COUPLES WORK
Find Your Way Back to Each Other
Find Your Way Back to Each Other
Move from conflict and disconnection toward understanding, trust, and deeper connection.
Inclusive & Affirming
All relationships & identities welcome here.
Structured Support
A clear, compassionate and supportive process.
Practical Tools
Real skills for impactful and lasting change.
You Don't Have to Stay Stuck
Every relationship experiences difficult seasons. You may feel like you are having the same arguments, growing apart, avoiding important conversations, or no longer feeling like a team.
Couples counseling gives you a structured place to slow down, understand what is happening beneath the conflict, and begin relating to one another differently.
Together, we can help you interrupt painful patterns, communicate more clearly, rebuild emotional safety, and create a relationship in which both of you can flourish.
What Brings Couples Here
Different challenges often share the same hope: to feel understood, secure and connected again.
Communication Breakdowns
Conversations quickly become arguments, defensiveness or withdrawal.
Repeating Conflicts
The same disagreements and ruptures return without resolution or meaningful repair.
Loss of Deep Connection
You feel more like roommates, coworkers or co-parents than intimate partners.
Trust and Infidelity Challenges
You need a safe, structured process for addressing hurt and rebuilding trust. You need a safe process.
Life's Many Transitions
Parenting, careers, illness, aging, loss or other changes are affecting the relationship.
Intimacy Challenges
You want to restore affection, vulnerability, emotional closeness or physical intimacy.
Choose the Support that Fits
Ongoing Couples Coaching
Regular 60- or 90-minute sessions provide consistent support as you strengthen communication, understand recurring patterns and create lasting change.
Sessions are available in person in North Ridgeville, Ohio, or online.
Private Couples Intensive
A focused two-day experience gives you extended time to work through urgent or deeply rooted relationship challenges without the limits of a traditional weekly session.
Sessions are available in person in North Ridgeville, Ohio, or fly David to you.
Couples Workshop
A structured 2 1/4 -day educational workshop designed to help couples understand one another more deeply, communicate more safely, and develop a more conscious relationship.
Held in Cleveland, OH & NY City
Healing After Infidelity
Compassionate, structured support can help you understand what happened, address the impact of betrayal and determine whether and how trust can be rebuilt.
Sessions are available in person in North Ridgeville, Ohio, or online.
An Integrated, Relationship-Centered Approach
No single method fits every couple. Your work is shaped around your relationship using structured communication, relational insight, body awareness and practical tools.
Imago Relationships
Imago helps partners understand the deeper needs and experiences beneath their reactions. The structured Imago Dialogue teaches couples to slow down, listen, validate and respond with greater empathy. Learn to listen not respond
Gottman Tools
Research-informed communication and relationship tools help couples strengthen friendship, manage conflict, make repairs and build a shared sense of meaning. These strategies help partners replace reactive patterns with greater understanding, trust and connection.
Embodied Couples
The Exceptional Relationship and Core Energetics perspectives bring attention to the body, nervous system and emotional energy present between partners. Couples learn to recognize when they become closed or protected and practice returning to openness and connection.
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.
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The Gottman Method
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.
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.
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 & certified in Exceptional Relationships.
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 and Exceptional 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 thrive.
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
Ready to Begin a Different Conversation?
Take the first step toward clearer communication, deeper understanding and a more connected relationship.