Comprehensive Care For Your Relationship

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I help couples turn arguments and disagreements into opportunities for intimate and collaborative conversations that strengthen relationships. Collaborative conversations are non-judging, non-blaming and confiding; the kind of conversations that trusted confidants have with one another. Through repeated experience, couples learn to have collaborative conversations on their own. You will learn how to talk with your partner about problems and difficulties in ways that increase intimacy and emotional connection.

Collaborative Couple Therapy (together with Gottman Institute research) is my primary orientation to couples work. John Gottman, arguably the foremost research psychologist for understanding good relationships, has written how Dan Wile, my mentor and the originator of Collaborative Couple Therapy, was “a genius and the greatest living marital therapist.” * In other words, Collaborative Couple Therapy exemplifies what Gottman’s research values in effective couple therapy. 

Dan Wile emphasized how all couples create, and must learn to negotiate, a unique set of problems specific to their relationship. John Gottman asserts that approximately two-thirds of all disagreements in good relationships go unresolved and repeat themselves for the length of the relationship. Together, Wile and Gottman illustrate how confident, loving, happy couples are able to acknowledge disagreements while maintaining emotional connection. Through Collaborative Couple Therapy couples learn to fold relationship problems into the relationship itself as something to relate with together, as collaborative confidants, rather than using problems against each other. Through sharing and receiving each other’s hearts in this way, our problems can become vehicles for deeper intimacy.

*From the acknowledgements in John Gottman’s book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, 1999.