Couples therapy can be a wonderful, meaningful experience for couples whose relationships are already strong. You may not even have a clear target for what you want to work on or improve—but just the desire to deepen your connection, find ways of feeling more in tune with each other more of the time, more in touch, to experience your love and your life together in new, deeper, satisfying ways.

Sometimes the pain comes over you keenly, leaving you sobbing. Other times you may feel numb. And still other times, you may feel neither of these two, but rather you may feel listless and have difficulty concentrating. This can be a natural part of grief.

No matter how much love is there between you and your partner, in the course of life, partners can lose touch with the deeper parts of each other. Couples therapy is a wonderful support in helping you find each other again.

We often avoid feeling sadness. But allowing yourself to feel healthy sadness can bring with it deep relief. It takes a lot of emotional energy to push sadness away. Allowing yourself to feel your sadness is allowing those muscles to relax. This can be part of moving through your sadness into the more emotionally expansive life that will exist for you beyond.

Anxiety can leave you feeling emotionally depleted. Rather than experiencing the full expanse of emotion, you may feel constricted. Perhaps you feel numb; or that the emotion you feel moves in the realm of overwhelm, frustration, anger, and annoyance. It may seem that given your anxiety, the demands of your life are always too much.

In addition to feeling your sadness, you may feel out of whack, off kilter, off balance, and lost. The relationships with people we love are interwoven through our life experience in ways broad and deep. Not having this person with you physically any longer may leave you feeling shaken even in parts of your life that you never anticipated.

After you experience a loss, it can be difficult to feel your grief. Working together in a safe and caring environment, we can move into your grief and whatever emotions are there for you. Not abruptly or all at once, but at a pace that feels right to you, and in ways that you can handle.

Working together in a safe and caring space, we can explore your experience of anger—the anger itself, what happens between you and others when you feel it, and the feelings that lie underneath your anger that are difficult for you to feel and to express. This process that can be profound and freeing. None of us want to be trapped in anger or in the distance that it can cause in our close relationships.

It’s easy to point to people who are more depressed than you are. You may be getting by fine, even though life feels challenging. But perhaps the question should be: Would you like to find relief from the depression, the weight, that you feel? Would you like to expand and enrich your life so that you feel again a sense of pleasure and meaning, expansiveness and growth?

People often come into therapy wanting to work on a particular source of anxiety. But as we go, other thoughts and feelings may also emerge. Exploring these can help us understand your anxiety in the context of who you are, of your life experiences current and past, your joys and sorrows, disappointments and dreams. This process can support alleviating your anxiety in deep and lasting ways.

Depression can manifest in many ways—as a persisting sadness that blots out enjoyment, a sense of emotional numbness, as a heaviness across your emotional and physical experience.

Most people have heard of the seven stages of grief. Denial/shock, pain/guilt, anger, sadness, an improvement in mood, working through the emotions and thoughts, then finally, acceptance.

In every intimate relationship there are situations that come up with partners where we feel hurt, frustrated, unheard or unseen. Sometimes when this happens, you may feel comfortable bringing up your feelings with your partner, talking your feelings through and finding your way through the difficulty together.

We’re now more than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic. As the years have gone on, the anxiety that people feel has often taken on new forms. When the pandemic hit, many felt thrown abruptly into an alien experience: germs, sickness, unknown dangers, the loss of regular contact with friends and loved ones, financial worries.