COUPLES AND RELATIONSHIPS

Relationship therapy is one of the more beneficial things two or more people can do together. Not because it fixes things quickly, but because it creates a space where the friction is present in the room, opening the door for change.

I work with gay couples, queer couples, triads, people in open relationships, and people navigating polyamory, kink dynamics, and power-exchange structures. If your relationship doesn’t fit a conventional template, that’s not a problem to work around, it’s our starting point.

What the work involves

Some couples come in with a specific presenting issue: a recurring conflict, a rupture, a transition they’re trying to navigate. Others come in because something feels stuck and they can’t quite name it. We’ll work with whatever you bring and probably uncover more as we go.

A significant part of what I offer is structured skills-building: approaching communication, conflict, vulnerability, and intimacy as concrete practices: how to say a hard thing, how to hear one, how to stay in contact when a conversation gets uncomfortable instead of shutting down or escalating. These skills are learnable, they take practice, and most of the practice happens between sessions in your life together outside the therapy room.

I subscribe to a developmental approach to couples work, which means I pay attention to how relationships move through identifiable stages over time. A lot of relationship distress lives at a particular transition: the shift from early closeness and alignment into the harder work of two people becoming more fully themselves while staying connected. When differences surface it’s common to struggle to hold the new reality without feeling like something is breaking. Things aren’t necessarily breaking, but they can benefit from some attention.

Some of the work is structured and skills-focused. Some is slower and deliberate, like tracing where each person’s patterns come from and how those patterns come up against each other. Usually it’s both.

Relationship transitions

I also work with people navigating significant changes to the structure of a relationship: opening a previously monogamous relationship, restructuring an existing open one, adding a partner, or ending a relationship with as much honesty and care as the situation allows. These are distinct situations that tend to get handled without much support. Each one benefits from having a space to work through deliberately and I don’t come in with a preferred outcome.

Substances and relationships

Substance use affects relationships in specific ways. Honesty, trust, and intimacy can be impacted. And the dynamics that develop when one partner’s relationship with substances becomes a source of tension or concern are often distressing. I’m happy to work with couples where this is part of the picture. I take a harm reduction approach and don’t assume abstinence is the goal for everyone.

What to expect

Relationship therapy is work. There are definite time, money, energy, and comfort tradeoffs. You’ll be expected to show up each week with things to talk about, to sit in discomfort and non-closure, and to take what we work on in session into your life between appointments. That’s where the change happens. A free consultation is a low-risk way to find out if we might be a good fit.

Find out what working together is like.