Couples Therapy
Relational Psychodynamic Therapy for Couples in Asheville, NC, and online.
For couples seeking to understand and transform the emotional and relational patterns underlying conflict, distance, protection, attachment, and repair.
Working Together
Couples therapy is an active and emotionally alive process. I work with the relationship as a whole while attending carefully to each partner’s experience.
Each person brings an attachment history, family system, inner relational world, and learned ways of managing closeness, conflict, dependence, anger, and vulnerability. Under stress, these patterns can become locked together, creating cycles that neither partner consciously chose but both may feel caught inside.
My role is not to decide who is right, referee disagreements, or teach communication skills in isolation. Together, we slow the pattern down and become curious about what each person is protecting, longing for, expecting, and reacting to. I may interrupt a destructive cycle, help translate a protective reaction into the more vulnerable experience beneath it, or speak honestly about what I notice happening between you.
I also pay attention to what the relationship evokes in me. Couples may unknowingly draw a therapist toward familiar roles, such as taking sides, rescuing one partner, blaming the other, or becoming emotionally distant. I hold these responses carefully as possible sources of clinical information while working to remain connected to both partners and centered on the relationship.
This work tends to be a good fit when both partners are willing to examine not only what the other person is doing, but their own feelings, protections, and participation in the relationship. This does not mean assuming equal blame. It means developing a fuller understanding of the pattern between you, including differences in power, responsibility, and impact, so that something more honest and workable can become possible.
Areas of Focus
I have particular experience working with couples at important thresholds, transitions, and impasses in the life of a relationship.
Common areas of focus include:
Preparing for marriage, living together, or parenthood
Raising children and navigating changing family responsibilities
Caring for aging parents and moving through midlife
Recurring conflict, resentment, or emotional distance
Patterns of pursuit and withdrawal, criticism and defensiveness, or control and resistance
Changes in intimacy, sexuality, friendship, or emotional connection
Attachment injuries, secrecy, infidelity, or breaches of trust
Unequal responsibilities and conflict around parenting, work, money, or extended family
Family-of-origin patterns that continue to shape the relationship
Questions about commitment, separation, divorce, or coparenting
Some couples come to therapy at a crossroads and need help deciding whether to remain together or end the relationship. My role is not to push toward staying or leaving, but to slow the process down enough for greater honesty, emotional clarity, responsibility, and thoughtful choice.
When children are involved, I also hold their experience and the larger family system in mind. If separation or divorce is underway, our work may focus on reducing destructive conflict, grieving the relationship, and developing a more stable and cooperative coparenting relationship.
An Affirming and Open Practice
I welcome couples across a wide range of identities, cultural and ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities, relationship and family structures, spiritual or religious traditions, political perspectives, and ways of living.
I approach each relationship with curiosity, respect, and a commitment to understanding the particular context, values, and agreements of the people within it.
Session Length and Frequency
Couples generally begin with weekly sessions to create enough continuity and momentum for the work.
Standard sessions are 55 minutes. Extended 85-minute sessions are also available when more time is useful for deeper exploration, difficult conversations, or work involving rupture and repair.
As the relationship becomes more stable and the work develops, we may decide together that less frequent meetings are appropriate.
Beginning Couples Therapy
We begin by meeting together to understand what brings you to therapy, the history of the relationship, and the patterns creating difficulty between you.
I then meet individually with each partner as part of the initial assessment. These meetings help me understand each person’s experience while keeping the relationship as the central focus of treatment.
Together, we clarify the direction and goals of the work.
When Couple Therapy May Not Be Appropriate
Couples therapy requires enough safety for both partners to speak honestly and participate freely. It may not be appropriate when there is ongoing violence, coercive control, intimidation, or fear of retaliation.
I may also recommend individual treatment, specialized support, or a higher level of care when active substance dependence, severe psychiatric instability, or another concern makes conjoint therapy unsafe or ineffective.
Fees
55-minute session: $190
85-minute session: $260
I am an out-of-network provider and can provide a monthly superbill for possible reimbursement through out-of-network insurance benefits.