rebuilding intimacy, and addressing how trauma and PTSD impact your relationship dynamics, offering structured support tailored to your needs.

Integrative Behavioral
Couples Therapy (IBCT)

In IBCT, you and your partner will develop an in-depth understanding of your relationship difficulties and the unhelpful patterns you fall into. With this understanding, you will identify the things you wish to change and improve how you interact and connect. For the things you cannot change about your partner or your relationship, IBCT teaches strategies for increasing acceptance.

DBT-informed
Couples Therapy

In DBT-informed couples therapy, you learn strategies from Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) to manage intense emotions, communicate effectively, and resolve conflicts. This approach emphasizes validation and acceptance of each other’s experiences to improve your relationship.

Infidelity
Treatment

If you’re recovering from infidelity, this treatment focuses on rebuilding trust and repairing your relationship. It helps both of you understand the impact of the affair and foster empathy to facilitate healing.

Conjoint Behavioral Couples
Therapy for PTSD (CBCT)

If you or your partner have PTSD or are recovering from trauma, this therapy focuses on improving communication, rebuilding intimacy, and addressing how trauma and PTSD impact your relationship dynamics, offering structured support tailored to your needs.

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