Services
Every relationship arrives in its own shape. Below is how the work usually begins, but the first conversation is always about what you actually need, not about fitting you into a category.
You've had the same argument enough times that you both know your lines, or you've stopped arguing entirely, which is quieter and often worse. Maybe something happened and you're not sure whether you're rebuilding together or just being polite with each other.
Whatever brought you here, the pattern you're stuck in developed for a reason. You're both protecting something. That's not a character flaw in either of you. It's what people do when reaching for someone stops feeling safe.
Couples work here is grounded in attachment theory, drawing on Emotionally Focused Therapy and IFIO, the version of IFS built for couples. Rather than negotiating the surface conflict, we slow down enough to see the pattern you're both caught in, and what each of you is protecting underneath it.
What changes is not just how you fight. It's how you know each other.
Common reasons couples come in:
Nothing is inherently wrong with you.
You may be more anxious than you once were, experiencing lows that feel deeper or last longer, or noticing anger and frustration that don't seem to match the moment. For some people it's numbness where feeling used to be. There's good reason for all of it. It developed in response to something, and it made sense at the time. It still makes sense now.
You don't have to be in crisis to come to therapy. Often people come in because something they've carried quietly for years has finally gotten heavy enough to say out loud.
Individual work here uses Internal Family Systems, which understands you as a system of parts rather than one unified self who keeps failing to get it together. The anxious one, the one who achieves, the one who goes numb, each formed at some point for a good reason. None of them are the problem, and most people find it a real relief to stop treating them that way.
What people work on:
Not because something is wrong, but because the habits you build now are the ones you'll be living inside later.
Whether you're planning a wedding or a year or two into marriage, this work covers the things couples often assume they already agree on and don't: money, family expectations, what conflict is allowed to look like between you, sex, what each of you means by commitment, and how you'll handle it when your lives change shape.
The goal isn't to predict every problem. It's to build the muscle for handling the ones you can't predict.
Book a free consultationYour family runs on rules nobody ever wrote down: who's allowed to be upset, what gets talked about, and who absorbs everyone else's feelings so the room stays calm.
This work focuses on those patterns rather than on deciding who the problem is. Usually the person everyone's worried about is the one carrying something for the whole system.
Families often come in for:
Some things move better alongside other people who are in it too.
I'm trained in running groups, and it's some of the most rewarding work I do. Something happens in a good group that individual therapy can't quite replicate: the moment you realize you aren't the only one, and that the thing you assumed was your private failing is a shared experience.
Somewhere between the first pregnancy and the last child leaving, a lot of women lose track of who they were before they were needed constantly. Then midlife arrives with a question nobody prepared you for: now what, and who am I when I'm not the one holding everything together?
This isn't a complaint about motherhood, and it isn't something to fix. It's a real developmental moment, and it goes considerably better with other women in the room asking the same question.
Groups form periodically and space is limited. Get in touch to hear when the next one opens.
Ask about upcoming groupsThat's exactly what the free consultation is for. Tell me what's going on and I'll tell you honestly how I'd approach it, or who else might be a better fit.
Book a free consultation