Individual therapy for relationships focuses on you: your emotions, your internal world, and the patterns and history that shape how you show up with the people you love. Couples therapy focuses on the dynamic between two people, with more attention to how you each impact each other than to your solo experience. Many people find individual therapy works well alongside couples therapy with a different therapist, since individual therapy gives you more room to tend to your own emotions without also caring for what comes up for your partner.

I don't provide both individual and couples therapy to the same people. If we work together individually and you later want couples therapy, I'm happy to refer you to one of the wonderful clinicians in my network. It's important to me to bring the same empathy and care to both partners in a couple, and after providing individual therapy, the rapport we've built means I couldn't reasonably be an unbiased therapist for you both.

Sessions focus on how you show up in relationships. Your partner will come up, because that's where your patterns play out, but the work centers on caring for your emotions and changing how you engage.

No. Whether you're single, dating, or recovering from a breakup, you can learn a lot about yourself by paying attention to what comes up for you in relationships. Individual therapy gives you space to do that, and what you learn carries into the relationships you have now and the ones you have later.

Clients meet with me weekly or every other week, and many work with me anywhere from a few months to a few years. Individual therapy for relationships is depth-focused work that looks at how you relate to yourself and to others. A few sessions can bring insight, but deeper change comes from steady time spent learning to relate to your emotions and needs in new ways.

In our first session, my goal is to get to know you: what your life looks like now, what it's looked like in the past, and the concerns that brought you to therapy. I'll ask questions to understand your story, and you can share as much or as little as feels comfortable. It's also your chance to get to know me and begin building trust.

Narrative Therapy explores the stories that shape our lives, both personal and cultural. I use it to help clients feel more empowered and have more choice in the face of problems by examining stories that limit them. That might mean looking at internalized beliefs about what it means to be a woman or a person of color, or at how messages about acceptable emotions affect your ability to be vulnerable with your partner.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) is a framework that sees the mind as made up of different inner "parts," each with its own perspective and role. I use it to help you change your relationship with yourself by noticing your inner conflicts and getting curious about them. That might include exploring how harshly you respond when an anxious part shows up, or getting to know a hurt part that an angry part is working to protect.

Lifespan Integration is a gentle, timeline-based approach that helps your nervous system integrate and heal from difficult past experiences. It can be especially helpful for working through trauma or a sense of being stuck. In session, we build a timeline of your life together and read through it. It looks different from the talk therapy most people imagine, because it works with how your memories are stored and organized, not just how you talk about them.