Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
THOMAS LAWRENCE, M.Div., LMFT
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
26 Court Street, Suite 2709
Brooklyn Heights, NY 11242
“I help couples learn how to use their love relationships
to develop and maintain emotional safety and intimacy. Working with
alcoholism and substance abuse is another area of my expertise.
I specialize in therapeutic work with adult children of alcoholic parents.”
I help couples quickly gain understanding of their “relationship agendas” stemming from their unhealed individual background issues. Couples learn how to develop and ask for caring behaviors which can heal painful emotional wounds sustained in their love relationships - even healing childhood emotional wounds - which so directly affect the level of satisfaction couple relationships produce.
In counseling, I teach couples how to communicate effectively, talking to each other one-at-a-time. This makes it possible for partners to hear one another completely, and provides safe emotional space. Each partner has an opportunity to design and ask for specific, concrete caring behaviors.
As a result, couples report feeling heard for the first time in their lives! Couples recover many positive feelings which they had developed at the beginning of their love relationships.
Sometimes couples need to register specific complaints with one another. This can be done safely and effectively. It’s always best to follow up a complaint with your request for a specific, caring behavior. The flip-side of any complaint is what you want.
Couples are often hurt emotionally in their love relationships and need specifically designed ways to re-develop trust and friendship. This can be done by working together (with me) in a format which safeguards both partners, while maximizing full expression of negative emotions. This format provides an opportunity to design caring behaviors which replace defective ones. Each partner experiences greater levels of trust with repetition of desirable behaviors.
Couples sometimes experience betrayal. This situation requires careful, deliberate work: (1) to uncover and identify unmet needs of the betrayer; (2) to provide ways to design repetitive trust-building behaviors for the benefit of the other partner. Emotionally safe transactions lead couples towards greater and greater fulfillment, trust and friendship.
Thomas Lawrence, M.Div., LMFT received his specialized training in couple therapy from Dr. Harville Hendrix, founder of the Institute for Relationship Therapy in New York City.
Tom’s foundational training was conducted through the three-year intensive residency program in pastoral psychotherapy at Blanton-Peale Graduate Institute in New York City. This included heavily supervised work with individuals, couples, families and small groups in an outpatient clinic setting.
Mr. Lawrence is a Master of Divinity degree graduate of New York’s Union Theological Seminary and is an ordained Protestant minister. He does not proselytize in counseling, although some clients bring spiritual concerns which he readily honors.
Thomas Lawrence, M.Div., LMFT is licensed by New York State as a Marriage & Family Therapist. License No. 000101.
To make an appointment or ask questions, please call 718-852-2281.
Clients may be seen in his office at 2205 RIchmond Road, Staten Island, New York 10306.