Daniel Brooks, LCSW

Couples Therapy

As an experienced couples psychotherapist, I enjoy that work with a strong belief that partners often overcome roadblocks by understanding unconscious roles that have emerged from their past which hinder present interactions.

I often say to couples in therapy, “One of you can sit here and speculate for years with me about why your partner acts in a certain way, but here at couples therapy you can actually ask that question to him or her, get a direct answer, work through it and save a lot of time and arguing!” Often with couples, the simplest of answers has become so difficult to ask that it takes on a shroud of mystery and a life of its own. In couples psychotherapy it is often quickly illuminated and understood by all.

The beginnings of couples treatment, although administered in a simple non-threatening, non-accusatory form of recognizing partner's strengths and weaknesses, is solidly based in my experience as an individual psychoanalyst. It draws greatly from developmental, Imago and self psychology but is psychoanalytically based. Instead of treating one individual, each member of the couple is treated separately in the same session, and that shared information is then related to how the dyad is effected by their individual differences.

Couples walk away from each session with a better understanding of why short-circuited interactions between them are contributing to or creating angry pervasive arguments, nagging, limited or no sexual contact, and a feeling that each must “change” the other in order to proceed in their bond.

As anger dissipates and is replaced by understanding, effort and empathy, the intimacy that many couples once had but lost, reemerges. Couples often find that they have something unique to offer each other and can work through their conflicts, deciding not to separate.

For some couples, therapy actually helps them to decide that separation is necessary because they have changed as individuals and they find that their new “selves” are in conflict with the very attributes that initially attracted them to their partner.

In those cases, where reconciliation is agreed to be impossible, couples therapy helps the couple to separate. I am associated with a neighborhood attorney who specializes in divorce remediation, and details of separation are worked out with the mediator ahead of actual litigation, therefore saving huge legal fees.

In both scenarios, the couple and psychotherapist sift through heated emotions and mutually arrive at working goals, direction and duration of treatment. From that point the work begins.