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 couples 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, 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 partner 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 couples share appreciation, affirmations, or renewed commitments to each other.
- 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 progress.
- Over time, you develop stronger communication skills, deeper emotional bonds, and a renewed sense of partnership.
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 values 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
The ultimate goal of Imago is to help couples achieve a deeper level of connection, intimacy, and understanding. By addressing childhood wounds and fostering effective communication, couples can create a more loving and conscious partnership. Imago can be beneficial for couples seeking to improve their relationship dynamics and resolve ongoing conflicts.
The therapeutic process involves several key components including dialogue, childhood wounds, conscious relationship, and behavior change. The central premise of Imago is that we are drawn to partners who mirror the positive and negative traits of our early caregivers. These traits, when triggered, can lead to conflicts and emotional wounds in our current relationships. Imago aims to help couples understand and heal these wounds to create more fulfilling and conscious connections.
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 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 Vision - Creating a Heart to Heart Exceptional Relationship
Long term commitment is for many the greatest undertaking ever encountered. As two people join together, their 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:
- Partners feel safe in each others presence
- Partners can share their inner selves with one another
- There is a high degree of trust
- There is laughter and lightness
- There is conflict but quick repair and learning
- Partners can take self responsibility
- A willingness to learn from what goes wrong
- A desire to see each other flourish
- Partners can admit to human realities like jealousy, competitiveness and insecurity
- Partners find a way to balance independence and connections
We are here to help you create your
Heart to Heart Exceptional Relationship!
