Couples & Relationship Therapy
Relationships are where we grow the most, hurt the most, and occasionally need someone else in the room to make sense of it.
The short version
Whether you're working through recurring conflict, emotional distance, or major decisions about children, therapy can help you better understand the patterns shaping the relationship and what to do next. My approach centers on attachment and emotionally focused communication, understanding what's underneath the conflict, and working through blame, shame, or criticism.
Each person in a relationship has things they're working on, and this work tends to help most when each of you is willing to look at your own part and stay curious about each other's experience. My role is to help you understand what's happening between you and where you want to go from here.
I work with couples and people across relationship structures and orientations, including LGBTQ+ relationships, long-term partnerships, marriage, dating relationships, blended families, co-parenting partners, monogamy, ethical non-monogamy, polyamory, open relationships, and asexual or aromantic partnerships.
Common Patterns
Stuck Cycles
The same argument keeps happening. Someone pursues, someone withdraws, and everyone leaves feeling misunderstood, defensive, or alone.
Distance & Disconnect
Conversations get shallower, intimacy fades, and connection gets replaced by routines you do next to each other rather than with each other.
Reactivity & Flooding
Small things escalate fast and you end up overwhelmed, defended, or saying things you don't mean instead of finding common ground.
How I Work with Couples & Relationships
Most relationship problems aren't just about the fights. Conflict around communication, commitment, trust, parenting, or emotional closeness usually reflects deeper patterns like fear, self-protection, resentment, longing, withdrawal, or difficulty staying emotionally open with each other. Those patterns can surface as criticism, contempt, defensiveness, or stonewalling. Sometimes they show up in your sex life, too.
Therapy helps slow those patterns down enough to understand what's happening between you, so you can move out of blame, defensiveness, or distance and closer to each other.
My approach integrates emotionally focused therapy (EFT), attachment theory, psychodynamic therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), and Imago therapy.
Substance use, or a breach of trust like infidelity, can be part of what we talk about, held as part of the relationship rather than one person's problem to solve. If ADHD is part of what strains the relationship, here's a piece on what your partner can't see about your ADHD.
What Therapy Can Help With
Premarital Counseling
Finances, conflict styles, family dynamics, children, wedding planning, division of labor, religion, and more.
ADHD & Relationships
Reactivity, mental load, task initiation, follow-through, friction, and caretaking, without reducing conflict to a diagnosis or blame.
LGBTQ+ Relationships
The same relationship work, with room for whatever's specific to your identity or relationship along the way.
Life Stress & Connection
Stress, transitions, money, parenting, and the daily demands that wear on closeness, including in your sex life.
Cultural Differences
Understanding culture, religion, family expectations, interracial relationships, identities, and belonging.
Kids or No Kids
Fertility issues, timing, and what you want outside of pressure, timelines, guilt, or other people's expectations.