WHEN TRUST IS BROKEN, RELATIONSHIPS NEED MORE THAN COMMUNICATION SKILLS

Arguing

Break Free From the Same Painful Cycles.

Many couples find themselves repeating the same arguments again and again: criticism, defensiveness, shutdown, and resentment slowly eroding connection.

Couples counseling helps partners understand the deeper emotional patterns driving these conflicts so they can interrupt destructive cycles and rebuild understanding, safety, and closeness. Learn more.

BrOKEN TRUST

Healing After Betrayal or Infidelity 

The discovery of an affair, emotional betrayal, or secrecy can shake the very foundation of a relationship, leaving partners overwhelmed by anger, fear, and uncertainty.

Therapy provides a structured process for understanding what led to the rupture, rebuilding trust, and determining whether and how the relationship can move forward with honesty and renewed commitment. Learn more.

Relationships AT A CROSSROADS

When You’re Not Sure If the Relationship Can Continue

Some couples come to therapy unsure whether their relationship can survive. They may feel deeply hurt, emotionally exhausted, or uncertain about what the future should look like.

Discernment-informed counseling helps couples slow down the decision-making process, understand what has brought them to this point, and determine whether the next step is repair, separation, or a different kind of relationship moving forward. Learn more.

Couples Counseling  

You and your partner have probably already tried to work on your relationship without professional help and have most likely found that it's hard to change deeply entrenched or destructive patterns by yourself.

Couples counseling provides you and your partner professional guidance and caring support as you experience a new way to address relationship issues while building a deeper emotional connection and understanding. Learn more.

Individual Counseling

Perhaps you want to gain clarity about your relationship on your own. Maybe you don't feel ready yet or aren't sure how to share your true feelings with your partner. Perhaps your partner isn't willing to participate in couples counseling. Or maybe you need to work through a stressful circumstance you are going through that is negatively affecting your relationship.

Individual counseling can help you understand yourself, gain clarity about your relationship, figure out how to handle complicated relationship issues and ultimately cultivate your own personal fulfillment and happiness. Learn more.
 

The Marriage Made Better–Accelerator™

In many cases, couples may argue about one topic without realizing the unspoken feelings, unmet needs and deeper desires that all too often remain buried in the subtext. The Marriage Made Better–Accelerator™ helps couples and individuals get a jumpstart on the therapeutic process that works to uncover these hidden meanings by assessing for these kinds of root issues in a comprehensive relationship assessment and analysis.

The Accelerator can help you identify more quickly a road-map for repairing your relationship. Learn more.

Carly Ketchum, MA, MA, LMFT

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist & Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University

Carly is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology, and founder of Marriage Made Better™ Relationship Counseling. Passionate about helping people have happy marriages, Carly has dedicated her career to studying relationships and helping people develop and maintain satisfying relationships as well as overcome considerable relationship obstacles. With enthusiasm, warmth, and a great sense of humor, Carly distills scientific findings into straightforward, practical suggestions as she guides couples and individuals through the process of developing stronger, more fulfilling relationships.

Carly has extensive experience helping people heal from past traumatic relationship experiences. Often these traumatic experiences cause enduring emotional wounds that infiltrate subsequent relationships and cause dysfunctional patterns and significant barriers to experiencing loving connections with others. Through her work as a therapist at the non-profit domestic violence organization Laura’s House Counseling and Resource Center, Carly has helped countless former victims of domestic violence work through the painful and often frightening process of entering new relationships in which they take the risk to love and trust again. Seeing a need for intervention specifically aimed toward challenges in former victims' future relationships, Carly created and launched a group therapy program called ‘Dating After Abuse’ designed to help former victims not only heal and process past trauma, but also increase self-esteem and develop and practice the relationship skills that enable them to courageously and confidently move forward to enjoy healthy, happy romantic relationships free of violence.

Carly is also a dynamic and engaging public speaker who has provided information and inspiration to a wide variety of audiences regarding the complex dynamics of romantic relationships. Approachable and refreshingly real, Carly brings concepts alive by sharing pertinent examples from both her clinical work as a therapist as well as her personal life. She has given multiple presentations on how to have satisfying relationships, how to identify and repair common dysfunctional patterns of communicating in relationships and how to effectively have difficult conversations and resolve conflict in healthy ways. She has also given presentations about how to build and maintain self-esteem and how self-esteem affects dating behavior in teens as well as adults. Carly has been a regularly invited presenter at Domestic Violence Advocate trainings, has been featured in an interview on Orange County radio station KNOC regarding the effects of domestic violence on teenagers and recorded a domestic violence public service announcement that aired on Los Angeles radio station KFWB News Talk 980. She has also been an invited guest lecturer in classes at University of Southern California Master of Social Work Program as well as University of California–Irvine Master of Science in Nursing Program regarding understanding and effectively treating victims of domestic violence. Click here to learn more about Carly's speaking and events.

Carly is a Licensed Clinical Member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT). Carly holds two masters’ degrees from Pepperdine University, MA in Psychology and MA in Clinical Psychology with an Emphasis in Marriage and Family Therapy and has a bachelor’s degree from University of Southern California.