The work underneath the fight.
Some couples arrive fighting — the same argument returning in a slightly different form each time. Others arrive polite. Functional. Quietly going through the motions, sharing a calendar and a life but not, anymore, much of each other.
The forms look opposite. Underneath, they're often the same thing: a reaching that has stopped landing.
You probably understand a fair amount about why. You may have read the books, had the hard conversations, even done therapy before. And still it happens again — which is its own particular kind of discouragement, because it suggests the problem isn't that you don't know enough.
It isn't.
You're not broken, and the relationship isn't failing. You're caught in a cycle — a pattern of disconnection that forms when attachment needs go unmet. One partner moves toward; the other moves away. Or both withdraw. Sometimes the cycle is loud: criticism, defense, the fight you could script in advance. Sometimes it's silent: distance, avoidance, the slow settling of two people into separate rooms of the same house.
These moves aren't personality flaws or failures of effort. They're protective strategies — learned early, when connection felt unsafe or uncertain, and carried forward into a relationship where they no longer fit. They made sense once. That's exactly why they're so hard to think your way out of now.
The fights about money, sex, parenting, the dishes — those aren't the real subject. Underneath, both of you are asking the same few questions, in different registers:
Can I count on you?
Do I matter to you?
Are you with me, or am I in this alone?
Am I too much for you?
Do you still like me?
Am I too much, or not enough?
Will I ever get this right?
Am I failing you?
Is this my fault?
When those questions go unanswered, the nervous system takes over — fight, flight, or freeze, faster than thought. It's automatic, and over time it wears the connection down. The work is not to argue better about the surface. It's to let those questions finally get answered, in the only place they can be: between you, in the body, in the moment of reaching.
When this work takes hold, couples stop the painful spirals before they gather speed. They repair in hours instead of days. They ask for what they need instead of attacking, withdrawing, or going quiet. They feel close again — not merely civil. And the change tends to hold, because it isn't a set of techniques layered on top of the old pattern; it's the pattern itself, reorganized.
This isn't a hopeful claim. Emotionally Focused Therapy is the most rigorously researched approach in the field: roughly seven in ten distressed couples move from distress to recovery, and the large majority show meaningful improvement that lasts. The work is demanding — you'll say vulnerable things you've protected for years, and hear hard truths about how your own protection has cost your partner — but what it's in service of is durable.
This is not communication training. It isn't about fighting fair, compromising better, or learning a set of scripts. Those have their place, and none of them is what changes a relationship at depth.
My work integrates three traditions: Emotionally Focused Therapy, Gestalt therapy, and the contemporary neuroscience of how emotion is constructed in the body. EFT gives us the map of the attachment bond. Gestalt gives us the present-moment, experiential depth — working with what is alive in the room rather than talking about it. The emotional-neuroscience lens explains why the past keeps running the present, and what has to happen for that to change. In the room, none of this arrives as theory. It arrives as a particular quality of slowed-down, embodied attention.
I'm a Certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist and a Certified Gestalt Therapist, dual-licensed in Washington as an LMHC and LMFT. I trained in couples crisis intervention directly with Sue Johnson, the founder of EFT, and I'm also Gottman-trained (Levels 1 and 2, and in Affairs and Trauma). I've spent more than twenty years in this work, and I teach it to other clinicians at the postgraduate level.
I work with couples across many situations. You may be:
I work with straight and LGBTQ+ partnerships, monogamous and consensually non-monogamous relationships, married and unmarried couples, new relationships and decades-long ones. What matters is not the shape of the relationship but whether both people are willing to show up and do the work.
The clearest way to know whether this is right is to talk. I offer a free 15-minute discovery call — a chance to tell me briefly what's bringing you in, and to ask me anything before you decide.
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