Couples come into therapy holding ideas about how partnership should look. These were learned from inside the family system as well from the culture. As individuals in the relationship change, circumstances around the relationship change, and as the larger culture changes, these ideas can hold to a picture no longer matching the current reality, or they can reconstruct themselves in adaption to current reality. Either way, there can be an experience of disorientation, fear, pain, confusion or questioning, frustration. By providing themselves with a venue to express and share the thoughts and feelings which accompany change, couples can develop greater intimacy as well as greater efficacy in communication. Often, however, partners do not avail themselves of such an arena while their differences and percieved problems escalate in intensity. At that point, connectedness may seem painful or even threatening. To be intimate may feel vulnerable, leaving the possibility of resolution ever more distant. In the couples therapy session, partners are invited to reconnect with their issues, beliefs, emotions and the whole body-mind arena of information. Connected to self, the partners can then connect to each other. The resolution is in the connection, whether with the self, with a partner, or with the world.

Each of us has experienced events to which we have responded, and out of the ground of these responses we have sprouted our ideas about how things are. In relationships we are provided with the opportunity to sprout anew again and again.

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