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Portland Couples Therapy

Therapy for Relationships & Couples

Therapy for individuals and couples who wish to develop healthy relationship patterns, improve communication, build trust, and grow intimacy.

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Are you feeling distressed about your relationship or struggling to maintain healthy connections?

I’m here to help

Restore a Sense of Friendship & Harmony

Offering therapy rooted in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) & Gottman Method

Instead of struggling with the same relationship patterns imagine how it would feel to finally…

Improve connection
resolve conflicts
repair and build trust
increase intimacy and affection
create healthy dynamics to establish emotional safety and openness

Gottman Focused Therapy

go from disconnected to best friends

Cultivate healthier patterns

Heal from old relationship patterns and find new, healthy ways to connect.

Renew your sense of friendship

Create rituals of connection and a perception of love and admiration.

Learn how to repair

Arguments are inevitable. It’s normal to argue! Despite what many people believe. HOW you argue and HOW you repair is what matters.

couples therapy portland

Insights from Gottman Research About Relationships

Unsolvable Problems

69% of problems couples experience in a relationship are perpetual, meaning they will never be resolved due to differences.

Successful Couples

Couples who successfully remain together have 5 positive interactions for every negative interaction during conflict.

Quick to Repair

The most successful couples are those who are quick to repair following a fight.

Relationship Concerns

In addition to building a healthy relationship, I enjoy helping individuals and couples who are impacted by the following:

Anxiety or OCD is impacting your relationship.

Healing from past abusive relationships.

ADHD or Autism can have profound impacts on relationships. Let’s explore ways to work with how this impacts you and your relationships.

Distressing, unwanted thoughts or images with urges to do things to avoid distress, get rid of unwanted images/thoughts, or to prevent bad things from happening. Chronic doubt and need for reassurance.

Always setting the bar higher and higher, discounting your accomplishments, procrastination, abandoning projects, fear of failure, and avoiding promotions or opportunities.

Dismissing your boundaries out of fear of letting others down, trying to do it all and be it all for everyone all the time.

Effective Gottman Therapy

The Gottman method is a research based framework for helping people recover and build lasting relationships. Since 69% of issues in relationships are due to perpetual problems or those that can’t be resolved, Gottman method provides techniques for improving relationship dynamics from the heart. Couples will learn how to build a firm foundation for their relationship, so that challenges can be worked through together as partners. This is known as the Sound Relationship House Theory.

The Sound Relationship House has two weight bearing walls that strengthen the relationship and include:

  • building love maps
  • sharing fondness and admiration
  • turning towards each other instead of away
  • establishing positive perspective of your partner
  • conflict management skills
  • making life dreams come true
  • creating shared meaning
  • building trust and commitment


Integrating Gottman method into couples therapy gives you daily practices to apply in your relationship.

Replace what’s not working with something deeper and more meaningful.
gottman couples therapy portland
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Emotionally Focused Therapy

Heal Uhelpful Patterns & Build Emotional Intimacy

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a therapeutic approach that focuses on the emotional experiences and attachment of individuals and couples. For individuals, EFT helps to explore emotions deeply, identify patterns in emotional responses, and develop healthier ways to connect with themselves and others. The goal is to foster emotional resilience, self-compassion, and the ability to navigate life’s challenges with greater emotional intelligence.


For couples, EFT focuses on strengthening the emotional bond between partners by identifying and addressing negative interaction patterns that create distance and conflict. The therapist helps couples express their emotions and needs in a way that fosters safety in being vulnerable, understanding, and connection.

By creating a safe and supportive environment, EFT helps couples rebuild trust, deepen their emotional connection, and create a more secure and fulfilling relationship.

Frequently Asked Questions

Get your couples counseling questions answered here. If you have more questions, reach out today.

In the first few sessions, we will talk about your main concerns, history, and goals. There will be some individual sessions to understand each of you better.

You will complete a Gottman relationship assessment that will help use identify areas of growth in the relationship so we can create a plan together. I maintain open and honest communication in our sessions and require you honor this as well.

During a couples counseling session, I will facilitate discussions between you to help you communicate more effectively and understand each other’s perspectives.

Sessions may include exercises and techniques to improve communication, resolve conflicts, and strengthen the relationship.

It can be common for one partner to be more reluctant to start therapy than the other, and that’s ok. I will work with you individually on your relationship concerns, equipping you with new insights, education, and ways to relate to your partner that can still improve your relationship experience. When your partner is ready to join, we can bring them into that process.

There is never any way to guarantee outcomes in therapy. However, research supports that the Gottman approach for couples is highly effective.

You will complete a relationship assessment at the start and end of couples counseling that helps us identify the effectiveness of our work together.

You can read more by visiting the links below:

Gottman Website

Examining the Effectiveness of Gottman Couple Therapy on Improving Marital Adjustment and Couples’ Intimacy

That all depends on a number of factors. Everyone is different and while some couples can get a lot through just a few sessions, most couples will work with me for about 12-16 sessions.

Online couples counseling works just like individual online counseling except you and your partner will be in the same room with your laptop. It’s easiest if you sit next to one another and share the same screen. At rare times, it may not be possible for you to be in the same room during sessions, and that’s ok, as long as most of the sessions occur with you together in the same room.

Anyone in a relationship- long term partners, married, dating. Couples counseling helps address issues that come up in any relationship.

Yes. Infidelity is a relationship trauma. Repairs can be made, trust can be restored with effort and commitment from you and your partner.

Getting started is simple even if it makes you a little nervous (that’s normal). Click the link below to schedule a free consultation.

Let’s get started

Ready to Improve Your Relationship?

Gottman Approved Member