Work with Tom Monte

Counseling Couples

The purpose of intimate relationship is to help you grow in your ability to love and your understanding of truth, which together are the life blood of your evolving journey to become your most fulfilled, unique, individuated self.

All committed relationships are based on four promises that each partner — consciously or unconsciously — makes to the other.

Those four promise are:

1. I will grow you with my love so that you become your best self.

2. I will confront the challenges that I face as an individual— and those we face as a couple — with honesty, courage, love for you, and for myself.

3. Together we will live our best lives. As I evolve and learn to experience more of who I am, I will naturally bring more joy, excitement, and new areas of interest into our lives. Your life will be richer for my evolution.

As you evolve and enrich your life, I will be richer and happier for your growth, happiness, and fulfillment. Therefore, I support your growth as essential to my own.

4. Together we will be fulfilled in love and reunited to the Great Life of Spirit-Unity-Love, into which we will pass when our journeys in this world are completed.

Most couples do not understand that they are making these promises to each other. Yet, those who live dishonestly, or shrink from challenge, or hide in addiction, or refuse to grow, sooner or later, discover that they have destroyed their most important relationship.

When two people commit to each other, their own deep needs for love and healing start to surface — often in the form of old pain, anger, and fear. As each partner is driven by unconscious needs, each seeks healing from the other.

Each begins with the expectation that “my partner will heal me.” That illusion keeps each partner from seeing the work that he or she alone is responsible for — and must do if the two people are to be fulfilled and happy.

Failing to see the nature of this illusion leads to the false belief that if you are unhappy, it’s your partner’s fault. Under such an illusion, there is no other recourse but to blame your partner, and thus avoid your own responsibility and power to change yourself and the conditions of your relationship.

A relationship that was born of love and excitement is soon overwhelmed by criticism, blame, disappointment, and anger. As criticism mounts, each partner loses connection to his or her heart and love, and secretly (and not so secretly) seeks power over the other.

Love can be restored. Below the hardness of anger and resentment lie deep states of compassion, tenderness, healing, and love. In these regions of the heart lie the ability to open to new possibilities, to love and be loved again, to forgive and be forgiven, to be healed and restored to your joy and happiness.

My method, Compassionate Integration, can accomplish all of these goals and restore love — and the four promises — to your relationship.