Chiara Simeone-DiFrancesco, PhD

I have specialized my entire professional life in healing relationships and marriages. I love doing this.

I also love to help people over their trauma, both "big T trauma" and "little traumas".  For Christian clients who come to see me, they discover that God is the God of the present, past and the future, and He can walk back into the past and provide great comfort and healing.  Not that you will forget all about it, but that it won't affect you as much, and you can also experience His comfort and another experience connected to what happened, and new experience, one that is filled with peace and hope.

 For couples, there are a lot of things to try that a lay person would not know, so please, don't give up thinking you've "tried everything"! Slowing things down in session and placing the interactions into a conceptualization where each thought and feeling in a typical couples clash is heard, understood and placed into this conceptualization can lend tremendous understanding to this interactional "Mode" model. I'll teach you what a Mode is, and how to ally together so that you may learn how to fill your own Needs and each other's, differentiating them from gridlocked "wants". The real enemy is not each other, but the "Coping Modes" that are comprised of the rough edged ways you each handle things that trigger each other. It's great to be able to come to therapy and know that the blame lies in these coping modes, not yourself!! And, you learned these coping modes, you were not born with them. Hence, with work and effort, you can unlearn them and your partner too.

Many reactions in an intimate relationship are based on this learning and our memories. But these do not have to continue to limit and direct our lives. We can learn to become aware of these things that are painful to our partner, and also learn to have new empathy for their personal history and experience of these triggers. When a couple does Schema Therapy for Marriage, or even Marriage Preparation, they learn the inner world of their partner in a way that is designed to soften their perspective and facilitate empathy and caring. Persons who have stayed withdrawn for years or who act frustrated and angry are provided experiences that are geared to heal these patterns and learn new healthy adult coping mechanisms.

My own practice has been significantly enriched and transformed when I learned Schema Therapy in 1997. I find that the principles of it fit with a gospel perspective and a Christian outlook. Jesus through His Spirit wishes to "re-parent" us, healing our unmet Needs in life. In this therapy, we try to plug into His model of re-parenting, and I facilitate the couple to also "re-parent" each other and show them how.

My greatest joy is to see you leave my office hugging and smiling. However, if a couple cannot get to that place and one is very ambivalent about staying in the marriage, I am able to offer a rather new development: Discernment-type  Therapy. This is a 5 session couples therapy that is not designed to work on the problems or change things, but to come to a decision about which of three paths to take: 1) to stay as things are; 2) to leave the relationship; 3) to work hard on the marriage for 6 months, with divorce off the table, with the couple after 6 months making a decision about their future. I find that this gives us a vehicle to address the doubts and concerns of the leaning out partner, to coach the leaning in partner how to not make things worse, and to help them each understand what has happened to their marriage and what aspects each would wish changed should they continue. If path 3 is taken, each partner constructs future goals for their own self to work on in the couples therapy. This also is a venue that can be used if partners become very ambivalent during the course of the marriage therapy. If couples decide to chose path 3, I can see them or refer them out. If they decide to divorce, I can help them divorce in a more amicable way, or also refer them out to another provider if needed.

What I have found is that many couples who believed things were hopeless, and one or both were "leaning out" of the marriage, became hopeful even after some initial sessions of Schema Therapy for Couples where they were exposed to an experience of Mode Work, using the chairs to put the modes in, learning to "float above the issues" and alley together in filling Needs, their own and their spouse's. When you see the cycle in the relationship, understand how and why it is there with your respective histories, it often gives one a sense of hope in conquering it. After all, the cycle is the enemy, not each other!

God bless you.
Dr. Chiara Simeone-DiFrancesco