Experiential individual, couples and group therapy toward inner freedom and fuller contact with your life
In-person in Atwater Village, Los Angeles
Closer, without losing yourselves
It might start with something small: a tone in a text, a phone picked up during dinner. Within minutes, you're somewhere you've both been a hundred times. One of you pushes to sort it out now. The other goes still, or leaves the room. Afterward you each replay it alone, more certain of what's wrong with the other.
Or nothing much happens at all. You're kind to each other, and you run a life together well. You can't remember the last time either of you said something that felt risky, or the last time you surprised each other.
The need underneath the argument
My couples work draws on Emotionally Focused Therapy, which grew partly from the same experiential roots as the rest of my work, and on attachment research. Both are held inside the same person-centered relationship I offer individuals.
We slow an exchange down while it's still recognizable to you both. What did you hear when your partner said that? What did you imagine it meant? When did you start to pull away? What did you need them to understand that you couldn't say? Sometimes I'll ask one of you to pause before answering and notice what's happening in you right then, before it turns into the familiar reply.
Usually it's something neither of you has quite found words for: to matter, to be chosen, to have some room of your own. One partner says, "You never want to be with me." The other hears an accusation and defends. Underneath the protest we may find, "I miss you, and I'm frightened I don't matter to you." The partner who withdraws may be living with a different fear: "Whatever I do is wrong, so I stop trying." When those can be said and heard, the next moment between you can go differently.
Anger can be the only shape a longing finds in the moment, and silence can be the only way left to say you've been hurt. None of this excuses cruelty. Each of you gets my full attention, and neither account becomes the final word. The pattern belongs to both of you. You make it together, often within seconds, and it can change the same way: in small steps, from both sides.
Sometimes one of you will go silent in here, and it will look like nothing is happening. Often that's when the most is happening, and I'll ask you both to let it run. The one waiting has a part too: noticing what comes up in you while your partner is silent.
Sometimes I'll stay with one of you for a while, and the other gets to overhear what it's like inside their partner, without having to answer it.
Intimacy asks you to become findable
That can mean letting your partner meet something you haven't already made easy to receive: that you're frightened of how much you want them, that something hurt, or that you have a desire they may not share. They get to have their own response.
Life may have changed around you, with a baby, a move or an illness, and you've lost each other inside the logistics. Sex may have become rare or tense, one more place you miss each other. Resentment can build over years of small things nobody said, until you're each reading the other's mind and getting it wrong. Some couples come after a betrayal, to find out whether trust can be rebuilt, and some come to decide whether to stay together at all. I won't push you toward any answer.
You don't need a crisis to come. Some couples come with nothing obviously wrong, wanting to be more known by each other, more available and more intimate. Queer and straight couples, interracial and intercultural couples, monogamous and open relationships are all welcome here. Whatever the shape of yours, I'm interested in partners becoming more fully themselves and more reachable to each other.