Services
Couples Therapy
You’ve Stopped Expecting It to Go Differently
Nobody has said the word divorce.
You still love each other.
That’s most of what makes this so maddening.
You keep landing in the same place.
You Both Know How This One Ends
One of you needs the other to sit in it for a minute.
The other has already moved to what to do about it, because fixing things is how they show love.
By the end, one of you feels criticized and the other feels unappreciated.
Then it goes quiet and the evening continues.
Your Calendar Runs the Relationship Now
Kids, careers, and the logistics of running a life together took the relationship over gradually enough that neither of you caught the handoff.
Intimacy comes around less and less.
The fun disappears.
You start feeling more like coworkers managing a household than two people who chose each other.
Neither of You Is Asking for Much
To get through a hard conversation without it ending where it always ends.
To feel understood again.
To reconnect emotionally and physically.
And to remember what being on the same team felt like.
We Slow the Conversation Down Until You Can See It
Our couples therapists take one interaction and run it at quarter speed.
At that speed you can see what each of you is protecting.
And what each of you needs and has never said out loud.
You can also see the moment the sequence starts, which is the moment it becomes possible to send it somewhere else.
You’ll Work on Both the Feeling and the Sequence
Emotionally Focused Therapy stays with the emotion running underneath the argument.
Gottman-informed strategies take the sequence itself: how you raise something hard, what tips it over, and what repairs it afterward.
Raise the Topics You’ve Been Working Around
You both know which subjects send an evening sideways: sex, intimacy, resentment, trust, parenting, loneliness, and where the two of you are headed.
Those conversations happen here, out loud, with someone in the room holding the temperature down.
Your therapist’s work is to make the pattern visible enough that something different becomes possible for you both.
Say the Thing Without Attacking or Disappearing
Over time, each of you gets better at naming what you actually feel and need.
You say it in a way your partner can take in.
You listen without your defenses arriving first and without reaching for a solution.
You Rebuild, or You Choose Clearly
For some couples, closeness and intimacy and the sense of being teammates come back.
For others, the work produces enough clarity to make a considered decision about the relationship.
Either way, the circling ends and something starts moving.
Come In Disagreeing About the Problem
The first step is telling us what keeps happening between the two of you.
You don’t need to agree on what the problem is before you get here.
Couples rarely do.
Sessions run in our Arlington office, or on video from wherever the two of you are in Massachusetts.
Tell Us Where You’d Like This to Move
You don’t need the whole thing figured out before you write to us.
Some people know exactly which kind of therapy they want. Others know only that something isn’t working anymore, and that’s enough to start with.
Tell us what’s been going on, what you’ve already tried, and what you’d like to feel different. We’ll think it through with you and point you toward the therapist and the approach that fit.
You’ve done plenty of understanding already, and now it’s worth finding out what gets it moving.