I help couples to articulate unmet needs, working to establish compassion and understanding for the loneliness and suffering that can arise in relationships. This typically softens hardened attitudes and creates a safe ground for interest in and inquiry about destructive relational patterns.

Couples counseling slows down communication and provides time to think and reflect. Couples sometimes tell me that just the presence of a witness (the therapist) to their relational dynamics, creates a difference that enables them to hear each other differently.

As a couples counselor, I’m more active than I am with individuals. Couples often say they experience me as an “interpreter”, helping them to better hear and understand each others words, feelings, and perspectives.

Couples typically use counseling differently than individuals. Sometimes couples appreciate and need the support of weekly appointments. The regularity and stability of a place to go to sort out misunderstandings, hurts, and grievances is necessary and helpful.

But just as often, after 4-6 weekly appointments, partners find they are getting along better, feeling more understood and appreciated by one another, and able to put into practice their new experiences of one another, gained in the therapeutic process. At this point, many couples opt to have appointments every other week, or every three weeks, with the appointments serving as boosters, or reminders, of a more caring, life-affirming way of being with one another.