Hello and welcome to my page on couples therapy.

I integrate a wide variety of therapy approaches and interventions into the work.

Below is a summary of the goals I help couples meet, and the interventions that I use to help them successfully navigate conflict and reconnect with each other.

Seeking clarity and real insight into problematic patterns

I help couples get away from blame — the pattern of arguing over who is causing the problem — and shift toward studying their repetitive conflict patterns or, “the negative cycle”, itself.  It’s far better to align against the unhealthy dynamic than against each other.

I believe that when we see clearly what is going on, it dispels disorienting confusion and gives us hope and creative options. 

A goal I always have is to help you walk away from session having learned or more deeply understood at least one small thing about yourself, your partner, or your relationship that you didn’t previously know.  I believe that even small insights have a way of making little shifts in how you speak to and interact with each other, that can compound into big positive changes over time.

Open-minded expertise

To have such insights, I rely on a combination of bringing a curious and humble “beginner’s mind” to our work, as well as the expertise and pattern recognition of my 18 years of studying and practicing marriage and family therapy.  

We will begin by exploring your unique situation, dynamics, and histories, and this assessment will remain an element throughout the therapy process, as new memories, information, and insights unfold.  

As I get to know you more thoroughly and I feel that I genuinely understand your experiences, I’ll increasingly lead and direct us at times, sharing my own ideas and understandings of the problem and possible solutions, based on how I’ve fit my understanding of you personally with my experience working with other people in therapy, as well as my own life experience.  

Throughout this process, we’ll exchange feedback regarding how much my understanding and suggestions resonate with you, and how well I’m understanding your experiences and goals.

Empathic reflection and modeling openness and curiosity

I provide empathic reflection to each partner, which has two different, main purposes.

Firstly, it helps both of you understand your own and your partner’s feelings and experience at a deeper level, which is often re-connecting and is likely to lead to creative solutions to your current impasses. This could be thought of as me “translating” and deepening what you are each saying to each other, that can be hard to hear or understand. I’m able to do this because I can take a more objective position from the outside, and also because I’ve heard many other individuals and couples express similar feelings about their relationships before.

The second purpose is that it’s modeling for how I want you to talk to each other, in and out of session.  I usually start by addressing each partner myself one on one, but I will frequently shift you toward talking with each other, since the main point of therapy is to get you re-connected with each other.  Rather than immediately objecting and giving rebuttals, I encourage openness, curiosity, and questions, in order to see each other’s points of view empathically.  When I invite one of you to tell me more about some feeling you’ve been having, and ask follow-up questions about your answer, it’s not just to build rapport with you (although that is one aim).  It is also a demonstration, a practice, and a reminder of how you can talk to each other in ways that help you both feel seen and want to care for each other’s needs.

Dissolving self-protective defenses that block the exchange of love

I help couples better understand how their childhoods, their attachments with their parents, their “family of origin” experiences, and their societal/cultural upbringing affects how they show up in and experience their intimate relationship.

Everyone builds up at least some relational “defenses” (ways of protecting ourselves and regulating our nervous systems) during our childhood and teenage years.  Defenses are sometimes called “survival skills”, “adaptive strategies”, and other terms.

Defenses attempt to get our needs met and protect core wounds, and could include withdrawing or shutting down, being critical or blaming, minimizing and dismissing feelings, people pleasing, being over-dependent on reassurance seeking, being hyper-rational and emotionally distant, being too controlled by emotions, manipulating or dishonesty, and many others.  We unconsciously construct our defenses early in life to survive hard relational contexts, and we often hone and fortify them as adults.  But they typically cause some problems for us once we get into intimate relationships in which we’re seeking a nourishing, heart-to-heart connection.  The defense “walls” we built up to stay safe in life become the walls that prevent love from flowing to and from a partner.  This is why relationships are often quite challenging, and also why they can be a journey of personal healing and spiritual growth.

To the extent that couples’ defenses remain unconscious, they’ll take each other’s challenging behavior personally and as an indication that they aren’t loved.  Rather than seeing that your partner has love behind a defense that he/she built up in childhood to stay safe, it’ll just feel like a lack of love.  Seeing the defense and it’s positive intent (usually to avoid harmful conflict or to try to maintain closeness) accomplishes several things:

1. It creates the goal of healing core wounds rather than merely protecting them with defenses that block the exchange of love.
2. It provides the goal of creating safety for each other in ways that render your defenses unnecessary.
3. It reminds you both that you do have an abundance of love for each other, but that love is simply blocked and needs to become unblocked.
4. It helps you take each other’s challenging behavior less personally, rather than subconsciously experiencing it as somehow related to your own worthiness of love.

The process of learning about and dissolving defenses will involve us occasionally connecting your current struggles and conflicts to your experiences growing up, in particular exploring your emotional bonds with your parents.  A couple of fundamental questions are:

1. “How did I survive childhood difficulty and how am I still using those survival skills now with my partner in ways that disconnect us?”  
2. “How do the ways that I protect myself cause my partner to feel unsafe, and vice versa?”

If you can both learn each other’s answers to those questions, it often becomes clear how you can provide each other with a “corrective” and healing relationship that allows you, perhaps for the first time in your life, to have a real, authentic, deep and nourishing connection without the need for your survival defenses.

Your relationship is my client

I believe there are three entities present in any couple: the two partners, and their bond with each other.

In couples therapy, I consider my client to be the relationship between you and your partner. This makes couples therapy somewhat different from individual therapy.

I try to be neutral and not align with either partner, because that is not in service of reconnecting two people. I “call balls and strikes” as best as I can, giving validation to what I see as a legitimate pain or need, no matter whose it is, as well as challenging counterproductive views or defensive behaviors, no matter which side they belong to.

I try to take care of both individuals in ways that support the goal of them becoming closer. An example of one subtle difference is that in individual therapy I might tell someone, “wow, that sounds really hurtful!” to validate their hurt, but if I were to do this in couples therapy when both are present, this would likely evoke shame in the other partner, which doesn’t serve the relationship. Instead I’d be more likely to calmly say, “I notice ___ is happening, and it seems like it’s disconnecting you two. Can we take a curious look at this?”

One way I try to have rapport with both you and your partner, while also not taking sides, is keeping all of our communication between the three of us. I don’t see either individual separately, and I even ask that all our written communication outside of session be between the three of us. This helps to prevent unequal rapport between myself and either of you, as well as any “secrets” from being held in the therapy between me and either of you.

Self-disclosure for guidance and validation

Sometimes in therapy I’ll share what has worked or not worked for me along my own relationship journey.  I have a very healthy and nourishing relationship now, but that was not always the case.  

I think that sometimes it’s even more effective for me to say, “here’s something my partner and I do that works for us” than it is for me to make suggestions for what might work for you (although I do that too).

And sometimes it can also be more impactful to share, “I’ve experienced that pain and fear myself” than it is to reflect how hard I imagine something is for you (although I do that too).

Giving ideas for progress outside of the session

I realize that being stressed and disconnected in your relationship is very difficult, and has an urgency to it, because intimate relationships are so important. And I know it can be frustrating and discouraging to only have one hour per week or every other week in therapy sessions to make progress.

For couples who have the time, desire, and motivation to expedite their progress, I can give ideas for books to read, video/audio to study, and exercises you can do outside of session, which I believe could significantly increase the pace of your progress.

I always try to recommend resources that I have read/consumed and tried myself, to vet them so I’m not wasting your time, and also so that we can discuss any benefits or stuck points you encounter with them. I also try to make any recommendations customized to your needs and way of learning and seeing the world, based on what I know of you.

At the same time, I realize that many couples are very busy and/or prefer a moderate pace and want to keep their relationship work contained to the session, and that is completely fine with me too. The essential thing is that both partners are invested in the therapy process during the time that we meet.

Book a free consultation

If what I’ve written here sounds like the kind of couples therapy process that you are open to and think would help you, and you’d like to speak with me so we can see if we’re a good fit, please use this form to contact me to set up a free, 15-30 minute video consultation.

Resources for couples

Whether you choose to work with me or not, I’d like to share this page of books and other media that I’ve collected for couples, in case it’s helpful for you: Resources for couples