Certified Imago Relationship Therapist Cindy Cartee Encourages Conscious Coupling to Foster Greater Understanding & Love

The Short Version: When you’re fighting with a significant other day in and day out, you can lose sight of why you fell in love with that person in the first place. Couples locked in bitter and cyclical arguments may think there’s no way to recover, but relationship therapist Cindy Cartee believes there’s hope for any couple willing to do the work. She conducts transformative counseling sessions and workshops to help couples understand their inner drives and overcome conflict by looking past what they’re fighting about and remembering what they’re fighting for. Cindy shares the enlightening principles of Imago therapy to inspire couples to listen to one another with an open heart and become more conscious of each other’s emotional needs. For over 30 years, Cindy has worked closely with singles and couples of all ages and imparted life-changing strategies to help them resolve personal conflicts in a healthy way.

Cindy Cartee was 8 years old and riding her bicycle through her neighborhood when she decided what she wanted to do with her life — she wanted to help people. At a tender age, she developed a passion for therapy and started on a journey to change people’s hearts, minds, and relationships.

“I’ve been on this path for as long as I can remember,” she said. “It sounds cheesy, but it’s true. I’ve actually always known what I wanted to do, which is help people.”

Cindy grew up watching Dr. Ruth Westheimer on television and admired how the famed sex therapist helped people work through and understand their emotions. One day in middle school, she got an F on a paper because she had answered a prompt about what she wanted to do when she grew up by writing about her dream of becoming a sex therapist.

Her concerned teacher sent her home to get the paper signed. Cindy’s parents wrote back that they knew about and supported their child’s ambitions. The grade was revised to an A.

“It’s not something I thought about,” Cindy said reflectively. “It’s just something I wanted to do. I wanted to combine working with love, relationships, and sex.”

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Today, Cindy is a certified Imago Relationship Therapist with offices in Columbia and Spartanburg, South Carolina. She has over 30 years of experience in the field of counseling and psychotherapy. She has run her own private practice for the last 30 years and has helped hundreds of couples work through difficult issues and bring out the best in themselves and their relationship. She loves it when her clients take her words to heart, learn the lessons they need to grow, and pass along the message of healing and understanding to others.

“When I help one, I help many,” Cindy said. “I’d love to see a more conscious world where we’re able to see the otherness in people and have a dialogue about our differences.”

As an experienced and compassionate therapist, Cindy Cartee has many areas of expertise and words of wisdom to share with her clients. She offers her guidance on relationships, affair recovery, sex therapy, addiction recovery, and adoption services. She guides her clients to be mindful of how their past experiences with love and attachment can shape their present-day relationships, how they can enhance their relationships by making a conscious effort to be more understanding and loving, and how they can have a conscious relationship.

Some of her most impactful and healing work is done during in-person couples counseling sessions where she helps couples identify and resolve the underlying issues causing conflict between them. She offers a concrete plan to nurture intimacy, healing, and forgiveness in a relationship, so committed couples can overcome any obstacles that come their way.

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Cindy is an Imago Therapist which means she sees conflict as opportunity for growth. It’s a chance to heal yourself and your significant other. “Conflict has a deeper meaning,” Cindy told us. “Only when you get at that deeper meaning can you have healing in your relationship.”

During those moments when couples are in conflict with one another, Cindy doesn’t take sides — she looks for the unmet needs and unexpressed fears causing those disagreements. Cindy helps couples have a dialogue about their differences without feeling threatened. “You have to be willing to step into your partner’s otherness,” she told us. “Those differences and difficulties aren’t the end of the relationship; they’re an opportunity to learn what it is your partner needs from you, so you can be healing to one another.”

In addition to her counseling services, Cindy offers a couples weekend workshop designed to help couples restore, repair, and deepen their connections to one another. A few times a year, she leads 20 to 30 couples on a journey to heal their hearts.

Getting the Love You Want is a two-day intensive workshop for couples seeking to overhaul their relationships. For some it’s pre-marital work. For some, it’s pre-divorce work. For some, they want to deepen or enhance their relationship. Cindy is one of approximately 150 Getting the Love You Want presenters who conduct these workshops across the world. The presenters use the same workbook but bring their own personalities to the lessons. Cindy, for example, adds a lively sense of humor and empathetic spirit to the in-depth lessons.

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The couples who have taken the workshop often report feeling a renewed sense of hope for their marriage or relationship. Maybe they were on the brink of divorce, but now they see a path forward together. “The information has radically changed the course of our marriage,” said one couple who participated in the workshop.

“Cindy is a gifted presenter,” said another participant. “She made the workshop interesting and fun.”

Whether you’re just starting to date or have been married for decades, you can take part in this transformative coursework to deepen your relationship, move forward, and grow together in a healthy way. “The workshop is a powerful experience,” Cindy told us. “I would personally recommend it for everybody.”

Sometimes couples show up for sessions with Cindy when they’re at the end of their rope. They’ve been fighting nonstop, and they can’t see a way out. They need to find a way to understand each other and communicate in constructive ways, and so they turn to a therapist who has experience healing hearts. Cindy provides the framework to shift the discussion from what’s going wrong to how it can be set right and how couples can connect again.

“I see a lot of couples who are ready to do deep and meaningful work,” she said. “They have to have courage and a  lot of love and openness to heal their relationship.”

“Therapy with her is like an adventure of the soul. Helping couples consciously love one another is her gift.” — a review of Cindy Cartee’s counseling services

“Cartee has ignited hope during a time when many are hopeless,” according to one testimonial. “Despite the myth that affairs destroy a relationship, Cartee has proven that affair recovery is possible.”

Cindy said it means the world to her when she sees her clients connecting, holding hands, or smiling at one another after they’ve had a breakthrough. Tears of joy spring to her eyes during those moments of hope and understanding. She feels touched to play a role in bringing couples back to a place of love and happiness.

“It’s a blessing and a gift,” she said. “I feel privileged to be part of their stories and their healing.”

Cindy brings a lot of heart to her work as an Imago-trained therapist. It’s been her life’s passion. Ever since she was a child, Cindy knew her mission in life was to provide therapy and support to couples struggling to connect with one another. She loves talking to couples and listening to their perspectives in her private practice, and she loves watching her clients grow into conscious and loving partners.

When asked about her future plans, Cindy had a simple answer: She wants to continue striving to help people learn to love one another. Whether she’s helping someone move on after a breakup or encouraging couples to reconnect and recover from an affair, this therapist dives deep into the heart of an issue and finds the positives beneath the pain.

“I want to continue to give back and make change,” she said, “and do my part to make a difference one couple at a time.”