Welcome to Heart to Heart Couples Counseling
Here you are met with a warm, supportive environment designed to foster healing, connection, growth, and intimacy. The experience is thoughtful and structured to help you feel safe, heard, and empowered.
What to Expect
- A judgment-free zone, where the practitioner sets a compassionate and neutral tone.
- You discuss your goals, challenges, and hopes for counseling, while the practitioner listens actively and empathetically.
- Each session is interactive and tailored for you, including open discussions, guided communication exercises, and practical tools for resolving conflicts.
- Techniques such as mirroring, active listening exercises, and conflict resolution strategies help you navigate your challenges.
- The practitioner provides a balanced perspective, helping each of you feel heard and validated.
- As you progress, you experience deeper emotional understanding and begin to build or rebuild trust, intimacy, and connection.
- Vulnerability is encouraged, allowing you to express feelings in ways that feel safe and supported.
- Sessions may include reflection exercises, where you share appreciation, affirmations, or renewed commitments to your partner / spouse.
- At the end of each session, you receive personalized action steps or small exercises to practice at home.
- Resources such as communication scripts, relationship-building exercises, or mindfulness techniques help reinforce your progress.
- Over time, you develop stronger communication skills, deeper emotional bonds, and a renewed sense of partnership.
Couples Counseling
Ongoing couples counseling provides consistent support for partners looking to deepen connection, improve communication, and navigate challenges over time. Sessions typically occur weekly or biweekly and offer a steady space to grow, heal, and strengthen your relationship.
Couples Intensive
A Private Couples Intensive is an accelerated experience designed to address your relationship’s most pressing issues in 2 to 3 days. Through immersive sessions and personalized guidance, couples gain rapid insight, learn powerful tools, and experience breakthroughs.
Couples Workshop
Deepen or reignite connection and intimacy in a safe, guided space where you’ll learn to understand each other on a deeper level. Getting the Love You Want helps couples transform old patterns into new pathways of love, empathy, and lasting partnership. Workshops offered in Cleveland, OH & NYC.
Healing from Infidelity
Healing after infidelity is possible—with guidance, structure, and a compassionate process that helps both partners understand what happened and rebuild trust. We support couples in repairing the bond, restoring emotional safety, and creating a relationship that is stronger than before.
Your Mentors and Guides
David deBardelaben-Phillips is passionate about helping couples build stronger, healthier relationships. He thrives in sessions where he can facilitate open communication, foster emotional intimacy, and guide partners toward deeper understanding and connection.
David has specialized training to work with couples. He is a Certified Imago Relationship Facilitator, Certified Exceptional Relationship Mentor, and has completed Gottman Level 1 training, as well as being an Advanced Certified Core Energetics Practitioner.
Beyond technique, David genuinely enjoys seeing couples heal and thrive, celebrating each milestone—big or small—as they move toward a more fulfilling partnership.
Bentley deBardelaben-Phillips often partners with his husband David to work with couples.
Bentley and David deeply value commitment and believe that strong relationships require continuous effort, understanding, and intentionality. Having faced their own ups and downs, they know firsthand that love isn’t just about chemistry – it’s about choosing each other every day, even when things get tough.
Bentley is an ordained minister, pastoral counselor, and Certified Exceptional Relationship Mentor. They hold a Master of Divinity degree from Eden Theological Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Chicago Theological Seminary.
Clare Carr often partners with David to work with couples. Clare is an Advanced Certified Core Energetics Practitioner, Certified Exceptional Relationship Mentor as well as, an ordained Helix minister from New York City. Clare has also completed specialized training in Imago Relationships.
David and Clare share a deep bond built on mutual respect, shared passion, and years of working side by side. Both practitioners and educators, they are a dynamic duo dedicated to helping couples build healthy, thriving relationships. Their friendship is the foundation of their work—rooted in trust, laughter, and a shared belief that strong relationships require effort, self-awareness, and intentionality.
Methods and Approaches to Healing
Imago Relationships
Imago Relationships is a form of couples counseling that focuses on understanding the unconscious dynamics that shape our intimate partnerships. The core idea is that we are instinctively drawn to partners who reflect both the nurturing and challenging qualities of our earliest attachment figures. These similarities are not accidental—they present an opportunity for healing and growth. Imago views conflict not as a sign that a relationship is failing, but as an invitation to repair old emotional wounds that were formed in childhood. When couples engage these wounds with curiosity rather than defensiveness, they begin to transform their relational patterns and deepen their emotional bond.
The Imago process emphasizes several foundational practices, such as structured dialogue, intentional communication, and the exploration of childhood experiences. Through the Imago Dialogue, partners slow down their interactions, mirroring each other to truly hear and understand, validating the other’s perspective, and empathizing with the emotional experience beneath the words. Partners learn to recognize the core needs and fears that are activated in moments of conflict. Instead of reacting automatically, they respond with awareness and compassion. Over time, this allows partners to replace old reactive patterns with more conscious, loving, and supportive behaviors.
The Relational Paradigm in Imago shifts the focus from the individual to the space between partners—the relationship itself becomes the client where growth and healing happens in connection.
The Gottman Institute
The Gottman Method is an approach to couples work that includes an assessment of the relationship and integrates research-based interventions based on the Sound Relationship House theory. The Gottman Method was developed by Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman in the 1980s.
It is an evidence-based form of couples therapy that strives to assist couples in achieving a deeper sense of understanding, awareness, empathy, and connectedness within their relationships that ultimately leads to heightened intimacy and interpersonal growth. By combining therapeutic interventions with couples exercises, this type of work helps couples identify and address the natural defenses that hinder effective communication and bonding. Couples who enter into the Gottman Method Couples approach often begin with an assessment process that then informs the therapeutic framework and intervention.
The Exceptional Relationship / Embodied Couples
The Exceptional Relationship Model utilizes a unique approach for intervening with the cocreated relational field. This approach pays close attention to what’s happening in the body and nervous system when couples interact, through didactic and experiential learning. The goal of the work is to accompany couples on a journey from closed and protected, to open and compassionate.
The model was developed by Marcia and Brian Gleason to integrate psychology, somatic awareness, and relational dynamics to help couples deepen their connection, heal past wounds, and move beyond traditional relationship patterns. The concept of Exceptional Relationship is based on the idea that couples can move beyond conventional, transactional relating into a space of profound connection, authenticity, and growth.
The Vision - Creating a Heart to Heart Exceptional Relationship
Long term commitment may be the greatest undertaking you have ever encountered. As you join together, your relationship can become truly exceptional when there is a foundation of security and adventure, individuality and intimacy, harmony and conflict, the cozy and the erotic, the powerful and the most vulnerable.
Elements of an exceptional relationship include:
- You both feel safe in each others presence
- You both can share their inner selves with one another
- You both have a high degree of trust
- There is laughter and lightness between you
- There is conflict but quick repair and learning
- You both can take self responsibility
- A willingness to learn from what goes wrong
- A desire to see each other flourish
- You both can admit to human realities like jealousy, competitiveness and insecurity
- You both find a way to balance independence and connections
We are here to help you create your
Heart to Heart Exceptional Relationship!
We are here to help you create your Heart to Heart Exceptional Relationship!
