Did you know that nearly 50% of married couples have sought out marriage counseling services? With that in mind, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t consider therapy for you and your partner! When you and your partner are starting out in a relationship or after a long time of relationship, you can quickly develop bad habits and have difficulties coping with hard emotions. 

When you face such problems in your marriage or partnership, couples therapy becomes a great help. Conflict is a part of every couple’s life, and any dispute left unresolved can weaken your relationship if un-communicated. Using the assistance of an unbiased third party, you and your partner can create the healthy space for communication that you’ve been craving. 

Here’s how Dr. Phil Chanin’s Marriage Counseling Services can make a difference:

1. Dr. Phil Chanin
2. Marriage Therapy Focal Points
3. A Buddhist Psychotherapists Teaching Influences
4. Marriage Counseling Services

Dr. Phil Chanin

Dr. Phil Chanin’s work in couples therapy and marriage counseling utilizes the theory and practices of Imago Relationship Therapy (IRT). Drawing extensively on the approaches of nationally known couples therapists with whom he has trained, imago theory helps to explain how the choices we make, in whom we fall in love with, almost guarantee that we will eventually find ourselves in difficult and painful power struggles with our partners. 

Many couples have come for marital therapy while raising children, realizing that in part their focus on the children has subsumed their own emotional and sexual connection. Other couples have benefited from marriage counseling when seriously questioning whether they should stay married.

Successful couples therapy or marital therapy, is partly the result of learning new communication skills which interrupt the universal tendency toward defensiveness, enabling each partner to become a better listener as well as feel more heard by one’s partner. With help from Dr. Phil Chanin’s diverse marriage counseling services, you and your partner can work on incorporating healthier habits into your marriage. 

Marriage Therapy Focal Points

• Imago Therapy
• Marriage—Divorce
• Non-Violent Communication
• Relationship Issues
• Terrence Real’s Feedback Wheel
• The “Internal Boundary”: An Effective Strategy for not Taking what my Partner Says Personally
• Projective Identification: Appreciating My Role in Relational Conflict
• Reducing Destructive Conflict: How to Take a Time-Out
• Rapidly Interrupting Destructive Relationship Cycles: Setting up “Dead Stop Contracts”

Looking to understand the inner workings of your spouse? Connect with Dr. Phil Chanin today!

A Buddhist Psychotherapist’s Teaching Influences

Harville Hendrix

Imago Relationship Therapy (IRT), developed by Harville Hendrix, explains how our experience in infancy and childhood with parental figures leaves all of us with residues of “unfinished business”, frustrations, hurts, and unmet longings, residues that we unconsciously carry into our life with our present partners. What we bring to our romantic encounters is not only our present needs for companionship and love, but also our unconscious hope that this partner will meet, touch, and heal the hurts and unmet longings we bring from the past. 

With this very process, Dr. Phil Chanin teaches all the couples with whom I work an Imago strategy for communication that requires careful listening to my partners thoughts and feelings, rather than jumping in with my point of view, before my partner has been able to fully speak his or her experience.

John Gottman

John Gottman, a Seattle-based research psychologist who has been studying marriage counseling in his marriage laboratory for over 25 years also influences Dr. Phil Chanin’s work. Gottman takes physiological measurements, with heart monitors and blood pressure monitors, and measures what happens when couples talk and when they get into conflicts. 

He teaches couples to know their resting heart rate, because once a marital conflict begins, very quickly heart rate and blood pressure rise, and our body becomes “flooded,” in Gottman’s words. At this point, rarely does anything get solved, and often the exchange leads to anger and painful hurt feelings. 

The difference between happy and unhappy couples, he writes, is that unhappy couples keep hammering away at these conflicts, whereas happy couples develop a dialogue about the perpetual or unresolvable issues, and even have the ability to laugh about them.

Esther Perel

Another influence on Dr. Phil’s work comes from the teachings of Esther Perel. A Belgium-born psychotherapist who is fluent in nine languages and conducts couples therapy in New York City in five different languages, Esther Perel’s work focuses on how various sexual problems in marriages are much more often a loss of desire, even with couples only in their 20’s. 

We marry, she asserts, for security and companionship, but too often these work against sexual desire. In her words, “We expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all? 

In terms of many couples seeking therapy to relieve sexual difficulties, Dr. Phil Chanin ties Esther Perel’s work into many of his sessions. 

Marriage Counseling Services

In seeking couples therapy, you and your partner can troubleshoot areas of friction as they come in a safe, healthy environment. Often, having the ear of a third party professional can give you the reassurance you need in your relationship and keep you and your partner on top of your emotions.  

Dr. Phil Chanin’s work helps to explain the choices we make, why we fall in love with the people we do, and can almost guarantee that we will eventually find ourselves in difficult and painful power struggles with our partners. If you and your partner are looking for couples counseling services to re-energize your relationship, contact Dr. Phil Chanin today!