Couples & Relationship Therapy

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Making Meaningful Choices in Your Relationship

When we enter into a romantic relationship, it often feels less like a conscious choice and more like an irresistible pull. The exhilarating mix of attraction, connection, and the promise of a fulfilling partnership can easily overshadow the reality of navigating a complex dynamic.

Over time, however, we are constantly faced with choices: to compromise, to sacrifice, to stay, or to go. How we navigate these choices – how we see them, process them, and negotiate them with our partner – significantly shapes the relationship. These choices, and the patterns that emerge from them, can ultimately determine whether our relationship feels like a source of joy and growth or like a confining prison.

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Why Relationships Can Feel Challenging

No two relationships are the same. Each partner brings their own history, personality, communication style, and life experiences into the mix. Even in healthy, loving relationships, differences can lead to misunderstandings or conflict.

External pressures, like career demands, financial stress, extended family expectations, or the arrival of children, can add further strain. Without intentional care, what once felt like a team effort can start to feel like a battleground.

How Couples Therapy Helps

Couples counseling offers a safe, neutral space to slow down, understand each other’s perspectives, and strengthen your connection. This is true whether you are dealing with different concerns:

Struggling with communication or frequent arguments
Healing after a breach of trust
Feeling emotionally distant or “more like roommates”
Preparing for marriage or long-term commitment

Relationship therapy can help you develop skills, insight, and shared understanding to move forward together.

Evidence-Based Approaches I Use

I work from two research-backed methods that help couples not only resolve conflict, but also deepen emotional intimacy:

The Gottman Method

Developed from decades of relationship research, the Gottman Method focuses on strengthening friendship, improving communication, and building shared meaning. You’ll learn tools to manage conflict constructively, increase affection, and create rituals of connection that make your relationship more resilient.

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT)

EFCT helps partners identify and shift the emotional patterns that keep them feeling disconnected. By fostering emotional safety and secure attachment, EFCT allows couples to have more open, vulnerable conversations—so you can turn toward each other instead of away during times of stress.

Matching the Approach to the Need

I typically integrate both of these approaches to address the specific needs of your couple. For some, immediate challenges like high-conflict communication or repeated arguments require structured tools that create quick relief. For others, the core issues stem from deeper emotional injuries, such as breaches of trust, unresolved resentments, or old attachment wounds, that need slower, emotion-focused repair.

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Premarital & Pre-Commitment Counseling

Couples therapy isn’t just for those who are married or in cisgender, heterosexual relationships. It is for anyone in a partnership looking to strengthen their connection and build a healthier future together. From dating couples thinking about the next step to long-term partners navigating changes in their dynamic, therapy can provide valuable insights and tools.

For couples considering marriage or formalizing their commitment, premarital or pre-commitment counseling offers an opportunity to explore practical and emotional aspects of your future together. This includes discussing values, finances, communication styles, conflict resolution, and long-term goals, ensuring you're aligned before life becomes more interwoven and on a track you didn’t intend.

These conversations are important for all relationships, but they can be especially meaningful for those who may have experienced difficult childhoods or lacked examples of healthy communication and attachment. I work with couples to create a solid foundation, so you can move forward with confidence, clarity, and connection as you take the next step together.

Whether you’re here to repair, grow, or prepare, couples therapy can help you create the relationship you both want.

Could you benefit from Couples & Relationship Therapy?

Once we have a brief consultation to meet each other and answer any questions, we will typically schedule the following subsequent sessions:

First full conjoint
Individual sessions (for each member)
Follow-up conjoint

This is considered the assessment phase, and you may be asked to complete the Gottman battery of assessments to help nail down the challenges and treatment plan. Regardless, it's usually in the follow-up conjoint session that we will go over a general plan to move forward.

Couples therapy typically requires 8-20 sessions, depending on the couple’s needs. The goal of the process is to guide couples through stages designed to de-escalate conflict, strengthen emotional engagement, and create lasting patterns of trust and responsiveness.