Individual Relationship Counseling in Minneapolis & Online
Working with adults across Minnesota, North Dakota, and 40+ states.
You might be considering therapy because one relationship has become difficult, or because you keep running into the same problems with different people. Perhaps you avoid bringing up a concern until you’re too frustrated to talk about it calmly. You might spend an argument defending what you meant without understanding why the other person is hurt. Or you stay quiet, even when you have something important to say.
I work with individuals on relationship concerns involving partners, family members, friends, and colleagues.
Understanding what happens in your relationships
We’ll start with situations from your life. If a recent conversation went badly, we can look at what you each said, what you understood it to mean, and how you responded. This helps us get specific about where things became difficult and what you wanted but weren’t able to communicate.
We may also look at earlier experiences that affect what you expect from people. If expressing disagreement once led to ridicule or rejection, for example, speaking honestly may still feel risky. We’ll look at how those early experiences affect what you say and do in your relationships now.
Working on different responses
You may understand how you tend to react and still find it difficult to respond differently when a conversation gets tense.
Depending on your concerns, we might work on:
Asking directly for help instead of hoping someone will notice.
Saying no and following through, even when you feel guilty or the other person is disappointed.
Raising a concern before frustration has been building for weeks.
Listening when someone is upset with you without immediately defending your intentions.
We can use sessions to prepare for a conversation you have been avoiding, including what you want to say and what makes it hard to say it. Afterward, we can look at how it went and where you need more help.
What you can change on your own
You can focus on a marriage or partnership in individual therapy, but this is not couples counseling. Our focus is your experience and the decisions you need to make, rather than working with both people together.
We can work on how you communicate without assuming that every difficulty is yours to solve. The other person’s willingness to listen and follow through matters too. Part of our work may be deciding what you are willing to accept in a relationship and what you want to do if a problem continues.