Find a way to make your spouse your best friend.

Perhaps you once felt that you and your spouse were best friends. Through circumstances, time, and the routine trials of everyday life, that friendship diminished over the years and neither of you have been able to address the situation through honest communication. Things have gotten progressively worse. One of the most important elements in your marriage was the friendship that you once had with your partner. The time that you were each other's best friend may have been 2 years ago or 25 years ago. That does not matter. What matters is that it is time to find a way back to that state of your relationship. Making life work for you may be to find a way to make your relationship work again. We will help you make your life work.

Marriage is a relationship of meeting each other's needs.

There was a time that many of your needs were met through the relationship with your partner. Gradually less and less of those needs were being met by the other. A marriage's foundation is based on how each partner meets the other's needs. If each partner does not clearly understand what those needs are, then how can those needs be met? This can only be achieved through the ability to communicate with each other. By this time, you need help with communication skills. It is possible to reconstruct the behavior patterns as they once were, but not possible to do it by yourselves.

A good relationship has each partner looking forward to being with the other.

The best time of your relationship was when you could not wait to be with the your partner. The experience of looking forward to being with the other person and sharing time with them, was exciting and exhilarating. When a relationship goes down the wrong path, all of that stops. Couples have a difficult time finding the ways back to that experience of living for that moment when you can be with that other person. The hallmark of a good relationship is when each partner feels they cannot wait to be with the other. If it was once like that in your relationship, you need to find out what went wrong and how to get it back.

The problem in your relationship has been about a lack of communication.

When a relationship starts to deteriorate, there is a breakdown of communication and each partner eventually wants to know how to communicate with the other. The pain and frustration of this situation makes the problem worse and eventually one partner and possibly both shut down and withdraw into their own ways of dealing with this breakdown. Once this begins to happen most marriages never get off this path and they need professional assistance to repair the communication problem.

Years of pain may have created depression and anxiety.

Often, depression and anxiety are the resulting manifestations of a relationship that has been unsatisfying and frustrating for you, for a very long time. Because it seems much easier to ask a physician to help you with depression and anxiety drugs, one usually avoids the real solution to the problem, which is to find the best marriage therapist, to help your marriage. Some individuals never face the reality that the cause of their depression and anxiety is their relationship. Sometimes it is not only the current marital relationship, but also the unresolved and painful family relationships in their past. Whichever it is, the cure does not lie in medications. The answers lie in fixing the elements of your life that need to be fixed. Usually the sources of depression and anxiety stem from relationship problems in one’s life that have not been resolved. If that relationship is your marriage it needs to be addressed.

Your partner has not been emotionally available to you.

Sometimes you can put your marriage on the right path by addressing the issues that have been festering inside either you or your spouse for years. These situations may be responsible for your partner being emotionally unavailable to you. They have created barriers to achieving harmony in your relationship.


Alcohol usage can be a major obstacle to a good relationship.

The overuse and acceptance of alcohol as a popular and frequently used activity for adults in our culture, has led to more dysfunctional relationships than most people are aware. This aspect of your spouses' behavior must be explored in some marriages. Many times the wife is subconsciously aware that this is a major problem, but the enormity of the solution in her mind steers her away from confronting the problem. You need the proper help in confronting this issue. We are experts at helping partners confront this issue and getting their spouse on the right path. In many marriages this subject must be dealt with as the first major issue. No relationships work well in addictions.

Every day that goes by without touch, tenderness, and affection, is another day lost.

Critical to healthy relationships is the feeling of connection; of closeness and warmth that humans want and need. In most cases you had it in the beginning of your relationship. There is the opportunity now to recapture those necessary elements of life. We all want to feel good every day of our lives. After years of a relationship that has deprived you of those feelings, you sometimes forget the purpose and joy of relationships. The everyday, sometimes mundane aspects of life; work, family chores, children etc., get in the way of the most important human connection in one's life, one's marriage. We will help you retrieve the tenderness, affection, and caring that perhaps your partner once had shown to you in your marriage. It is most important that you once again feel loved.

Relationships are either growing or dying.

Relationships are like living organisms. They are either growing or dying. In order for something to grow it needs to be nurtured. A good relationship must be fed the right emotional nutrients for someone to feel affection and love for their spouse. And conversely you need to be nurtured to feel loved. Usually, couples do not know how to do this. You want to feel better about your spouse and more importantly you want to feel better about yourself. After all, the relationships in your life affect how you feel about yourself. Once you finally deal with these issues, with the help of the proper counseling, you will realize that it is not that difficult nor complicated. We will bring you and your partner along this path. Life can be different for you; it should be lived feeling good each day and looking forward to the next because of the enjoyment it holds for you. Your marriage may be the critical element that has been neglected by one or both of you. You can fix your life now. We will work with you in affecting these elements of your relationship.

There may have been extreme damage to the relationship; infidelity, verbal abuse, years of emotional neglect, or physical abuse.

There is no doubt that the degree to which these issues have existed in a relationship affect the realistic probability of ending up with a satisfying, loving and caring relationship. But it is possible to overcome damage in a relationship. Unfortunately, the way that people learn in life is by making mistakes. We will work with you to explore the damage and move forward in creating new paths for an emotionally healthier way to live in your relationship. In order to be in a healthy relationship, the individual partners must themselves be emotionally health. We will help you gain that emotional health.

Taking the first step in fixing your marriage or family life is the most difficult part.

You have taken the first step by searching for a marriage counselor to help you. Now, the second step is finding the right person with whom you are comfortable and have confidence that they are the one who is going to help you make your life work. After all, successful marriage, love, and relationships are the keys to making life work. Now is the time to make it all work.


If one or many of the above sections pertain to you and your relationship, call us as soon as possible to take the next step in the process of making your life work. Call Jeffrey Himmel at 856-266-6164