You’re kind of struggling in your relationship and you want help from a professional, not just friends or family.
The fight cycle is just really intense, and sometimes you feel so angry, and you want to feel close and loved.
At times, recently, there’s been yelling, door slamming, name-calling and negative jabs. You know you want and need healthier ways to talk together.
It feels like your partner kicked you in the stomach with their hurtful words.
In Middletown, Connecticut, Wisdom Within Counseling can really help with conflict resolution and unity.
Couples counseling in Middletown, Connecticut helps you from feeling out of control or helpless after a fight.
So first of all, if you’re struggling with these things, it’s okay. You are not alone. All of these issues reason to get into couples counseling. The process of marriage therapy can help you build a foundation for effective communication.
Marital counseling helps you be playful when discussing kind of topics that might be tense.
To begin, click the button below for a phone consult to gain healthy communication skills and emotional closeness.
Medication, appointments, exercise, sex life, politics, parenting, fertility, in-laws to how you want to spend your money can be triggering. These different elements can trigger high conflict fights. As well, the marriage specialists at Wisdom Within Counseling will asses your relationship. Commonly, couples who are in distress have been in past emotionally or physical abusive situations. There is trauma that holistic marriage therapy takes into consideration. Couples often have a lot of unresolved trauma from childhood too.
What is trauma?
Maybe, your spouse had a parent that yelled at them a lot. Your spouse may have grown up in a conflictual home or a chaotic home. Maybe, they moved a lot, so they never had a stable parent. Or, you notice trauma in your own history with a past romantic partner. Perhaps, you have gone through losses like loss of a parent or a miscarriage. In your childhood, perhaps one of your parents was a substance user or an alcoholic. If a parent was violent domestically or narcissistic, this is childhood trauma.
These painful past experiences play a role in conflicts couples have currently.
All of these painful, complex, childhood traumas, stay with people into adult years. As humans, we bring with us fears, anxiety, and pain, in our little imaginary backpacks so to speak. Separating from and understanding childhood trauma is a key in overcoming high conflict arguments. Couples counseling in Middletown, Connecticut helps couples bring a clear, creative, and confident authentic self into relationships as adults.
Learning to talk about feelings in a calm way will help couples for many years into their marriage.
Working with a Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist helps you build a loving connection versus a negative connection. So one thing that you can do today is to notice when you raise your voice, it’s really easy when we feel unheard or pushed aside or unwanted or just like plain old unimportant to our partner. You have a part of you that’s like I want to be significant.
What is under argument or conflict when it comes to working with a Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist?
If one partner feels unheard, they may start yelling, or shutdown. To note, yelling and emotional shut down are not forms of effective communication. It is going to hurt your partner to yell at them. However, in the moment, a person who is flooded with anger is not able to think clearly. So, couples therapy teaches self-soothing skills for reducing and managing anger. It is going to do more damage to yell. When couples do not know how to stop or pause an argument, they get to the next level and it escalates.
When couples use name calling, they are really trying to share how hurt and sad they feel.
So, working with a Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist helps partners notice heartbeat, stress levels and find alternatives to yelling. And, if you notice yourself starting to yell, your heart rate starts beating faster. In the moments when you can imagine steam coming out of your ears, couples therapy teaches you how to practice self-regulation and self-care skills.
What is self-regulation in Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapy?
Taking space, going for a walk, having water, or doing some self-soothing is key to deescalate a fight. If you are too triggered to be able to be effective with your communication, notice and be aware of this. When you feel flooded with intense emotions like anger, jealousy, insecurity, or anger, take time to cool off. To be a good speaker and listener means being calm, creative, confident, and grounded. If you are angry, none of those positive qualities are possible to attain. Notice when you’re yelling and self-regulate when necessary.
Your Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist can identify heated topics and provide support
Couples need to understand their personal, heated topics. These are topics specific to each couples. Having a child, getting pregnant, fertility or infertility might be the triggering topic. For instance, sex life, sexual performance, and sexual pleasure may be a heated topic.
To begin, click the button below for a phone consult to get started with your Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist.
Start to think about your top three triggering topics.
However, for another couple, money, finances, debt, credit cards, budgeting, and decisions around money cause conflict. For one couple, childcare or parenting might not be a heated topic. For your next couple, and a fight breaks out every time parenting values or how to discipline children come up.
It’s very different for every couple, and these can change throughout the course of your entire life span as a married couple.
Holistic marriage therapy helps you feel connected rather than you at odds with each other.
One of you is telling the other one what they should spend money on. The other person is continually keeping secrets around money. This creates trust issues and dishonesty. As well, there might be debt that there has been kept in secret. Or, you found your spouse’s credit card debt that’s been racked up. A big purchase was made behind one person’s back. Holistic couples therapy helps when there is secret keeping and lying around money. These money issues are often a childhood generational pattern that can be broken.
Patterns of conflict around heated, stressful topics
At one time, planning your wedding might have been stressful. Losing a parent to cancer was a major loss. Then, after raising five children, you are dealing with other stressors as a couple around your sex life and sexual pleasure. These triggering, heated topics can change throughout your life. Couples therapy support healthy communication skills and calm ways of talking. Holistic couples therapy helps you talk about these topics in a calm and peaceful way. Playfulness and joy can be part of this conversation. So, notice your heated topics, and approach them with gentleness, nurturing and ease.
If you struggle with that, Wisdom Within Counseling specializes with couples.
If every time you approach money issues and you feel like your heart rate’s increasing, self-regulation skills are needed. Or, you just want to slam the door or yell, couples therapy can be very effective for you and your partner.
Understand your family’s dysfunctional patterns from working with a Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist.
As marriage and family therapist, Katie Ziskind and her team of therapists, love looking at family patterns. A lot of times, therapy can be this beautiful, safe environment to understand past generations. Looking at your family tree can give you insightful understandings about your family’s past. You can have a totally confidential space, to talk about what’s happened in your grandparent’s and parent’s childhoods. A lot of times, alcoholism, abuse, breakdown in communication, or yelling are generational trauma patterns. As well, looking at building a healthy marriage, all begins from nurturing your inner child parts.
To begin, click the button below to book your free phone consultation to work with a Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist for a healthier relationship.
What is generational trauma and why does it matter when meeting with a Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist?
In your childhood, you may have seen your parents have an affair, or seen your parents yell at each other. Perhaps, you saw your parents sing while doing the dishes, or even seeing your parents hold hands and kiss in public. Whatever it is, that all is part of who you are. And so, for instance, we see family patterns, abuse and occupations being passed down. Also, when one parent is a lawyer the child may become a lawyer. We see family patterns and substance abuse. So, when a parent is an alcoholic, an adult child commonly becomes an alcoholic or develops a problem with drugs.
Family patterns can be negative and positive.
You may have had a parent that withheld love or didn’t tell you they loved you. Maybe, a parent was highly critical of you as a child and you always felt like you had to be perfect. These parts of us are still part of our adult bodies and part of marriage counseling in Middletown, Connecticut. Simply notice family patterns. Pattern awareness might mean you feel like you have to be the caretaker to others. You feel like you have to be overly responsible for everyone else from being the oldest sibling. Birth order can play a big part in family patterns.
Your couple’s therapist can help you understand family patterns.
Learn what what patterns you want to break. Begin breaking the cycle for abuse, name calling, and anger through relationship therapy. On a negative side, there might have been a family pattern of lying or secret keeping.
What is a healthy family pattern or family ritual?
On the healthy side, we might see a family pattern of getting together every Sunday for a family breakfast or dinner. Some families have a weekly ritual for family time. Or every holiday, some families do a specific tradition. Or every year, some families go to a special beach or place on vacation.
So, those can be very positive family patterns that you might want to incorporate and keep in your marriage and family life. Meeting with a Middletown, Connecticut marriage therapist help you gain clarity on what patterns you want to keep and what you what to stop.
Our Middletown, Connecticut team of holistic therapists at Wisdom Within Counseling would love to help you gain some clarity and emotional confidence.
Couples get a safe place to build emotional intimacy and develop heart-to-heart energy. You can regain clarity and creativity in your communication.
From there, you can feel close falling asleep next to each other at bedtime, and wake up together. Couples therapy in Middletown, Connecticut helps couples create a sense of love and connection to each other.
Right now, you feel like you’re on different planets or like two ships passing in the night.
And if you do, our team at Wisdom Within Counseling would love to help you build a healthy, loving and meaningful marriage. You can create communication skills that are healthy and long-lasting. Your marriage can develop into one that is strong and stable.
Katie Ziskind is the owner of Wisdom Within Counseling in Niantic Connecticut. We help families, anxious children, depressed teenagers and distant couples, using holistic, creative therapies. Couples who are fighting, distant, stuck in negative communication can get professional help at Wisdom Within Counseling.
Art, yoga, meditation, music, and creative, holistic therapies help couples heal together. Creative, mind-body, complimentary alternatives improve your intimate relationship.
