“Human nature dictates that it is virtually impossible to accept advice from someone unless you feel that that person understands you. So the bottom-line rule is that, before you ask your partner to change the way he or she drives, eats, or makes love, you must make your partner feel that you are understanding.”
Give Lynne a call today and have a conversation with her to see how Marriage Counseling and Couples Therapy can help.
“Relationships and marriages are ruined where one person continues to learn, develop and grow and the other person stands still.”
Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.
Lao Tzu
Blooms In San Francisco Near Ghiradelli Square
Photo: Lynne Azpeitia
“Where love is concerned, too much isn’t even enough.”
“Giving the cold shoulder deliberately-ignoring or responding minimally-damages the relationship making a partner feel worthless & invisible”
Lynne Azpeitia's Approach to Working with Couples
Moving from Conflict to Collaboration
What makes a happy marriage? It is a question which all men and women ask one another... The answer is to be found, I think, in the mutual discovery, by two who marry, of the deepest need of the other's personality, and the satisfaction of that need. Pearl Buck
Keep emotional love, passion and affection alive in your relationship. Discover and learn to speak each other's love language.
Helping couples
retain or renew their loving connection to each other
achieve their goals
develop solutions for resolving problems and overcoming challenges
strengthen their relationship
is very important to me.
My goal is to help each couple rapidly resolve their problems/frustrations, improve their communication and to preserve their relationship.
Couples who come for marital or relationship therapy can expect to learn new skills for
communicating
listening
problem solving
dealing with and resolving conflict
decision making
that help them think, feel, and respond more lovingly and effectively with each other at home, at work and in social situations.
To schedule an appointment or arrange a free consultation, contact Lynne
Love is the greatest refreshment in life
Couples take home practical tools and useful information for interacting, resolving conflict and dealing with difficult situations. In therapy sessions couples learn and practice the skills, attitudes and actions needed to build and preserve intimacy in a healthy committed relationship.
Click Here for Books that I Recommend to Couples who are Clients
Consider counseling if big arguments are the norm or if there is more than 20% discord in your relationship you should get some professional advice from a skilled couple therapist.
In John Gottman's study....."master" couples made at least 5 positive remarks or gestures toward each other for every zinger during a fight. In calmer times, their positive-to-negative ratio was an astounding 20 to 1. "Masters of disaster" couples were pretty much the opposite. Psychotherapy Networker
Seeing a couple together is usually the best approach, however, I also counsel individuals in communication, listening, conflict resolution problem solving and how to invite a partner in to couple therapy.
Using an active solution-oriented skill based approach that is relationship and marriage friendly helps couples get relief right away and enables them to learn intimacy and communcation skills and to work through and solve their most challenging problems and dilemmas.
10 Ways to Perk Up Your Relationship
I have extensive experience with couples in the area of conflict resolution, communication, pre-marital preparation, affairs, parenting, co-parenting and the challenges of remarriage and blended families that impact a couple’s relationship.
The couples I work with appreciate my active approach, candor and concern for their well-being and that of their relationship. I am respectful of differences and provide an atmosphere where clients feel comfortable enough to share their difficulties and supported enough to make changes and move towards their goals.
Taking joy in life is a woman's best cosmetic. Rosalind Russell
For more than ten years I have been working with couples doing Marriage & Relationship Counseling and Therapy and have taught, trained, and supervised, therapists in couple and family therapy years at three universities and numerous counseling and mental health centers.
I have expertise in many couple therapy approaches (Gottman, Johnson, Schnarch, Bader & Pearson, Hendrix) and continually receive training and education in the most effective methods of working with and helping couples. I conduct workshops teaching couple therapy skills, techniques and approaches to licensed therapists.
I hope you will consider some type of couple therapy to keep your love and relationship alive so you can achieve your goals, solve your problems and meet the challenges you face in making your relationship stronger and more satisfying. With the right therapist, many couples can make significant progress from the very first session.
Find out how relationship counseling with Lynne Azpeitia, MFT can improve your relationship or marriage and make your life together better.
Call (310) 828-7121 or e-mail me to set up a complimentary telephone consultation for couple counseling or to schedule an appointment. Be sure to include your phone number in your e-mail.
I wish you continued relationship success.
Lynne Azpeitia, MFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
AAMFT Approved Supervisor
310-828-7121
3025 Olympic Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Coaching, Counseling & Psychotherapy for Couples, Individuals and Families
Have a question? Need some information? To schedule an appointment or have a free consultation, contact Lynne
Lynne Azpeitia's Registry of Marriage Friendly Therapists Profile
Click Here for Books that I Recommend to Couples who are Clients
Lynne Azpeitia
Licensed MFT
AAMFT Approved Supervisor
310-828-7121
Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage.
John Gottman
“Nobody’s ready for marriage. Marriage makes you ready for marriage.”
“Marriage, ultimately, is the practice of becoming passionate friends.”
To schedule an appointment for Marriage Counseling or Couples Therapy email Lynne or call her at 310-828-7121
In a secure relationship, excitement comes not from trying to resurrect the novel moments of infatuated passion but from the risk involved in staying open in the moment-to-moment, here-and-now experience of physical and emotional connection. With this openness comes the sense that lovemaking with your partner is always a new adventure.
Sue Johnson Photo: Lynne Azpeitia
“Masters are scanning social environment for things they can appreciate & say thank you for. They are building this culture of respect & appreciation very purposefully. Disasters are scanning the social environment for partners’ mistakes.”
How To Get The Most From Couples Therapy
Ellen Bader and Peter Pearson
Your job is to create your own individual objectives for being in therapy. Like a good coach, my job is to help you reach them. I have many, many tools to help you become a more effective partner - they work best when you are clear about how you aspire to be. My goal is to help you each make better adjustments and responses to each other without violating your core values or deeply held principles.The major aim of therapy is increasing your knowledge about yourself, your partner and the patterns of interaction between you.....More
The Upside of Infidelity: Can An Affair Save Your Marriage?
Hanna Rosin
Emily Brown, who directs the Key Bridge Therapy and Mediation Center in Arlington, Va., and is an expert on affairs, reads this situation as hopeful. In her taxonomy of affairs, this type—the “conflict avoidance affair,” generally found among couples whose arguments never escalate into screaming matches—has a prognosis for resolution of “very good” and a “low” probability of causing divorce. The affair, in Brown’s eyes, is a “wake-up call,” not the “disaster” the couple sees now “but a real opportunity for them to go on a different route and deal with the issues between them.” In the hands of the right therapist, Brown says, the affair is what could save their marriage. More
The seven basic types of marriages and what they're built on.
PT Staff
Tolstoy wasn't even half right. Happy couples are not all alike. Nor is every unhappy family unhappy in its own way. If David H. Olson, Ph.D., is correct, there are seven basic types of marriage. In three of them, where happiness abounds, couples held together by the smooth working of most or all factors intrinsic to relationships - personality compatibility, communication, conflict resolution, and sexuality. In the other four, the marriage hinges more on external elements, leisure activities, religious attitudes, financial management, children, family and friends, and distress predominates.
Unfortunately, Olson finds, most people today live in distressed marriages...More
Science Says Lasting Relationships Come Down to 2 Basic Traits
Emily Esfahni Smith
.....In one study from 2006, psychological researcher Shelly Gable and her colleagues brought young adult couples into the lab to discuss recent positive events from their lives. They psychologists wanted to know how partners would respond to each other’s good news. They found that, in general, couples responded to each other’s good news in four different ways that they called: passive destructive, active destructive, passive constructive, and active constructive.
.....Active constructive responding is critical for healthy relationships. In the 2006 study, Gable and her colleagues followed up with the couples two months later to see if they were still together. The psychologists found that the only difference between the couples who were together and those who broke up was active constructive responding. Those who showed genuine interest in their partner’s joys were more likely to be together. More....
Hold Me Tight: Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath the distress, partners are desperate to know: Are you there for me?
Susan Johnson
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. He is upset and really wants to be comforted, but she leaves him alone, thinking that he wants solitude. These moments are actually inescapable in a relationship. If you're going to dance with someone, you're going to step on each other's feet once in a while.
Losing the connection with a loved one, however, jeopardizes our sense of security. We experience a primal feeling of panic. It sets off an alarm in the brain's amygdala, our fear center, where we are highly attuned to threats of all kinds. Once the amygdala sends out an alarm, we don't think—we act. The threat can come from the outside world or from our own inner cosmos. It's our perception that counts, not the reality. If we feel abandoned at a moment of need, we are set up to enter a state of panic....More
Predicting Which Marriages Will Fail--And When
John Gottman
Forget visiting a fortune teller with a crystal ball. To really find out whether your marriage will last forever, ask John Gottman. Gottman and a colleague at UC Berkeley, Professor Robert Levenson, say they can predict not only which couples will divorce but also when they will divorce. They have found two distinct patterns of dysfunctional marital interaction that seem to be predictive of divorce at different points during the life of a marriage.....More
Trust & Betrayal
John Gottman
How do you build trust? What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connecting with your partner or turning away from your partner.....One such moment is not that important, but if you’re always choosing to turn away, then trust erodes in a relationship—very gradually, very slowly.....By contrast, the atom of betrayal is not just turning away, but I think to myself, “I can do better."
Once you start thinking that you can do better, then you begin a cascade of not committing to the relationship; of trashing your partner instead of cherishing your partner; of building resentment rather than gratitude; of lowering your investment in the relationship; of not sacrificing for the relationship; and of escalating conflicts. More...
An interview with Dr David Schnarch, The Sex Therapist
I help couples use the inevitable problems with sex and intimacy to grow -- so they can have sex with their hearts and minds, and not just with their genitals (there is no nudity or sexual contact in our therapy or workshops). All couples eventually hit emotional "gridlock": when partners are at each other's throats, arguing about everything and no one can give an inch or say they're sorry. More...
A More Perfect Union: Esther Perel on Intimacy, Infidelity, and Desire in Long-Term Relationships
Mark Leviton
Why does great sex so often fade for couples who claim to love each other as much as ever? Why doesn’t intimacy in a relationship guarantee good sex? Why is the forbidden so erotic? In a healthy relationship people live with the knowledge that the other person isn’t automatically there to stay. A spouse will stay if he or she feels compelled to stay. You’d better behave in a way that makes marriage attractive to your partner. Today, in the West, the only thing that keeps a couple together is the relative contentment of the two people involved — not the church, not the kids, and not the courts. You have to offer not just reliability but also surprise. And novelty in a relationship is not a mere repertoire of bedroom techniques. It involves new ways to let yourself be seen.