Counselling services
Couples Therapy Programs and Seminars
Rebuild your relationships with couples therapy intensive programs.
What are Intensive Couples Therapy Programs?
Can’t We Just Get Along Counselling provides intensive marriage counselling and couples workshops with certified Gottman therapists in Calgary, Alberta. The goal of the programs is to help clients in committed relationships create the desired changes and positive results they seek in their relationship. These intensive counselling sessions and programs combine the most evidence-based theories, tools, and useful strategies to help couples get along.
What is the Gottman Method?
At Can’t We Just Get Along Counselling, we use the Gottman method, developed by John and Julie Gottman, to provide effective counselling to couples in need. After 30 years of research on marriage success and failure, Dr. John Gottman developed a counselling technique that helps to increase the success of relationships. The Gottman method is centred on the conclusion that relationships last longer when couples become better friends and learn to manage conflict.
Melody Evans, our Registered Clinical Psychologist and Marriage and Family Therapist, is trained by the Gottman Institute and provides effective, research-based Gottman couples therapy to couples in Calgary.
When Couples Therapy Programs are a Good Fit
These intense programs and group sessions are best for couples or individuals in the following situations:
- Couples want to learn and work intensively over a short period
- Couples have tried counselling and want a different experience and approach
- Couples or individuals are looking for preparatory therapy to further counselling services such as couples counselling or psychotherapy
- Couples want to improve their conflict resolution and problem-solving skills to overcome gridlock and repair their relationship with their partner
Affair recovery program
Registered psychologist and mental health professional Melody Evans will be your workshop leader. She creates a safe space where partners can deal with the challenges of healing from an affair, work through issues with self-esteem, and develop coping skills and emotion regulation. This program is provided to just one couple at a time.
Who Benefits from an Affair Recovery Program?
This is an intensive program for couples going through the initial discovery and recovery stages of infidelity.
Program Topics
This program covers the following issues to assist a couple dealing with the challenging problem of betrayal:
- The three phases of healing from infidelity: atone, attuning, and attaching (Gottman, 2017)
- Understanding PTSD its impact, effect, assessment of and treatment for PTSD due to an affair.
- Transparency and expressions of remorse, shock, hurt and loss
- Boundaries making sure there are only two people in the relationship now
- Understanding the story and what happened - the WHYS
- Restoring trust, and the expression of needs
- Understanding how to express emotions, tolerate and regulate our emotions
- Rebuilding the relationship, dealing with conflict and past hurts
- Responding to the betrayal and moving towards acceptance
- Moving forward in marriage with a new sense of connection: of what we are now, where were we, and what has changed.
- Ways we will stay connected now that the affair is in the past
- How to communicate dreams, wants, and needs
- How do we deal with sex and intimacy, given what we have been through?
Couples Conflict, Communication, And Intimacy Program
This is an intensive program that deals with topics that promote a healthy, lasting relationship.
Who Benefits from a Couples Communication, Conflict, and Intimacy Intensive Program?
This program is best suited for partners who want to stay in their marriage but are struggling or feel they need a tune-up.
Program Topics
This program addresses the following aspects of creating healthy relationships:
- An evaluation of where we are at in our marriage
- How to understand conflict: why can we not stop fighting and why do we have the same fight over and over
- Tools to create new healthy interactions with your loved one
- How are we doing regarding money, sex, in-laws, children, and running the household
- Overcome myths of our marriage; challenge the past or current hurts and negativity
- Building our friendship or making it more robust and learning how we can express our needs.
- What is the importance of empathy and fairness, and how do we create and communicate these values?
- Review the positive and what works
- How has our individual growth affected our marriage over time? What do we both want, and what are we working towards together and as individuals?
- What are our beliefs and views on sex and intimacy, and how do we talk about sex? How to say yes and no to sex, dealing with feelings of guilt and the rejection, "not tonight, honey."
- How are we doing regarding our bodies, health, and physical connection? What makes us feel alive, creative, fun, and adventurous? Trauma and the effect of trauma on our relationship to our bodies, minds, spirits, and others
Pre-Marriage Program
This is an intensive program that covers all aspects of how to create a long-lasting relationship.
Who Benefits from a Pre-Marriage Program?
This program is targeted towards couples just beginning their lives together. This program is an excellent idea for a wedding gift and is also for couples who want to establish good patterns of behaviour early on in their lives together.
Program Topics
Topics include:
- Understanding Our Love Story, the Past, Present, and Future Where did we come from, and where are we going?
- How to have a long-lasting friendship
- How to effectively resolve conflict
- How to manage our money now that we are getting married
- How will in-laws and external relationships be managed
- Our plans for children and our parenting styles
- The wedding – how are we doing regarding the big day?
- The stages of marriage and our shared purpose, goals, and dreams; as a couple and as individuals
- What are our expectations of marriage?
- Questions to you should ask your partner before the big day
- How are we doing regarding sex and intimacy, and what are our expectations desires and needs long term?
Register for a Couples Therapy Program
The facilitators for our couples therapy day workshops are highly-trained registered psychologists and therapists from our office in Calgary, Alberta. Contact our office for further information and to register for the next available program.
