Couples Counseling for Pittsburg, KS Couples — In Person in Webb City

It's one road.

You get on 171 in Pittsburg. It stays 171 when it crosses into Missouri. Forty minutes later you are at my office. There is nothing to navigate and almost nothing to look at, which several Pittsburg couples have told me is the useful part — forty minutes in a car with the person you are about to be honest about is not wasted preparation.

Sessions are in person at my office in Webb City, MO.

Pittsburg couples, specifically

A university town has a shape. The academic year runs the household. Summer changes the rhythm completely. If either of you works at Pitt State, your marriage has to absorb a professional life that comes with seasons and a tenure clock.

The Pittsburg couples I see tend to arrive in two varieties.

The first is two articulate, competent people who have been having the identical argument for six years in steadily more sophisticated language. Being smart is not protective here. It means you have both had six years to build an airtight case, and you could each take yours to appeal. Nobody has ever been argued into feeling loved, but that has not stopped either of you from trying.

The second is the couple where one person's work is a calling and the other person's is a job, and at some point — nobody remembers when, nobody said it out loud — it became settled that the family organises itself around the calling. That arrangement is often perfectly workable. What is not workable is that it was never actually agreed to.

What the first session is actually like

You will both talk. I will interrupt both of you, roughly equally, and not because I am rude — because the version of the story you have each rehearsed is the least useful thing in the room and we do not have to sit through all of it.

Nobody is put on trial. I am not deciding which of you is the problem. I am looking for the loop the two of you fall into, and by the end of ninety minutes I can usually describe it back to you in enough detail that you both go quiet.

You do not have to arrive with a clear account of what is wrong. Most couples cannot produce one. That is not an obstacle, it is roughly the definition of being stuck.

What the work looks like

Emotionally Focused Therapy, couples exclusively. Sessions run 100 to 110 minutes, which is the mini-intensive and the only format I offer. That length exists because the first forty minutes are usually the version of the argument you have both rehearsed, and everything worth having is underneath it. The longer explanation is here: how EFT helps distressed couples.

$180 per session, private pay, no insurance.

Forty minutes each way is a real commitment and I would rather you went in clear-eyed about it. The couples who get somewhere are the ones who protect the appointment the way they protect anything else that matters. This work compounds, and it stalls when the rhythm goes.

More about how I work with couples therapy.

Call or text 417-768-9089 · shira@radicalrelationshiptransformation.com