Couples Therapy
- Home
- Couples Therapy
Looking to Improve Your Relationships?
Navigating the Challenges of Love & Partnership
Whether you’re newly dating or have been married for decades, every relationship encounters challenges. Couples therapy provides a safe and supportive space to navigate these transitions and reconnect with your partner.
Common reasons couples seek therapy include:
Navigating different relationship stages: dating, premarital, married, parenting, empty-nesting, separation, coparenting, or divorce
Relationship crisis and emotional disconnection
Infidelity and rebuilding trust
Neurodivergent couples learning to bridge communication gaps
Communication issues and recurring conflict
Blended family and in-law boundary challenges
Fertility and family planning stress
Struggles with intimacy, both emotional and physical
A sense of stagnation or growing apart
Our work together focuses on helping you:
✅ Resolve conflict effectively
✅ Deepen respect, admiration, and connection
✅ Increase emotional and physical intimacy
✅ Reignite romance and partnership
✅ Build empathy, trust, and shared meaning
Therapeutic Framework
Couples meet with a therapist once a week to:
Show commitment to the healing process
Build trust and therapeutic rapport
Create a structured environment for growth and reconnection
This consistent rhythm helps couples make real, lasting change.
Therapeutic Interventions
Our evidence-based interventions strengthen three key areas of every relationship:
Friendship & Emotional Intimacy
Deepen emotional connection
Rebuild trust and admiration
Create a shared sense of partnership
Conflict Management
Replace negative communication patterns with positive interactions
Resolve disagreements constructively
Heal from past hurts
Shared Meaning & Long-Term Growth
Strengthen mutual goals and vision
Build rituals of connection
Prevent future relapse of negative cycles
These interventions are designed to help couples not only repair but thrive in their relationships.
Begin Your Journey Together
Couples therapy is an investment in your relationship, growth, and emotional connection. Whether you’re facing crisis or simply seeking deeper intimacy, support is here.
📅 Schedule a session today and take the first step toward rediscovering your partnership.
Types of Therapeutic Modalities We use In Sessions
The Gottman Method
Developed by: Drs. John and Julie Gottman
Focus: Strengthening friendship, managing conflict, and creating shared meaning.
Goal: Increase positive interactions and reduce the “Four Horsemen” (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling).
Techniques: Love Maps, Softened Startups, Conflict Regulation, and the Sound Relationship House model.
Highly structured and often includes questionnaires and measurable interventions.
Build Love Maps
How well do you know your partner’s inner psychological world, his or her history, worries, stresses, joys, and hopes?
Share Fondness and Admiration
The antidote for contempt, this level focuses on the amount of affection and respect within a relationship. (To strengthen fondness and admiration, express appreciation and respect.)
Turn Towards Instead of Away
State your needs, be aware of bids for connection and respond to (turn towards) them. The small moments of everyday life are actually the building blocks of relationship.
The Positive Perspective
The presence of a positive approach to problem-solving and the success of repair attempts.
Manage Conflict
We say “manage” conflict rather than “resolve” conflict, because relationship conflict is natural and has functional, positive aspects. Understand that there is a critical difference in handling perpetual problems and solvable problems.
Make Life Dreams Come True
Create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk honestly about his or her hopes, values, convictions and aspirations.
Create Shared Meaning
Understand important visions, narratives, myths, and metaphors about your relationship.
Trust
This is the state that occurs when a person knows that his or her partner acts and thinks to maximize that person’s best interests and benefits, not just the partner’s own interests and benefits. In other words, this means, “my partner has my back and is there for me.”
Commitment
This means believing (and acting on the belief) that your relationship with this person is completely your lifelong journey, for better or for worse (meaning that if it gets worse you will both work to improve it). It implies cherishing your partner’s positive qualities and nurturing gratitude by comparing the partner favorably with real or imagined others, rather than trashing the partner by magnifying negative qualities, and nurturing resentment by comparing unfavorably with real or imagined others.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
Developed by: Dr. Sue Johnson and Dr. Les Greenberg
Focus: Attachment and bonding between partners.
Goal: Help couples identify and express underlying emotional needs and fears (often related to attachment injuries), and build secure emotional bonds.
Effective for: High-conflict couples, trauma recovery, and attachment insecurities.
Core stages:
De-escalate negative interaction cycles
Restructure emotional responses
Consolidate new emotional patterns and connection
Imago Relationship Therapy
Developed by: Drs. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt
Focus: Unconscious patterns from childhood that shape adult romantic relationships.
Goal: Help partners understand and heal old wounds through conscious communication.
Technique: The Imago Dialogue, where one partner speaks while the other mirrors, validates, and empathizes — fostering safety and understanding.
Cognitive-Behavioral Couples Therapy (CBCT)
Focus: Identifying and modifying unhelpful thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that harm the relationship.
Goal: Replace negative interaction patterns with positive communication and problem-solving.
Effective for: Couples struggling with distorted thinking, conflict cycles, or poor communication.
Often includes: Homework, skills practice, and behavioral change assignments.
Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy (IBCT)
Developed by: Drs. Andrew Christensen and Neil Jacobson
Focus: Acceptance and behavior change.
Goal: Combine traditional behavioral interventions (communication skills, problem-solving) with acceptance-based strategies to help partners tolerate differences.
Emphasizes: Emotional acceptance and compassion over trying to “fix” each other.
Narrative Therapy for Couples
Focus: Externalizing problems (“the problem is the problem, not the person”).
Goal: Help couples rewrite their shared story and separate their relationship from destructive narratives.
Technique: Re-authoring conversations that allow partners to see their relationship in a new, more empowering way.
Solution-Focused Couples Therapy
Focus: Building solutions rather than analyzing problems.
Goal: Identify and amplify what’s already working.
Techniques: The Miracle Question, scaling questions, and goal setting.
Useful for: Couples seeking short-term, goal-oriented work.
Psychodynamic or Object Relations Couples Therapy
Focus: Unconscious processes, transference, and early relational templates.
Goal: Increase awareness of how childhood experiences influence current relationship dynamics.
Used for: Deep-seated emotional conflicts and repetitive patterns of relating.
Integrative and Eclectic Approaches
Many clinicians combine multiple models (e.g., Gottman + EFT + CBT) based on couple dynamics, clinical goals, and cultural context. Integrative approaches are especially effective for complex or comorbid presentations (e.g., trauma, infidelity, anxiety, or depression within the relationship).
Improve your coping and communications skills
Learn conflict resolution skills
Bolster your interpersonal relationships
From newly married couples to empty nesters, each stage of life brings its own set of challenges and conflicts. I’ll collaborate with you during relationship therapy to help you and your family navigate your way through today’s challenges.