Roseville
Couples
Counseling
James Christensen LMFT
916-292-8920
Your First Session is Free
Click Here to Schedule
Additional sessions cost $250
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.
A Different Kind of Couples Therapy
Unlike traditional couples therapy, Crucible Therapy focuses on personal growth and responsibility. I'm much more direct than most therapists. You will never find yourself wondering what I really think.
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
How It Works
Logistics
Your first session is free. You can schedule it here
If you decide to continue, you can choose your own appointment times from my online calendar. There is no requirement to come every week or every other week.
I work seven days a week, mostly between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m
Most couples reach their relationship goals after 5-10 sessions
I focus on the following principles:
Communication: 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
See what you can’t see
You can't change what you don’t see, so the first step is to see yourself more clearly
When you start to see yourself differently, some of your behavior will change automatically
Earn your own self-respect
I’ll help you learn to rely on your own self-respect instead of trying to get your partner's approval.
Most relationship arguments are about trying to get each other's agreement and approval.
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.