“Intimacy is what we most long for and what we most fear.”
Relationships bring out our best and worst selves, our greatest hopes, and our deepest fears and vulnerabilities.
The goal of premarital therapy is to ensure your relationship’s foundation is rock-solid and that you’re entering into your marriage with your eyes wide open and ready to fulfill your lifelong commitment.
Learning to communicate both love and hurt in ways that your partner can hear are vital skills we need to sustain a supportive and meaningful long-term partnership.
Some couples may be seeking premarital therapy to simply sort out the “big conversations” about money, child-rearing, sex, and work-life balance to make sure they’re on the same page.
Others may feel a deep dedication to one another but are looking to develop that extra spark.
Still others may need help reversing the hurtful patterns in your relationships to help you become a life-giving source for one another, rather than a source of pain and strife.
In the latter case, premarital therapy focuses on unveiling deep fears, hurts, and painful internalized messages, while simultaneously learning to communicate your needs to one another in ways that are effective and healing.
Often in relationships we feel that we have tried to address a problem a hundred times but to no avail.
And sometimes getting through to our partners just doesn’t seem to work.
Can you relate?
Premarital therapy can help you to better communicate in a way that your partner understands, and can help you both identify the pain points in the relationship and how to move past them.
Our therapists are extensively trained in couples therapy and have the tools to help your relationship heal and flourish.
We also emphasize expressing your affection and loving more freely, so you can build a deeper, more satisfying connection with your partner.
In our experience, the most effective approach to premarital counseling is focusing on communication patterns within the session—including non-verbal communication—as well as pointing out times when unconscious anxiety contributes to destructive ways of engaging.
When there are long-standing issues in a relationship, it’s often hard to detect the underlying patterns and what exactly is going wrong since we are so deep in the cycle.
That’s why it’s helpful to have an outsider’s perspective (a.k.a. your therapist) to come in and point out the problems at hand.
When we repair the damaged interactional patterns, we don’t have to work through every single conflict that arises, but rather we heal the underlying issues so that the shift extends to all subsequent interactions.
In other words, we go beyond the symptoms and get to the root cause.
Often fights that seem petty can point us to deeper, unspoken issues within our relationships that need attention and healing.
These seemingly trivial fights are usually an expression of that which has not been communicated directly.
At My La Therapy, we are trained to identify and help you articulate what has been unspoken so that you can heal and restore your love connection, ensuring a foundation that lasts.
We have experience working with couples of all ages and at various stages in their relationships, whether dating, engaged, newly married, or in a long-term marriage or partnership.
We also have a great deal of experience working with LGBTQ+ and non-traditional partnerships in the BDSM/kink and poly communities.
One of our clients offered to share this email he wrote in case others may be interested in learning more about what it’s like to work with us. You can find more reviews on the Reviews and Testimonials page.
“I just wanted to share that yesterday’s session with you, and a long, productive dinner table conversation with my wife last night, started to uncover a huge gap between perception and reality in my understanding of the status I held in our marriage, and how that’s directly affected the way I relate with my wife. Our conversation went a long way toward opening my eyes to the fact that the inequity I’ve long felt in our partnership owes a lot to my coming to it from a mental place of assumed unworthiness. Shame has been the monkey on my back for a long, long time. You totally called it.
So I want to thank you again for your continued help and expertise, and more specifically for yesterday’s learning opportunity about how I can communicate with you more effectively. After your ultimately appreciated prodding, you made me feel comfortable with the idea that expressing confusion or even doubt can serve as valuable conversation-starters, and I look forward to continuing our work together without those self-inflicted parameters.
After every session, I come away feeling better prepared to start shining light into shadows I’ve hustled past for a long, long time… some rational ones, but a lot more aren’t. Yesterday I feel I finally started to understand that while my vivid (and lucrative) imagination often wants to create terrifying monsters under the bed, in a lot of cases those monsters are nothing more than a heap of decidedly less-terrifying laundry I’ve avoided for too long that just needs to be aired out and put away. Which I’ve got to imagine is a lot easier than monster slaying.
I’m so thankful for this journey my wife and I are taking together, with your help, towards deeper, more productive understanding. Sometimes I may shuffle and others I may leap, but after our sessions always feel like we’re moving forward. Yesterday felt like a leap day.”
We find you the perfect therapist – or your money back.
Promenade
127 Broadway Suite 205
Santa Monica, CA 90401
Venice
130 Ocean Park Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90405
San Fernando Valley
16055 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, CA 91436.
Brentwood
12100 Wilshire Blvd. 8th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90025
City
10801 National Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90064
