Online Marriage Counseling in Washington, Oregon and California
Online Intimacy Therapy and Marriage Counseling
Revitalize and Strengthen Your Marriage
Intimacy Therapy is an integral part of marriage counseling.
Intimacy and sex are important aspects of any romantic relationship, but they can be difficult to talk about.
Intimacy therapy can help couples start talking openly about their feelings and experiences, learn the language of intimacy, connect emotionally, become more affectionate, spontaneous, creative, and playful with each other which often leads to passion, sexual desire, and satisfaction.
Intimacy Therapy can also help couples embrace their sensuality.
Sensuality is an emotional and physical attraction that makes partners feel magnetically drawn to each other. Sensuality can be expressed in the way couples speak to each other, smile, kiss, touch, caress, or look at each other.
Sensual intimacy begins with emotional closeness when partners feel safe and cared for. Couples need to feel safe and emotionally connected so they can start exploring their sensuality, desires and preferences to develop a fulfilling and satisfying sex life.
The Effects of Attachment on Couples’ Interactions
The Impact of Attachment Styles on Couples' Relationships and Intimacy
Feeling vulnerable, fears of rejection, inadequacy, a past history of trauma, and/or insecure attachment styles may impact couples' relationships and be the cause for couples' struggles with physical intimacy.
The article by Johnson and Whiffen (1999) explored the effects of attachment on couples’ interactions. The authors suggested that attachment styles entail working models that are based on past experiences with attachment figures and that are responsible for appraisal and interpretation of information, affect regulation and interpersonal interactions.
Johnson and Whiffen (1999) highlighted that insecure attachment styles should not be viewed as a pathology.
Developed as adaptive responses to unresponsive or abusive caregivers, however, insecure attachment styles can contribute to distress in present relationships. Looking at couples’ interactions from an attachment perspective can help the therapist to better understand the struggles that couples go through.
For example, a person with an avoidant attachment style that could develop
due to abusive parenting or other traumatic experiences
with an emotionally unresponsive attachment figure
may avoid closeness out of fear that others are not to be trusted.
As for persons with a preoccupied or anxious attachment style,
in times of stress or perceived threat, they may seek support from a loved one by clinging, demanding or blaming.
The authors presumed that secure attachment style is associated with
intimacy and trust in relationships.
Secure attachment style that was characterized by internalized sense of security, developed through interactions with significant others in early childhood and based on the belief that one was worthy of love and care and that others would be available and responsive to his or her needs in times of stress.
Anxious attachment style is correlated with relationship dissatisfaction due to fear of abandonment and demands for reassurance , whereas avoidant attachment style is characterized by distancing and lack of intimacy in intimate relationships (as cited in Johnson and Whiffen, 1999).
In addition, recent research on the malleability of attachment styles suggested that although deeply ingrained, working models, which could be described as internalized representations of self and others during early childhood, could be modified through later interactions with significant others or traumatic experiences (as cited in Shorey & Snyder, 2006).
The process of change during marriage counseling
The authors proposed that in spite of attachment trauma or negative interactions with a primary caregiver, the presence of another positive attachment figure in a child’s or adult’s life could temporally or permanently overwrite negative experiences with positive experiences, thus, altering an attachment style.
In the systemic model, the authors identified three themes:
- positive interactions with significant others,
- mental representations of self as lovable and others as trustworthy, and
- fulfillment of attachment related and other needs
as the basis for secure adult attachment that lead to a satisfying relationship.
Johnson and Whiffen (1999) proposed that refuting working models, based on negative views of self and others, connecting the view of self as unworthy of love to past traumatic experiences and restructuring couples’ interactions by creating new positive bonding experiences can revise old working models into new working models of self as worthy of love and others as trustworthy, and contribute to happy and satisfying relationships.
