SPECIALTIES

Whether you are a couple living together, married many years, newly wed or domestic partners, intimate relationships can pose great struggles and offer incredible rewards. As you develop your relationship over your lifetime, situations will inevitably arise and challenge you.

Many couples feel strains in their relationship due to:

• Caring for an in-law
• Making financial ends meet
• Recently having a baby
• Career Stress
• Family responsibilities

These issues can easily distract you from your partner. You or your partner may feel distant, frustrated, angry and resentful.

Some couples find resolve without therapy but others find themselves caught up in a cycle of negative emotions. Through therapy, many couples learn how to handle relationships challenges without losing connection to their partners.

Many couples report that the structure of therapy helps them stay on track and not get stuck in “what happened last week”. Events are discussed but always within a frame of moving forward and beyond conflict toward resolution.

Couples who love each other and commit to their relationship learn how to:

• Improve communication
• Understand and practice compromise
• Cope with stress
• Make each other a priority
• Live like lovers instead of buddies
• Make time for intimacy and sex
• Meet each other’s needs and desires

Love can feel complicated as it is often filled with joy and pain. However, when two people attempt to build a life together, extraordinary learning, growth and connection can occur. From this, couples can learn how to be fully present to themselves, to each other and to their relationship.

Family planning is a personal, private process. You may be a single woman, in a domestic partnership or perhaps married, trying to get pregnant so that you can raise a child and create a family. If you're not successful in getting pregnant, you might feel like a passenger on an emotional roller coaster. This experience may also feel isolating and that no one can really understand what you are going through.

Infertility can flood you with a full range of emotions, often including:
depression ~ anxiety ~ frustration ~ stress ~ guilt ~ inadequacy ~ grief ~ jealousy

If you are already involved with the medical system, you may be going through tests, monitoring your body, eating healthy, taking injections - all the while continuing in your attempts to get pregnant only to find that in your next cycle, you or your partner menstruates.

You may feel betrayed by your body, angry at your partner or perhaps at the world and wonder "where do I go from here?"

On the infertility journey, it is important to develop strong coping skills. Many men, women and couples endure infertility by creating strategies for good self care and care for their partner. Coping skills may include learning how to:

• manage the stress of infertility and the medical system
• understand and support your partner
• take care of yourself when "everyone else is getting pregnant"
• make friends with your body again
• explore other alternatives to childbirth such as adopting or living child-free

There are many ways to create a fulfilling life. Therapy can help to support you as you try to make decisions in your family planning, either naturally, through adoption or choosing to live without children.

As a woman, you have so much possibility for greatness and yet that same possibility creates pressure on you to do it all and be it all. The social pressures of being a perfect mother, a climbing career enthusiast, a care-giving daughter, a house manager and a sexy spouse can exhaust your spirit, rendering you tired and spread too thin.

You can learn how to maintain your energy, strength and confidence as you learn to balance caring for others while also taking care of you. After working with many woman, I have found common themes that have helped women feel healthier in their relationships with others. Areas we can work together include:

• learn how to become more assertive (without feeling guilty)
• move from co-dependant relationships to mutually satisfying relationships
• balance work, family and your needs as a woman
• let go of the social pressure to be super-woman
• manage life changes and transition with confidence and ease

Life can feel easier and more manageable. You may also find that when you step back and give others room to"do", you create room for yourself to breathe. From there, anything is possible. As a woman, you can learn to live fully, nurture yourself and love others.

Like so many women, you may love your partner but lack the desire, energy and will to be intimate and sexual.

For some women, this can be due to recently having a baby, excessive stress, life-cycle changes and other life issues. For other women, it could be due to having a medical problem such as a sexual disorder.

Some common sexual concerns include:

• Low or no sexual desire
• Difficulty with sexual arousal
• Problems with orgasm
• Painful Sex, sometimes diagnosed as
   - Dyspareunia (painful intercourse)
   - Vaginismus (painful spasm of the vagina)
   - Vestibulitis (tenderness in vulvar vestibule)
• Infertility
• Interstitial Cystitis (inflammation of the bladder)
• Endometriosis (overgrowth of the endometrium)
• Sexual Inhibition
• Sexual Trauma

Current research reports that 43% of women suffer from sexual dysfunction. Unfortunately, for many years, the medical community has often treated these issues as purely psychological and did not give credibility to the physical pain that women reported.

Have you tried to report it to your doctor only to have your doc ask you about whether or not you've been sexually abused and dismiss your current physical pain? Or perhaps you were handed a fact sheet on your disorder with little information on how to cope with the change in your body?

Today, as the research increases, more doctors, clinics and hospitals recognize women's sexual dysfunction as a valid medical problem and are developing various types of treatments.

You may be one of many women who is uncertain if she has a sexual disorder or you may have been diagnosed with one and not been given any means of support about how to deal with this. Further, sexual disorders are not easy to talk about and you may feel isolated, ashamed and embarrassed. You might also be exercising the typical self-talk such as:

• What did I do to cause this?
• How do I tell my partner?
• Who is ever going to want to be with me?

Depression, anxiety and shame frequently accompany the diagnosis. You may also fear experiencing any potential pain and shut yourself down sexually.

Many women create satisfying, fulfilling sex lives. Whether your dissatisfaction relates to environmental or biological causes, therapy can help you grieve what you feel is lost and build on what you still have. Limitations in your sexual functioning do not erase your ability to feel sensual. By developing a healthy relationship with your body and with your partner, you can learn how to experience deep intimacy, sexual connection and arousal again.

Anxiety can play a positive role in your life. Anxiety acts as a natural alert system to your body, exclaiming "danger, danger!". Having this natural system in place is a healthy and necessary part of our survival. However, anxiety can feel problematic when your body sends out its alert signal and danger is not present. When might this occur?

Some examples include:

• meeting new people
• giving a speech
• worrying excessively

Stress and anxiety are closely related. Anxiety roots itself in fear where stress roots itself in feeling overwhelmed. Examples of stress include:

• pressure from your boss to perform days, nights and weekends
• having over-scheduled activities to do each week with family and friends
• financial pressure to pay bills or to care for elderly parents

Both share similar physical symptoms. With each, you might experience:

• shortness of breath
• rapid heart-beat
• racing thoughts
• sleeplessness
• tingling in the arms
• trembling
• upset stomach and/or "nervous" stomach
• high blood pressure

Since they both share similar physical symptoms, they can be difficult to separate. Whether you are dealing with stress or anxiety, you can overcome those painful symptoms through similar means.

In therapy, you can learn how to increase your self-awareness so that you can better understand how you relate to the environment around you. You can learn how to:

• effectively use breathing exercises
• use progressive muscle relaxation to reprogram your muscles to relax
• cultivate a mindful way of living
• use guided imagery to calm your nervous system
• create schedules that provide space

You can learn how to dispel the powerful hold that stress or anxiety may have on you so that you can relax more, move through each day with ease and comfort, feel confident and actually enjoy life.