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When you want to find your way back to each other.
You may still love each other very much, and that may be part of what makes this so painful.
You might keep having versions of the same argument, even when you promise yourselves it will be different next time. One of you may want to talk when the other shuts down. One might push harder because nothing seems to change, while the other begins to feel criticized before the conversation has really started.
Or perhaps there is less fighting than there used to be, but also less of everything else. You coordinate the kids, the calendar, the house, the work. You function well as a team and have slowly stopped feeling much like a couple, both inside and outside the bedroom.
Something may also have happened that changed the relationship more suddenly: an affair, a betrayal, a disclosure, a loss, a major transition, or a conflict that went somewhere neither of you thought it would.
However you arrived here, you may be wondering some version of the same thing:
How did we get here, and can we find our way out of it?
You may recognize yourselves here
It's possible that some of these thoughts have started to feel familiar:
· If I stop bringing it up, I'm afraid nothing will ever change. But every time I bring it up, things seem to get worse.
· I feel like I can't do anything right in this relationship.
· I know I screwed up, and I don't know if I'll ever be able to get things back to the way they were.
· I don't feel like I can live without you, but I can't go on in this relationship the way it is.
· I feel like no matter what we do, we keep having the same fight.
· I don't want to have to ask for everything. I want you to notice some of it without me having to manage that too.
· Sometimes it feels like you've already decided what I meant before I've had a chance to explain myself.
· Sometimes I can't tell whether we have a problem we can work through or whether this is simply who we have become.
Couples often arrive with different explanations for what has gone wrong.
You may even disagree about whether there is a problem, how serious it is, or whose behavior started it.
You do not need to agree on the story before you come in.
We can start by understanding what keeps happening between you.
The pattern matters more than the argument
Couples are often surprised by how many different arguments can lead them to exactly the same place. It might start with money, parenting, sex, the in-laws, chores, work, or something as small as the way one person said something. Before long, though, the original subject has almost disappeared and both of you are back in a familiar fight.
Maybe one of you keeps trying to get a response because being left alone with the problem feels unbearable. The more you pursue the conversation, the more criticized or overwhelmed your partner feels, and the more they pull away. Or perhaps you are the one who goes quiet because every attempt to explain yourself seems to make things worse. Your silence then feels like indifference to your partner, which makes them try even harder to reach you.
After this has happened enough times, you begin reacting to what you expect from each other before you have had much chance to hear what is actually being said. A question sounds like criticism. A pause feels like rejection. An attempt to solve the problem feels dismissive. Both of you may be trying to protect the relationship in ways that accidentally make the other person feel less safe in it.
In couples therapy, we slow those moments down and make sense of what is happening for each of you. Once the pattern becomes something you can recognize together, rather than something you keep blaming each other for, there is much more room to respond differently.
What is underneath the conflict?
What looks like anger, criticism, defensiveness, or withdrawal on the surface often makes much more sense when we understand what is happening underneath it.
Maybe you keep pressing the issue because your partner's distance feels like confirmation that you are alone in something that matters deeply to you. You ask again, explain more forcefully, or become angry because some part of you is trying to get through: Do you understand how much this matters to me? Do I matter enough for you to stay here with me?
Your partner may experience that same intensity very differently. What feels to you like an attempt to reach them may land as criticism, disappointment, or evidence that they have failed you again. They become defensive, go quiet, try to end the conversation, or retreat because they no longer know how to participate without making things worse.
Then the distance you were already afraid of gets bigger.
And from the other side, the more your partner feels pursued, criticized, or impossible to satisfy, the more they may protect themselves by pulling away. The more they pull away, the more alone and urgent you feel. Before long, both of you are doing the very thing that makes sense from inside your own experience and, without meaning to, confirming the other's deepest fear.
For another couple, the pattern may look different, but the emotional logic is often similar. Anger can carry fear, hurt, or longing. Silence can contain overwhelm, shame, or the belief that there is no safe way to respond. Criticism may be an attempt to say I need you, while defensiveness may be trying to say Please don't see me as a disappointment.
The histories each of you bring into the relationship matter here. Family relationships, previous partners, culture, trauma, and earlier experiences of closeness or conflict can all shape what you notice, what feels threatening, and how you instinctively protect yourself when the relationship feels uncertain.
Understanding that does not erase responsibility for the ways you hurt each other. It helps us see more clearly what keeps pulling you back into the same place, so the two of you can begin responding to what is actually happening underneath it.
How I work with couples
Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT, is the primary framework I use in couples work.
EFT helps us move beneath the content of an argument to understand the emotional and attachment needs shaping the cycle between you. Instead of becoming better at winning or avoiding the same fight, the work focuses on changing what happens between you when something important feels threatened.
I also draw from the Gottman Method, particularly when concrete communication tools, conflict-management strategies, friendship, repair, or shared meaning would be useful.
These approaches work well together. EFT helps us understand and change the emotional pattern. Gottman offers practical ways to support the relationship you are building around that change.
My work is also trauma-informed and attentive to the nervous system. If one partner becomes flooded, freezes, dissociates, or reacts intensely under stress, simply asking that person to “communicate better” may miss what is actually happening. We pay attention to what each person's system is doing and create enough safety for a different response to become possible.
I am less interested in deciding who is right than in helping both of you see the relationship clearly enough to understand what each person needs to do differently for the pattern to change.
When ADHD is part of the relationship
ADHD can create its own set of misunderstandings between partners.
A forgotten task may feel like a lack of care to one person and like an honest executive-functioning miss to the other.
One partner may carry more of the planning and mental load and become increasingly resentful. The other may feel monitored, corrected, or as though they are perpetually disappointing the person they love.
Over time, the practical problem and the emotional meaning attached to it can become difficult to separate.
When ADHD is part of your relationship, we can look at both.
That may mean developing more workable ways of dividing responsibility, communicating expectations, remembering what matters, and repairing things when something falls through. It also means understanding the emotional cycle that has grown around those difficulties, so ADHD does not become shorthand for one person being the problem.
Relationships do not exist outside culture
Couples bring more than two personalities into the room.
You also bring families, histories, identities, languages, cultures, expectations about gender and partnership, ideas about money and parenting, and beliefs about what people owe one another.
Sometimes those differences are obvious from the beginning. Sometimes they become much more visible after marriage, children, caregiving, financial change, or increased involvement with extended family.
You may each be doing something that makes complete sense within the world you came from and experience the other person's response as inexplicable.
We make room for that complexity here.
We look at what each of you brings into the partnership and make more conscious decisions about the relationship you want to create together, without treating either family or culture as the default.
LGBTQ+ couples
Your relationship should not have to be translated into a heterosexual framework in order to receive thoughtful couples therapy.
My training includes LGBTQ-centered Emotionally Focused Therapy Core Skills and advanced EFT work focused on intimacy.
That means we can attend directly to the relationship in front of us, including the impact of identity, family acceptance or rejection, minority stress, gender, sexuality, community, and the particular history the two of you bring to intimacy and attachment.
You do not need to spend your sessions teaching me why those things matter before we can begin the work.
When trust has been hurt
Some couples come because something has happened that has changed the meaning of the relationship.
An affair. A secret. A boundary that was crossed. A disclosure that arrived much later than it should have. A period in which one partner was not emotionally or physically available when the other needed them.
The person who was hurt may feel pulled between wanting answers and being exhausted by needing them.
The other partner may feel remorse, shame, defensiveness, frustration, or uncertainty about how many times the same questions can be answered.
Repair requires room for both people to understand what happened without rushing past the injury or remaining permanently organized around it.
Couples therapy can provide structure for that process and help you determine what rebuilding trust would actually require.
It can also help you get clearer when the question is not yet How do we repair this? but Do we want to?
What can change
A healthy relationship still includes conflict, disappointment, and misunderstanding. What can change is what happens around those moments.
You may notice the familiar fight beginning and recognize it before you are completely inside it.
A conversation that once ended in hours of silence may end in repair.
You may be able to say what is underneath your anger rather than relying on your partner to infer it.
You may hear criticism and stay present long enough to understand the hurt underneath it.
The two of you may become better at asking directly for reassurance, space, help, affection, clarity, or attention.
You may start believing each other's intentions again.
And there may simply be more room for the parts of the relationship that brought you together in the first place: affection, play, sex, friendship, curiosity, tenderness, and the sense that this is someone you want beside you when life gets difficult.
A note about safety
Couples therapy depends on both partners being able to participate with enough safety and freedom to speak honestly.
When there is ongoing violence, coercive control, intimidation, or fear of retaliation for what is said in therapy, joint sessions may not be appropriate or safe. In those circumstances, the first priority is assessing what kind of support makes sense and connecting each person with the right resources.
A consultation can help determine whether couples therapy is an appropriate fit.
You do not need to know whether the relationship can be fixed
You do not have to arrive certain that you want to stay together forever.
You also do not need a perfectly articulated relationship goal.
You may simply know that you cannot keep having the same fight, living at the same distance, or wondering what would happen if the two of you could finally talk about what is actually going on.
That is enough to begin.
We can start by understanding the pattern.