Couples Counseling In Nashville
You need a relationship upgrade. Our Couples Counselors can help.
You love each other, but you don’t always feel the love.
There are three different types of couples who come to our office. Here’s what they say:
Roller Coaster Couple
“When it’s good, it’s good - but when it’s bad, it’s really bad.”
The Quiet Couple
“We’re fine.”
The Volatile Couple
“It’s mostly bad.”
Every couple is unique and no one fits perfectly into a category. As you read the descriptor for each type of couple, you might identify with more than one. There’s overlap in each of these. The bottom line: regardless of how you got stuck, you want something different. You don’t want to lose yourself or the relationship. And by trying to not lose either, you get caught in a repetitive pattern.
The pattern is the problem - not you or your partner. You probably do actually love each other - you just can’t always get a felt sense of your love.
Roller Coaster Couple
“When it’s good, it’s good - but when it’s bad, it’s really bad.”
This pattern comes up a lot in relationship counseling. You might have heard it as the push/pull or pursuer/withdrawer dynamic, or as attachment styles with anxious/avoidant.
Imagine you both have headphones on your heart.
When something happens - one of you wants to turn the emotional volume up and the other wants to turn it down. Both are coping with what you perceive as a relational threat. You both want to find a way back to each other, you just have different ways of doing that.
If you are the one who turns the emotional volume up, you’re probably trying to get resolution.
You ask more questions, bring things up, test the water and eventually you get critical or blame. You are desperate to be heard and to feel something real with your partner.
If you’re turning the volume down, you’re just trying to make the whole thing stop.
You get defensive, logical, you placate, shut down and shut out. You do not initiate hard conversations for fear that you’ll just argue and make things worse.
If you turn the volume up, you usually feel rejected and alone. If you turn the volume down, you usually feel like a failure and that you can never get it right for your love.
A couples therapist would see this relationship and understand there’s no lack of love. It’s just a pattern that you are both stuck in. There’s no great way to repair, and so the trust just erodes over time. Eventually - the playfulness, lightness and romance just aren’t there anymore. Throw kids and jobs in the mix and everything is harder!
These are actual phrases from clients our relationship therapists have heard over the years.
If you can recognize yourself or your partner in these patterns, therapy with a skilled couples therapist from our team can help dramatically.
Partners Who Turn the Emotional Volume Up:
“I’m the only one that sees the issues. If I don’t bring it up - nothing will change.”
“I feel so alone in this relationship.”
“I don’t trust that anything will change. I’m really losing hope.”
“I never feel like I’m a priority.”
Partners Who Turn the Emotional Volume Down:
It’s like a moving target. As soon as I think I’m doing what my partner wants, it changes.”
“I think my partner expects too much and maybe if we just appreciated the good things, we could enjoy each other again.”
“I wish we had sex more often, but that’s definitely a topic that doesn’t go well.”
“It really bothers me that I can’t seem to meet my partner's emotional needs. I start to feel like maybe I don’t have it in me and that I never will.”
If you can recognize yourself or your partner in these patterns, therapy with a skilled couples therapist from our team can help dramatically.
Let’s look at another way that couples get stuck.
The following pattern is one in which there isn’t much fighting, but there’s also not much deep connection.
The Quiet Couple
“We’re fine.”
If you read the description above and could identify yourself, but the difference is you just don’t fight that much - you fit in the “we’re fine” category (until you’re not fine, of course).
You might partner well in life (co-parenting, taking care of responsibilities, etc.) but you don’t often share deeper emotions. There’s no emotional intimacy or safety and maybe no physical intimacy either.
You are polite, maybe even kind - but the passion is gone. Or, it could be that there’s tension - but it’s a quiet fight. There are lots of assumptions and no actual conversations. Neither of you want to risk a blow up, so you avoid the elephant in the room.
There’s a lot of sweeping things under the rug and waiting for the other person to make a move. You both sort of think things are fine until it’s not fine. Or maybe one of you is thinking about it a lot, but you’re really afraid to bring it up - so you don’t. Things build up, and then it all comes out.
If you’re this type of couple, you wait a long time before coming to see a couples counselor.
It makes sense - if avoiding is your go to coping mechanism, coming to counseling is probably intimidating or scary!
With the “Quiet Couple,” often something big has happened for you to make the jump toward counseling. Someone has threatened divorce, an affair has been discovered, or one partner decides they just can’t handle a sex-less relationship.
You are stuck in a rut, and if you’re honest - you’re done with going through the motions and feeling numb.
We can help you find a way through.
Let’s take a look at one more type of couple…You recognized yourself in the first category (the roller coaster couple) - but your energy is times 10. And no one backs down.
The Volatile Couple.
“We’re counting the days that we haven’t fought.”
You’ve gotten to the point where your fights define your relationship more than anything else. In this dynamic - you’re both stubborn and afraid of losing yourself - so you go toe to toe in order to be heard and seen. The problem is, no one gets heard or seen. You just go around and around until you’re exhausted.
If you’ve ever counted the days you’ve gone without fighting and have been desperate for any tool to keep it from happening - you’re probably stuck and you need help going deeper.
The difference between the roller coaster couple and the volatile couple is that no one is willing to placate. You probably have had fights where you can’t remember what started it. Eventually, you’re just fighting about fighting.
Finding the way through the dysfunction into harmony.
Being stuck in any combination of the three patterns (the roller coaster couple, the quiet couple or the volatile couple) is not sustainable.
It affects your health and it’s not good for the entire family.
This isn’t something that date nights, communication skills or individual counseling can touch. You have to stop the stuck pattern long enough to be able to build something new together. To do that, you have to go deep to the root that’s driving the whole thing.
You got into the pattern together, you have to get out of it together.
We’re a team of specially trained couples therapists in Nashville who can help you get out of the pattern.
And we have a specific method to help you do that. We do one thing and we do it really well. We are specially trained in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT).
Why do we use EFT? We could bore you with the decades of evidenced-based research proving it to be the gold standard of efficacy for couples therapy (but you can just Google it if you actually want to nerd out).
We love EFT because we’ve seen it work time and time again in our clients. The results they achieve are proof. They show us it works every day.
Couples come in with all kinds of issues. We help couples get to the heart of the pattern they’re stuck in so they can find some true relief and peace in their relationship.
Betrayal
Health problems
Parenting
Empty nest/transition in life stages
Discrepancy in desire/physical intimacy
Finances
Aging parents
Sharing the load of household chores
Infidelity
Job transition
This is what our couples say at the end of EFT couples therapy:
“I honestly didn’t know it could be this good.”
“I’m not worried about whether or not you’ll be there for me. I have confidence that you have my back.”
“It feels like it did when we were dating - only better. Now we’re more mature and we know ourselves.”
“If you told me we would be flirty again, there’s no way I would believe that.”
“I feel sad - we could have done this years ago and saved ourselves so much heartache.”
We know how difficult it is to be in your situation right now.
Our couples therapists have over 60+ years of combined experience working with couples day in and day out to help create a better relationship.
We will guide you through this process step by step. When couples in Nashville need help, they reach out to us.
You are worth it and your relationship really does deserve an upgrade.
We’re confident in our ability to help you.
This is our passion.