Let us tailor a treatment program designed for you, your spouse and your family to help you overcome the issues you are facing. Please call 703-893-3431 or click on the request consultation button below to determine what your needs are.
After careful assessment of each couple’s needs, we will develop a practical treatment program that focuses on learning new skills and communication strategies to help you strengthen your relationship and resolve your issues.
Couples Issues Addressed
Communications Skills
Dr. Nay’s six-step anger program published in Taking Charge of Anger: 2nd Edition (Guilford Press, 2012), as well as his Anger Managment Workbook (Guilford Press, 2014), provides the basis for practical and powerful to regulate anger arousal and alter thinking that fuels anger. New ways of expressing feelings and solving problems without emotional arousal are practiced.
Anger Management
Stress and anxiety diminish the quality of your life. Muscle tension, gastro-intestinal upset and general inner tension and “nervousness” can roadblock your life’s goals and make each day a challenge. You will learn new ways to identify the beginnings of “fight or flight” arousal and to relax your mind and body while challenging and replacing upsetting thinking patterns (e.g., worrying, catastrophizing, “filtering in” upsetting thoughts) that trigger anxiety and lead to emotional arousal. Our CBT interventions will help you to manage your anger and successfully achieve your goals.
Boundary Setting
To clearly communicate what you expect, you must define your own boundaries: what is unacceptable and not to be tolerated. What are your boundaries for others? When you’re speaking with another person who has a tendency toward hostility or aggression, at what point do their behaviors become unacceptable? We will help you identify destructive behaviors and to set essential boundaries to assert what you expect from others in no uncertain terms using effective CBT tools and techniques to accomplish your goals.
Resolving Differences
Getting your needs met sometimes requires learning to use your words to defuse conflict before it has a chance to fully ignite. The anxiety conflict creates can diminish the quality of your life. The most powerful strategy can be to tailor your words to the specific intense actions of the other person with the goal of interrupting arousal to give the other person an opportunity to rethink and restate what was said and to give yourself a brief time to perform a thoughtful intervention. Sometimes, however, no matter how hard you try to defuse the situation and keep it on a calm course toward resolution of differences, the other person won’t cooperate. We will help you accomplish these objectives by using CBT interventions that are effective in achieving your goals.
Crafting Vision Statements & Setting Goals
Crafting your vision statement of what you desire for your relationship and setting goals is crucial for the sustainability of a long-term relationship. We provide you with the tools essential to achieving these goals and encourage contracting with your partner to meet each other’s desires and needs to create a healthy outcome—to grow within both individually and as partners in a more perfect union.
Pre-Marital Counseling
Couples contemplating marriage are encouraged to explore their individual and mutual desires and goals for their future together and to learn strategies to communicate effectively with each other. CBT interventions, as identified above, are also explored to enhance and strengthen your new commitment to marry.