Couples Therapy

Understanding the deeper stories your relationship tells. Building connection beyond conflict.

Couples often come to therapy feeling stuck, caught in painful cycles of conflict, distance, or emotional disconnection. You may find yourselves repeating the same arguments, struggling to communicate, or unsure how to feel close again. If you're wondering why this keeps happening, or if there's something deeper beneath the surface, couples therapy can offer a space to explore, understand, and change those patterns of relating to help you feel good about your relationship again.

 
Couples Therapy Philadelphia
 

Who Couples Therapy Is For

This work is helpful for couples who are seeking more than symptom relief, and who are curious about what their relationship patterns reveal about themselves and each other. It’s for partners who are open to exploring how past experiences show up in the present, and who want to move toward deeper, more authentic connection.

Whether you're feeling emotionally distant, locked in conflict, or trying to rebuild trust, couples therapy can help you slow down, find steadier ground in emotionally charged moments, understand what’s happening beneath the surface, and begin relating in new ways.


My Approach to Couples Therapy

My approach integrates systems thinking with psychoanalytic traditions, which focus on the unconscious aspects of emotional and relational life. We all have thoughts and feelings we’re aware of, but we also carry experiences, expectations, and emotional reactions that operate outside of awareness. These unconscious patterns, shaped by earlier relationships and experiences, often play out in couples in ways that are painful, confusing, or hard to make sense of.

Couples Therapy Philadelphia

At the same time, I view your relationship as a system, one in which each of you takes up particular roles, and in which dynamics are co-created and reinforced over time. These roles and dynamics don’t emerge in a vacuum; they reflect each partner’s emotional history, as well as the unique system the two of you have formed together. By paying attention to how you function both as individuals and as a unit, we can better understand how you impact one another, and what keeps certain cycles recurring.

We’ll explore what’s happening now and your histories that shaped it. While my approach is responsive to your present concerns, early relationships leave an imprint that informs how you experience closeness, conflict, vulnerability, and trust. By understanding how each of you brings your own history into your relationship, and how you replay familiar dynamics with one another, we can begin to create space for something new and different.

This work can help each of you begin to see the other more clearly, not through the lens of old wounds or assumptions, but for who you really are, and who you’re becoming together.


What We Explore in Therapy

  • The unconscious roles and emotional positions you are pulled to take up in the relationship

  • Cycles of conflict, distance, or disconnection, and the deeper meaning behind them

  • How your family histories and early attachments shape current dynamics

  • Difficulties with trust, emotional expression, or vulnerability

  • How each partner’s inner world impacts the shared relationship

 
Couples Counseling Philadelphia
 

AREAS of Focus

I can help you and your partner address a range of challenges, including:

  • Life transitions and changing roles

  • Affairs and infidelity, and rebuilding trust and repair after betrayal

  • Poor communication, frequent misunderstandings, or emotional shutdowns

  • Frequent or intense arguments that feel circular or unresolved

  • Unmet emotional needs or a sense of growing apart

  • Difficulty committing or ambivalence about the relationship

  • Sexual or intimacy concerns

  • Parenting stress, family strain, or conflict around caregiving roles

  • Financial stressors and their emotional impact

  • Feeling stuck in roles or patterns that no longer serve the relationship


Couples Counseling Philadelphia

Getting Started

If you and your partner are feeling stuck, disconnected, or caught in repeating dynamics, couples therapy can help you begin to understand what’s beneath the surface and work toward a more honest, connected, and meaningful relationship.

Reach out for a consultation to see whether this approach feels like the right fit for you both.