Roseville
Couples
Counseling

James Christensen LMFT
916-292-8920

Your First Session is Free
Click Here to Schedule

Additional sessions cost $250

A woman with brown hair holding a bicycle, standing next to a man in a military uniform with a white hat, outside a building at dusk.

Our Story

Molly and I got married a few months before I started Air Force pilot training. Military life was hard on our marriage. We wanted to create a loving home for our children, but we didn’t know how to do it.

We started couples therapy after my first military deployment, but it didn’t help much. We worked with five therapists over five years, but nothing changed. We were starting to lose hope, but we decided to try one more therapist.

Therapist #6 saved our marriage. She used an approach called “Crucible Therapy,” and she was more blunt and direct than our other therapists had been. We made more progress in five weeks than we had made in five years of traditional couples therapy.

I became a Crucible Therapist to help couples the way our therapist helped us. I believe in the power of couples therapy to help you create the kind of marriage you’ve always wanted.

James Christensen offers Couples Therapy in Roseville, CA

A Different Kind of Couples Therapy

Unlike traditional couples therapy, Crucible Therapy focuses on personal growth and personal responsibility.

Crucible Therapy can help you work through:

  • Communication problems: stop arguing and start communicating.

  • Infidelity: Feel heard, feel understood, and start rebuilding trust.

  • Intimacy issues: Rekindle sexual desire and solve sexual problems

  • Narcissism: overcome personality problems that destroy relationships

A man leaning against a tree and a woman sitting on a branch of the same tree in a park with green grass and trees with fall foliage, smiling at each other.

How Couples Therapy Works

I focus on these six principles:

  1. See what you can’t see

  2. Feel what you can’t feel

  3. Earn your own self-respect

  4. Focus on what you can change

  5. Don’t let your feelings drive your behavior

  6. Say what is most important in the kindest way possible

See what you can’t see

  • The first step is to see yourself more clearly, because you can’t change what you don’t see.

  • I’ll tell you what I see that you might not, and I’ll encourage you to do the same with each other.

Feel what you can’t feel

  • When you have intense feelings, there's a temptation to let those feelings direct your behavior.

  • Couples therapy helps you learn how to feel the intensity without acting on it.

Earn your own self-respect

  • If you want to stop arguing, you have to lean on your own self-respect instead of trying to get it from your partner.

  • That means making room for your partner to disagree with you and disapprove of you. 

Focus on what you can change

  • Weak focus is when you’re mostly focused on how your partner is impacting you.

  • Strong focus is when you’re mostly focused on how you are impacting your partner.

  • Our brains default to weak focus, because that’s what made sense when we were children.

  • Strong focus is how you build a better relationship. 

Don’t let your feelings drive your behavior

  • When you fall in love, you have loving feelings for each other, which drive loving behavior.

  • After a few years, your feelings change, and so does your behavior.

  • The solution is to not let your feelings drive your behavior, and to hold yourself to a constant standard of kindness and decency.

Say what is most important in the kindest way possible

  • Collusive Communication is avoiding conflict by not saying what you really think. 

  • Combative Communication is trying to control your partner with anger.

  • Collaborative Communication is saying what’s most important in the kindest way possible, and then allowing your partner to disagree

Your First Session is Free
Click Here to Schedule

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