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Please note that I am now conducting sessions both remotely and in-person.

Teletherapy can be conducted via Zoom or phone.

If you are in the Bay Area and wish to meet in person, we can do so

either indoors or outside in my Cathedral Hill office.

Information about my Covid protocols can be found here.

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Couples seek therapy for many reasons. 

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• ​Often there is an ongoing conflict the couple feels unable to work through on their own, a topic about which they find themselves continually fighting, or a mode of communicating which feels unproductive but in which they nonetheless find themselves stuck.

• One or both members of the partnership may feel a sense of loneliness, neglect, or disconnection.

• A breach of trust which feels irreparable may have occurred.

• The difficulties inherent to living a shared life and/or the pressures and demands of the world at large may be contributing to strain within the relationship.

• Anger and resentment toward one another may now rule where positive feelings once held sway.

Therapy can help in a number of important ways. Couples can learn to avoid the pitfalls of contempt, criticism, defensiveness, and withdrawal, find ways to be kinder to one another, and discover better ways both to communicate more effectively and to resolve conflict.​  But in addition to such skill-building, I find it's important for couples to understand that at the root of many difficulties is a discomfort with difference.  

 

Each couple, whatever the configuration ---straight or queer, poly or monogamous, trans or cis, interracial, inter-generational, or interfaith—is a unique union of two individuals, individuals who come to the relationship with a separate histories, values, and points of view. They bring differing ideas and desires, differing feelings and beliefs, differing expectations, fears, and dreams.​  Unknown or unexamined, these differences—about anything but especially around issues of dependency, control, commitment, togetherness, sex, love, and fairness—can wreak havoc. But when these differences are explored and accepted they can be the building blocks of intimacy, mutual satisfaction, and a more satisfying, better functioning, less adversarial relationship in which the positive feeling more often than not overrides the negative.