My Approach to Working with Couples

My goal is to help each couple rapidly resolve problems, 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 and decision making that help them think, feel, and respond more effectively with each other at home, at work and in social situations.

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 the Couples I Work With 

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

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 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 achieve your goals, solve your problems and meet he 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.

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

Click Here for Books that I Recommend to the Couples I Work With  

Counseling & Therapy for Couples

How To Get The Most From Couples Therapy
Ellen Bader, Ph.D. and Peter Pearson, Ph.D.
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

Hold Me Tight
Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath the distress, partners are desperate to know: Are you there for me?
Sue Johnson, Ph.D.

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

An Arrangement of Marriages:
The seven basic types of marriages and what they're built on.
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