Couples Therapy

Rebuild communication, trust, and connection with a neutral, emotionally-focused approach.

How does couples therapy work?

1. Upon booking an appointment with the therapist best suited to your needs, we meet with you and your partner together for an initial 50-minute session. During this appointment, we establish a therapeutic rapport with you and your partner, and observe your natural interactions. The next 2 sessions are conducted separately with each partner. This gives us an opportunity to gather more information about each partner’s presenting concerns and personal history. We reconvene as a couple for the third session and onward.

2. The following 2-3 sessions are a continuation of the first session and an opportunity for us to gather more information about the couple and their concerns. A treatment plan is then formulated out of which future sessions are designed, and for each session thereafter, clinical interventions are utilized in service of meeting the established treatment goals.

3. Meeting weekly is our recommended frequency for beginning the process. In-person or virtual meetings are both well-suited for couples therapy.

4. Where clinically indicated, it may be recommended that one or both partners seek individual counseling in addition to couples therapy.

What happens in a couple therapy session?

Both partners will be seated in comfortable sofas on a private office floor. Serving as a neutral third party, we address presenting issues as a starting point for exploring and identifying each partner’s unmet needs in the relationship. Communication patterns may emerge to reveal the reactive strategies each partner uses to get their needs met by the other. These strategies, initially off-putting, will be reframed to help the partners see one another in an honest light. New perspectives create opportunities for a different kind of interaction, and the empathetic response most desired may finally emerge. Using emotionally-focused therapy techniques, old strategies will be replaced with new ones to sustain empathy, and partners may feel more bonded as a result of being seen for the truth of their experience.

Once the partner’s communication is improved, topics that were once troublesome or avoided may now be addressed in new ways. Whether the topic be intimacy, betrayal, or anything else, we facilitate enactments in which partners turn towards each other, speak from their primary emotions non-defensively or non-aggressively, and share what they most need from their partner, who can now hear them clearly.

We integrate strategies from the Gottman method to help you stay clear of behaviors that correlate with divorce. Where separation or divorce is decided, we use techniques from the Conscious Uncoupling approach to help you separate peacefully.

For premarital couples, we use Prepare and Enrich measures to identify relationship areas of strength and growth, initiate constructive dialogues, and work towards transparency around differences or incompatibilities.