A New Experience of Couples Therapy

How Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT) Works

Developed by David Mars, Ph.D.

New TCT Research Project: If you and your partner are interested in applying to participate in a 16 week series of Transformative Couples Therapy® sessions at a 50% reduced fee - click here for more details

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Conflict, crisis and disconnection in couple’s lives provide motivation to awaken capacities for change that otherwise might lie dormant and untapped. 

Making the most of these opportunities for healing and relationship transformation is the focus of Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT).

Here are just a few of the powerful and unique aspects of TCT:

  • Discovers and explores the felt experience of love that draws your partner and you more closely together

  • Creates a safe space to communicate kindly and collaboratively with each other about key issues

  • Expands a mutual curiosity about your relationship which promotes a clearer understanding and deeper, more heartfelt communication

  • Builds new patterns of connection which foster trust, empathy, understanding…and a deep feeling of peace

  • Heals the underlying hurts and resentments (even past traumas), which tend to create unhealthy patterns of relating in one’s daily living

In Transformative Couples Therapy® the therapist seeks to uncover and activate the couple members’ natural impulses to connect and create a healthy relationship

The therapist seeks to uncover and activate the couple members’ natural impulses to connect and heal in promoting a healthy relationship.

In every session we deliberately create a sense of safety in which the experience of connection and love can spontaneously emerge.

The felt experience of love and valuing helps to enhance closeness and move the process of therapy forward.

In this atmosphere of safety, couples find new ways to approach their problems and differences, as well as life’s ongoing stress.

This is a discovery process that is collaborative and opens new paths and patterns that couples want to take home.

Couples often come into therapy feeling distant, hurt and frustrated. From the first session, the therapist helps the partners access and focus on the strengths that already exist in the relationship.

When anger or shut-down gets triggered, the therapist may encourage the partner to express their frustration directly to the therapist instead of to their partner, again keeping safety as the most important element for bonding and connection.

Often beneath this anger or withdrawal, there is fear, sadness and loneliness.

The therapist then guides the partners towards an inner calm, where they can access these more tender emotions and express themselves from this deeper, more genuine place - in a way their partners can better hear and receive.

As each couple member learns how to listen and express themselves in new ways, even the sharing of sad or distressing events and emotions can forge new bonds.