• ​​Is Your Relationship in Turmoil?  
  • Do You Feel Alone in Your Relationship? 
  • ​Do You Want to Increase Intimacy With Your Partner?​
  • Does every discussion with your partner turn into an argument?​
  • Do you feel to have fallen out of love and would like to get the spark back?
  • Are you trying to overcome your partner's infidelity?
​Pleasure heals! Relationships heal!​ We all have fears, feelings, needs for comfort, closeness, and care. Infidelity, trauma, emotional pain, hardships in life, chronic illnesses, sexual problems etc. get in the way when the bond is not secure and thus, there are blocks to reaching for each other. When that loss of connection and intimacy is experienced, a negative cycle of interacting with each other is established. These cycles are often characterized by high reactivity for both partners, and often include anger, criticism, withdrawal, going cold or quiet, or turning to other things or people outside the relationship during times of distress. Once established, these negative cycles can emerge over even small issues, and these negative cycles, repeated over time, fracture the bonds of trust, intimacy, and security in the relationship.

​CALL (657) 888-3222 TO FIND OUT HOW MY THERAPY SERVICES CAN HELP YOU.
As a relationship, intimacy and trauma recovery therapist, Luisa can help you restore trust, safety, intimacy, and strengthen your relationship through loving and secure connections. In therapy Luisa will guide you and your partner to create a relationship that is a safe haven and a healing environment for both. Luisa will assist you to identify the negative cycles in your relationship and replace them with healthier patterns. She will lead you and your partner to evolve and become a couple with a stronger emotional connection, fulfilling sex life, one that can reach to each other for comfort, care, and closeness. 
What to Expect from therapy?
​Clients report that five things happened in therapy that made things better for them:
  • One partner expressed underlying feelings, and the other changing their perceptions of the partner after hearing this
  • Learning to understand underlying emotions
  • Learning to productively express emotional needs
  • Taking responsibility for emotional needs
  • Receiving validation for one’s needs
What are the Concepts of Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples?
  • ​Emotion and attachment have received little recognition in previous treatment models compared to rational cognitions and logical behaviors. In EFT, Luisa validates the partners’ emotions and attachment needs, responds genuinely to the partners individually, and tries to stir the two partners’ own ability to heal themselves and their relationship (the relationship is the client). This fits well with Gottman’s research that it is not negative emotional engagement that predicts divorce, but rather a lack of emotional engagement.
  • The process of uncovering emotions is not the same as catharsis, but is an effort to reveal and integrate marginalized and denied emotions by identifying and engaging them in the moment.
  • The therapy session is seen as a healing place where a corrective emotional experience between partners happens, and it is that process that is the method of therapeutic change. In therapy Luisa is egalitarian, and empowers the partners.
  • Luisa avoids over-pathologization by remembering that current negative emotional responses were adaptive at some place and time; what seems irrational now actually was a logical response somewhere and somewhen. However, previously adaptive behaviors are now mismatched to the situation, or are rigidly practiced, and so are now maladaptive.
  • Systems theory combines two individuals and creates a whole relationship that is more than the sum of the part(ner)s. For Partner 1, inner emotional experiences influence external experiences, which in turn prime the person for the same inner emotional experiences, re-influencing external experiences…. This cycle for Partner 1 feeds itself and the same cycle for Partner 2, whose cycle feeds itself and that of Partner 1…. The whole thing takes on a life of its own and becomes “a self-maintaining positive feedback loop”. This means positive encounters can have a compounding effect, while experiences in which one partner failed to respond to the other’s needs (attachment injuries) can warp perceptions of future experiences.
SEX THERAPY SERVICES
​As a Client, why Choose EFT?
  • Indicators for EFT are high negative emotional engagement, low sexual affection, and lower sense of emotional engagement or time together in the couple.  
  • EFT is culturally sensitive as universal emotions are examined, but placed in a personal cultural context. For example, shame is universal, but shame takes on an additional role in the Japanese culture. Anger is universal, but often takes different forms when men and women express it. Responsibility is universal, but what’s “a man’s responsibility” and “a woman’s responsibility” is determined but the culture’s views of marriage.
  • EFT is humanistic based, and believes the couple can heal itself.
Strengths of Emotion Focused Therapy
  • EFT is considered one of the most well-substantiated therapies with well designed studies backing it up as having isolated necessary and unique factors of change in therapy.
  • It’s been shown to be an effective treatment for couples and families facing sexual abuse histories, depression, grief, management of chronic illness, eating disorders, and PTSD. 
  • EFT is brief work (8-12 sessions) and leads to as good or better rates of improvement (less distress after therapy) and recovery (adjustment and satisfaction scores in the non-distressed range) as other therapies.
  • Several studies show slight increases in adjustment and functioning after therapy has ended. Cloutier et al. (2002) found 62% improved at termination, but 77% improved at the two year follow-up (an increase of 15%). She found 15% were recovered at termination, while 64% were recovered at the two year follow-up (an increase of 49%). The longer terms studies show about the same rate of improvement; some show over a 30% increase in recovery, but the follow-up for these studies is generally a few months.