At Marriage Couples Counseling, we use Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy to facilitate seven important conversations in your counseling sessions. These conversations, described by Sue Johnson in Hold Me Tight, are absolutely crucial for a lifetime of love. They include:

1. Recognizing Demon Dialogues: We teach you to appreciate how rapidly arguments can escalate as a consequence of criticizing each other's character, denying responsibility, insulting each other, and emotionally withdrawing. These negative ways of relating, described by social psychologist J. M. Gottman as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, increase the odds of getting a divorce to 85%.
2. Finding the Raw Spots: We teach you to get more in touch with your hypersensitivities resulting from past experiences that get triggered in the present when your lover neglects, ignores or dismisses you. These are the deeper hurts that fuel the Demon Dialogs and leave you feeling emotionally deprived or deserted by your lover.
3. Revisiting Rocky Moments: We teach you to revisit past mistakes and take charge of how you each contributed to mis-attunements and emotional disconnections. Here you get the chance to apply what you learned in conversations 1 and 2.
4. Hold Me Tight: In this conversation we encourage and facilitate a greater feeling of emotional safety in which you step away from your past ways of protecting yourselves and build a bridge between you to find a safe haven in each other.
5. Forgiving Injuries: Here we facilitate a healing dialog to encourage mutual exoneration. We encourage you to speak your pain as openly as possible, acknowledge your lover's pain, revise your script by moving from behind your protective walls, take responsibility for how you hurt each other, identify with what your lover needs from you, and create a new and better story of your lives together.
6. Bonding through Sex and Touch: Here we teach you how to move from emotionally disconnected or just partially connected sex to rich, synchronous moments in which emotional openness, responsiveness, tender touch and erotic exploration all come together.
7. Keeping Your Love Alive: In this last conversation, we encourage you to understand love as a language that has to be spoken again and again, to have what Sue Johnson calls ARE conversations based on Accessibility, Responsiveness and Engagement. The more you speak this language, the more easily it flows and the stronger your love will be.

New lovers are nervous and tender. They smash everything for their hearts are an organ of fire.

- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient