Couples Therapy
Trauma-focused interventions for recurring conflict, betrayal, and attachment issues
you can’t remember the last time you felt truly secure, understood, and at peace in your relationship.
You never pictured your passionate, exciting, love-filled connection reaching this point. You tried your best to avoid the problems you could see coming and weather the ones that you couldn’t with the tools you had, but now you’re trapped by a vicious loop of resentment, suspicion, anxiety, and guilt.
You’re stuck in a pattern.
Every couple has one. When you choose one other, you each bring in your own histories that combine to form a template for how to relate. A dynamic develops around how conflict is handled, sex is experienced, and lifestyle goals are set.
This cycle can either be the best thing that happened to you or the worst nightmare of your life.
If you and your partner came from homes that didn’t feel safe, your survival strategies may have been what brought you together. They were probably just different enough from each other to be exciting but similar enough that they remind you of what is familiar - healthy or not. Intoxicating at first, these often opposing attachment styles quickly bring out the defenses in each of you, turning the relationship into a war zone. This is a common heartbreak for couples who recycle the trauma they know and end up wounding each other in the process.
Alternatively, you may have experienced a trauma together that disrupted everything you thought you knew. Sudden losses, fractures in important friendships, and career setbacks are just some that can overwhelm a couple’s ability to cope. Spousal betrayal, including infidelity, also creates a chasm that wounds the very core of the relationship by destroying trust.
When trauma dictates your relational pattern, it can feel Hopeless to keep trying. Worst of all, you struggle to understand how you both got to such a lonely, confusing place when you’re doing everything you know to fix it.
As a trauma-informed couples therapist, my passion is helping partners deconstruct the cycle that keeps them stuck and exploring strategies to rebuild a sense of empathic curiosity between them. My approach is direct, experiential, and collaborative and puts both parties in charge of the goals of the session. Rather than just regurgitating your latest argument or replaying the conversations you’re having at home with no resolution, you both get a chance to experience each other differently in session.
I help by teaching you to track your core relational cycle in real time and become aware of the feelings and sensations that are guiding your automatic responses. This enables you both to connect with the kind of vulnerability that increases emotional security (Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy). To guide this process, I learn your dynamic as it unfolds in front of me and directly address each person’s role in it. Inviting you to explore the pain underneath the pattern and where it comes from while your partner observes and supports in real time is a key to facilitating healing (Relational Life Therapy).
A Sex Therapy Informed Professional, I am also equipped to help you understand how your intimate life has been affected by trauma or betrayal. I take a non-pathological approach that encourages curiosity towards each part of a person that carries wounding, desire, shame, anxiety, or hope related to their sexuality (IFS Couples Therapy). This type of counseling allows you to better understand each other’s needs and desires, decode your fantasies, and practice skills that promote erotic fulfillment and recovery.
FAQs
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There is a broad spectrum of reasons for why couples choose counseling. Some are in a relatively healthy place and want to capitalize on not being in active crisis by learning skills for when the hard times do hit. For others, therapy is crucial in addressing a serious issue (such as betrayal or a shared traumatic experience) that feels too big to handle on their own. I have also worked with partners who wanted to treat counseling as a “wellness check” to measure the health of their relationship and gain practical tools for managing communication better. No matter where you fall on that spectrum, research suggests that all couples can benefit from an objective, mediated space to work on the patterns in their relationship. The more insight you have into your core dynamic, the more empowered you are to keep building healthy ways of relating.
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Because this process involves two people with their own unique needs, histories, and goals, couples therapy (including couples sex therapy) is typically a long-term process in which there are no quick fixes. Growth happens as you implement the tools, skills, and awareness that you learn in session in everyday life. The majority of my clients notice a significant shift in their dynamic within eight to ten sessions and it largely depends on how willing you are to engage in the process. My goal is to facilitate new, reparative experiences between you both and we do a lot of practicing together, but you are ultimately the one in charge of your progress.
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My job is to be a student of your relational dynamic in order to help you both deconstruct it and examine your options for change. I do not judge because we are not in a courtroom and litigation rarely leads to increased empathy. Both parties have their own equally valid reality of what it’s like to be in the relationship and my hope is to help you both increase your curiosity about each other’s experience, as well as take individual responsibility for what you are each in control of. I am very direct in calling out the patterns that I see and that process is not always perfectly “equal” between partners, but the responsibility never rests on one person alone and the blame is always on the pattern, not the person.
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Therapy is most effective when both parties want to be there and are motivated to do the work. That does not mean that someone who is ambivalent or skeptical towards therapy cannot benefit from it, but at some point they have to be willing. If your partner has expressed that they are open to trying counseling but that they have doubts, I am capable of meeting you both where you are at. If, however, your partner has made it clear through words and action that they are not ready to try at this time, I encourage you to focus on what is within your control. This might look like getting therapy for yourself and benefitting from a space that is dedicated to exploring options for your own wellbeing.