When two people love each other, they don't look at each other, they look in the same direction. Ginger Rogers
“In every marriage more than a week old, there are grounds for divorce. The trick is to find, and continue to find, the grounds for marriage.”
“Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath the distress, partners are desperate to know: Are you there for me?”
“What counts in making a happy relationship is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility.”
Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Photo: Lynne Azpeitia
To schedule an appointment or arrange a free phone consultation, email Lynne or call her at 310-828-7121
“Building a positive atmosphere of appreciation, respect and affection, both during conflict and in general in the relationship (in everyday interaction), turns out to be essential to ensure lasting change.”
The 90 Second Rule
Marriage & Relationship Counseling: Make Love Last
Increasing Couple Intimacy & Satisfaction
Falling In Love Is Easy
Staying in Love Is Something Very Special
Help for Couples
Marriage Counseling and Couples Therapy can help you to improve your relationship, repair past hurts, manage your conflicts and understand each other better.
Feeling Alone Or Frustrated In Your Relationship?
Think Your Marriage Needs Reviving?
Tired of Arguing Or Having The Same Fights?
Want To Make Your Relationship Better?
Need Better Communication?
Want More Love, Support & Affection?
These are many of the concerns and hopes expressed by the couples I see every day in marriage and relationship counseling.
Many times couples wait too long to come for counseling. Don't let that happen to you.
You can get your relationship back on track with relationship counseling that supports and repairs troubled marriages and committed relationships--and strengthens happy ones.
Couples come for relationship or marriage counseling and therapy to
--have better communication
--learn relationship skills
--solve problems
--get along better
--manage conflicts
--have more caring, affection and closeness
--make their relationship better--or more like it used to be
But most of all, couples come to make love last.
Real-life romance is fueled by a far more humdrum approach to staying connected. It is kept alive each time you let your spouse know he or she is valued during the grind of everyday life.
John Gottman
Yes, all couples come for therapy to experience, develop and increase the level of intimacy and satisfaction they experience in their relationships.
Interested in Reading More? Click Here for Books for Couples
This is true of all couples--married, dating, living together, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered.
However, when couples come to therapy to work on their relationships or marriage they most often request help with communication.
Why do so many couples ask for communication skills and intimacy training when they come to therapy?
Couples ask for skills and training in how to talk and express caring because they want to feel and be close to their partner--and they have some awareness that clearly communicating and intimately connecting with their partner on a continuous basis is an important ingredient in successful coupling and marital satisfaction.
Couples are right about this.
We start out intensely connected to and responsive to our partners. But our level of attentiveness tends to drop off over time. We then experience moments of disconnection, times when we don't express our needs clearly.
Sue Johnson
In couple relationships and marriages, the ongoing practice of sharing, receiving and affirming each member of the couple’s personal experience is positively correlated with relational satisfaction, health, and longevity.
However, the majority of couples do not begin their relationship or marriage equipped with intimacy, communication and conflict resolution skills, they must learn them.
Yes, love and commitment isn't enough to insure a healthy, happy, enduring marriage.
Unless you constantly communicate, signaling to your partner where you are and getting a recognizable message in return, you will lose each other along the way.
Wayne & Mary Sotile
Intimacy, communication and conflict resolution skills, which are so necessary to the vitality of each person and the couple or marital relationship, must be learned and used if the relationship or marriage is to become and remain intimate. There is no substitute for this.
Successful couples are those who know how to discuss their differences in ways that actually strengthen their relationship and improve intimacy.
Diane Sollee
How can couples learn the skills to talk, listen, express their caring and to manage conflicts?
How can a therapist provide couples with the skills to talk about what they feel, need, want, and appreciate when they seek therapy?
What is the most effective treatment for working with couples?
Therapists, who are marriage friendly and relationship friendly, are expert in working with couples and the issues they face through out their couple relationship life cycle are well equipped to handle and answer these questions and issues--and to recommend books that support relationships.
To find out more about marriage counseling or couples therapy, and get answers to your questions, contact Lynne Azpeitia at (310) 828-7121 to make an appointment or to find out how she can help.
Lynne Azpeitia, MFT is a member of the National Registry of Marriage Friendly Therapists
Lynne Azpeitia, MFT
310-828-7121
3025 Olympic Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Coaching, Psychotherapy & Consultation
Contact Lynne About Couples Counseling, Relationship Counseling or Marriage Therapy
Coaching, Counseling & Consulting Services Also Available by Phone & Skype
Interested in Reading More? Click Here for Books for Couples
The therapist is caring and compassionate to both of you.
The therapist actively tries to help your marriage and communicates hope that you solve your marital problems. This goes beyond just clarifying your problems.
The therapist is active in structuring the session.
The therapist offers reasonable and helpful perspectives to help you understand the sources of your problems.
The therapist challenges each of you about your contributions to the problems and about your capacity to make individual changes to resolve the problems.
The therapist offers specific strategies for changing your relationship, and coaches you on how to use them.
The therapist is alert to individual matters such as depression, alcoholism, and medical illness that might be influencing your marital problems.
The therapist is alert to the problem of physical abuse and assesses in individual meetings whether there is danger to one of the spouses.
Lynne Azpeitia
Licensed MFT
AAMFT Approved Supervisor
310-828-7121
“Lynne, we wanted to let you know that you gave us some great tools and we are enjoying our day to day growth.”
“Falling in love may appear to happen naturally and spontaneously; maintaining that love so it grows stronger with time takes a conscious effort. Without this effort marriage just drift aimlessly along as everything else grabs our attention.”
New love is the brightest, long love is the greatest, but revived love is the tenderest thing known on earth.
Thomas Hardy
Give Lynne a call today & have a conversation with her about Couples Counseling, Marriage Therapy or Relationship Counseling
“Successful couples know how to contain their disagreements – how to keep them from spilling over and contaminating the rest of their relationship. ”
“Love is the very difficult understanding that something other than yourself is real.”
“Being married is like having somebody permanently in your corner. It feels limitless, not limited.”
“Love Killers: self-centeredness, lack of observing oneself, inability to validate another, playing fair, emotional detachment, control and denial separateness, the wish for Eden, parental dynamics, lack of boundaries.”
Too busy for love? Overworked Couples Can Rekindle the Spark in Their Marriage
Wayne Sotile & Mary Sotile
If you lead a busy life, you probably spend considerable time preoccupied with your own anxieties, needs and wants. This creates various forms of relationship narcissism the tendency to be so preoccupied with the unending struggle to maintain control that you mismanage your relationships. It may show up in an attitude like this one: Given how beaten up I am from stress, I deserve to have my every need met, my every insecurity soothed, and my batteries recharged by you. For some, relationship problems are caused by insensitivity to the people around them. Self-absorption and focusing on your own worries can result in feeling so anxious and burdened that you don't notice others or their needs...More
Gay & Lesbian Couples Research: What Makes Same-Sex Relationships Succeed or Fail?
Dr. John Gottman
Gay/lesbian couples are more upbeat in the face of conflict. Compared to straight couples, gay and lesbian couples use more affection and humor when they bring up a disagreement, and partners are more positive in how they receive it. Gay and lesbian couples are also more likely to remain positive after a disagreement. "When it comes to emotions, we think these couples may operate with very different principles than straight couples. Straight couples may have a lot to learn from gay and lesbian relationships," Gay/lesbian couples use fewer controlling, hostile emotional tactics. Gottman and Levenson also discovered that gay and lesbian partners display less belligerence, domineering and fear with each other than straight couples do. "The difference on these ‘control’ related emotions suggests that fairness and power-sharing between the partners is more important and more common in gay and lesbian relationships than in straight ones," Gottman explained. More...
How Well Do You Know Your Partner?
Dr. John Gottman
One of the most important features of successful couple relationships is the quality of the friendship. Do you know your partner's inner world? Take the quiz below and find out.....More
Nobody's Ready for Marriage, Marriage Makes you Ready for Marriage
Dr. David Schnarch
Marry and with luck - it may go well. But when a marriage fails those who marry live at home in hell. Euripides, 408 B.C.
“We came here because we had a sexual problem, but you've helped us recognize it's something much larger.” Karen and her husband are leaving my office after our final session. Her smile and gratitude make clear her intent. She speaks like a person who has....More
10 Ways to Perk Up Your Relationship
Darby Saxbe
If you've ever gotten relationship advice, you've probably heard plenty of don'ts. Don't nag. Don't stonewall. Don't blame. Don't leave the toilet seat up, don't squeeze the toothpaste tube from the middle, and definitely don't assume he's that into you when he's just not. Well, don't listen....More
Daily Temperature Reading Originated by Virginia Satir
PAIRS seminars are known for the practical, proven skills participants learn that help them create and sustain successful relationships. One of the first skills taught in PAIRS is the Daily Temperature Reading, which was originally developed by Virginia Satir. The "DTR" is invaluable for couples in any stage of relationship, as well as for parents, children, entire families, friends and even co-workers. Traditionally, PAIRS suggest you set aside 15 minutes to a half-hour as often as daily to do a DTR with the significant people in your life. More….
How Therapy Can Be Hazardous to Your Marital Health
William J. Doherty, PhD
What Grown Up Marriage Looks Like
Thea & Duane Harvey
No one is emotionally grown-up all the time. Our earlier selves are not filed away as memories but cordoned off like a half dozen smaller siblings who think it isn’t fair that the biggest makes all the decisions. It doesn’t take much for any one of them to climb the furniture and take over. Marital maturity is not about suppressing these earlier stages, but recognizing when they show up in ourselves and in our partners, and then, before coaxing them back into the highchair, gently remove any sharp utensils they may be welding. As grown-ups, we protect our marriage from ourselves. More...
Why Infidelity Happens
Drs. Evelyn and Paul Moschetta
Nothing shakes a marriage to its core like an extra marital affair. Nothing. Not money problems, not interfering in-laws, not poor communication, not kid burnout and not colliding careers. None of these come even close. An outside affair blows through a marriage like a tornado. It turns everything upside down and inside out. Most of all it leaves trust, sacred to any marriage, in shreds. Rekindling that trust is essential but it’s difficult, tricky business. More …
Shattered Vows: Getting Beyond Betrayal
Shirley Glass, Ph. D.
After an affair, I do not ask the question you would expect. The spouse always wants to know about "him or her". "What did you see in her that you didn't see in me?" Or, "what did you like about him better?" I always ask about "you": "What did you like about yourself in that other relationship?" How were you different? And, of the way that you were in that other relationship, what would you like to bring back so that you can be the person you want to be in your primary relationship? How can we foster that part of you in this relationship?...More
The Key to Wedded Bliss? Money Matters
Tara Siegel Bernard
If you ask married people why their marriage works, they are probably not going to say it's because they found their financial soul mate. But if they are lucky, they have. Marrying a person who shares your attitudes about money might just be the smartest financial decision you will ever make. In fact, when it comes to finances, your marriage is likely to be your most valuable asset — or your largest liability...More
Gottman's Marriage Tips 101
Dr. John Gottman
Since 1973, Dr. John Gottman has studied what he calls the "masters and disasters" of marriage. Ordinary people from the general public took part in long-term studies, and Dr. Gottman learned what makes marriages fail, what makes them succeed, and what can make marriages a source of great meaning...More