Couples Therapy
The Ever-Moving Dance Toward and Away From Each Other
Relationships often begin with possibility, connection, and vitality. Over time, even loving couples can become caught in patterns neither partner fully understands yet both participate in. Conversations repeat, misunderstandings deepen, and each may experience the other as the problem.
Couples may seek therapy during transitions, after breaches of trust, when emotional or sexual connection has diminished, or while deciding whether and how the relationship can continue.
Understanding the Pattern Between You
Couples therapy creates an opportunity to slow down and examine what lies beneath recurring conflict. Patterns often developed for understandable reasons and may once have helped the relationship function; over time, they can leave both partners feeling unseen or alone.
Individual histories, attachment experiences, family relationships, and unspoken expectations shape intimate partnerships. We can become curious about what the relationship may be expressing, protecting, or struggling to contain.
Long-term relationships can also bring us into contact with parts of ourselves that are hard to acknowledge. We may search outside the relationship for vitality, freedom, or fulfillment, or locate the source of our unhappiness entirely in a partner. Therapy helps distinguish what belongs to the relationship, what belongs to each person, and how the two interact.
Intimacy and Separateness
Couples therapy is about more than communication skills, although communication often improves. It supports emotional honesty, responsibility, mutual recognition, and the capacity to see one's partner as a separate person with an inner world of their own.
As early idealization and infatuation fade, a more mature love can emerge, rooted in curiosity, acceptance, creativity, vitality, and genuine intimacy.
My Approach to Couples Therapy
My approach integrates psychoanalytic couples therapy, attachment and developmental perspectives, emotionally focused therapy (EFT), family-systems thinking, and selected insights from the Gottman Method. I attend to each partner's experience and to the relationship as a whole—its patterns, vulnerabilities, strengths, and ways of adapting. I welcome couples of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and relationship configurations.
Common Reasons Couples Seek Therapy
- Recurring conflict and emotional disconnection
- Intimacy, sexuality, and desire differences
- Infidelity and breaches of trust
- Parenting stress and major life transitions
- Commitment, separation, or divorce decisions
- Cultural, religious, and family differences
- Trauma, attachment challenges, and nontraditional relationship structures
Frequently Asked Questions
What is psychoanalytic couples therapy?
Psychoanalytic couples therapy looks not only at each partner individually, but at the relationship they create together. I am interested in the patterns, expectations, longings, and protections that develop between partners, often outside of awareness.
My work is also informed by EFT, the developmental model, and Esther Perel’s thinking about intimacy, desire, and long-term relationships.
Can couples therapy help after an affair or other breach of trust?
Yes. An affair or other breach of trust can profoundly destabilize a relationship. Therapy can make room for the hurt, anger, and uncertainty while also exploring what made the relationship vulnerable to what happened—not to assign blame, but to understand it more fully.
Sometimes a crisis can become an opportunity to build a relationship that is more honest, alive, and intentional than the one that existed before.
How can couples therapy help with conflicts that never seem to get resolved?
Recurring conflicts are often about more than the issue being argued about. Couples can become caught in patterns in which each person’s attempt to be heard, protected, or understood evokes a response from the other that keeps the conflict going.
Therapy can help us slow this process down, understand what is happening underneath it, and find different ways of meeting one another.
Can couples therapy help if we have become emotionally or sexually distant?
Emotional and sexual intimacy often change over the course of a long-term relationship. A secure connection can create the safety needed for closeness and desire, while intimacy also depends on preserving enough separateness, curiosity, and space to experience one another as distinct.
Therapy can help us understand what has happened between you and explore how connection, desire, and vitality might become possible again.
What if one of us is unsure about staying in the relationship?
Couples do not need to enter therapy equally certain about staying together. Sometimes the work is about understanding the ambivalence and whether something in the relationship can be repaired or experienced differently.
At other times, therapy may become a process of uncoupling—helping partners move toward separation with greater clarity, care, and understanding.