Marriage
“If age is just a state of mind, then While We’re Young is the best kind of therapy a forty something starting to lose touch with the younger generation could hope for.” Peter Debruge, Variety Josh (Ben Stiller) and Cornelia (Naomi Watts) are settling into their forties and beginning to feel all washed up. Josh,…
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When a parent falls ill, the family constellation is bound to change, and multiple familial relationships usually become strained or strengthened, sometimes in unexpected ways. Most people decide to begin therapy because something has changed, and usually this change involves a family or relationship crisis. Since most of the clients in our therapy practice are…
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Gary D. Chapman, Northfield Publishing How can couples who want to make their marriage work regain the loving feelings from earlier years? This is a question asked by many clients in couples therapy and obviously an excellent one. One challenge is that the whirlwind passionate experience of falling in love is magical — in part…
Read More Director: John Madden Screenplay: Ol Parker Stars: Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Dev Patel PG – 122 Minutes We are socialized to imagine that getting engaged and planning a wedding will be a magical whirlwind fulfilling life-long fantasies of white lace, multi-level tiered cakes and happy-ever-after. Any couples therapist with experience in pre-marital counseling…
Read More Director: Charlie McDowell Writer: Justin Lader 91 minutes/ August, 2014 Infidelity is a common topic of conversation in couples therapy. While discovering that one’s partner was unfaithful is a devastating and often traumatic experience, many couples can and do work through this discovery and come out stronger on the other side. One of the toughest…
Read More Each holiday season, many of our therapy clients reflect and prepare emotionally in an effort to make the most of their upcoming visits with family. Family visits can be psychologically intense experiences that are especially meaningful for those who are in therapy and hoping to break out of long standing patterns and dysfunctional family…
Read More What makes a marriage work? What makes a relationship last? How does work influence marriage? How does marriage influence work? How important is it to make time to see friends? These are questions that come up frequently in psychotherapy. Wallace Stegner’s 1987 classic novel on love, literature, friendship and marriage illuminates the timeless quality of…
Read More 257 pages, Simon and Schuster Molly Wizenberg’s blog, Orangette, was named the world’s best food blog by the London Times. Her lively 2014 memoir about her husband Brandon’s dream of opening a pizza joint in Seattle and what happens along the way says as much about maintaining a healthy, happy albeit imperfect marriage as it…
Read More Esther Perel, 2007, 272 pages A mantra of my post-graduate training in couples, family and sex therapy was that when a couple is struggling in the bedroom, that struggle is a mirror for what’s happening outside of the bedroom. So, if you help a couple increase intimacy and enhance communication, and you employ the sex…
Read More Cinematic portrayals of couples therapy are tough to acheive. While television series such as In Treatment and The Sopranos have done a wonderful job of conveying what its like to experience individual psychotherapy, a realistic portrayal is much harder to achieve in a film. And even harder to achieve with respect to couples. The groundbreaking film Hope Springs (available on DVD) achieves…
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