COUPLES THERAPY
Couples Therapy: Understanding the Patterns That Shape Your Relationship
A psychodynamic approach to deepening connection and transforming conflict
Couples therapy is a collaborative process that helps partners understand and strengthen their relationship. It's a space to look closely at how you communicate, how you protect and reach for each other, and how past experiences shape what happens between you in the present.
Every couple develops its own language — the subtle ways of connecting and defending that give a relationship its shape. At the same time, each partner brings an older language into the relationship: the emotional atmosphere of their childhood home, the roles they held in their family of origin, and the ways they learned to seek closeness or manage conflict long before they met their partner.
These early patterns often sit just out of awareness. They influence how quickly we react, how we interpret a partner's tone, what makes us withdraw, and what makes us pursue. Without realizing it, we find ourselves in familiar positions — the caretaker, the fixer, the emotional rock, the anxious one, the one who anticipates everyone else's needs. These positions aren't consciously chosen. And in a relationship, they can become automatic.
Couples therapy helps you slow down enough to notice these automatic reactions and understand their origins. Rather than reenacting your histories with one another, you begin to recognize them — and eventually, choose differently.
Many couples come to therapy feeling stuck: repeating the same argument, caught between closeness and distance, or unsure how to reconnect when trust has been shaken. Others arrive with a quieter sense that something in the relationship wants more room to grow. Wherever you begin, the work starts with curiosity about what lives under the surface — the unconscious forces, the projections, the shadow material that emerges not in isolation but in the intimate collision of two psyches.
The work starts with curiosity about what lives under the surface — the unconscious forces, the projections, the shadow material that emerges from the intimate collision of two psyches.
This work is not about deciding who's right or wrong. It's about seeing the emotional choreography beneath your interactions: the timing, the tone, the protective instincts, and the micro-moments of hurt and repair that shape your bond. Therapy helps each partner speak from experience rather than accusation, and helps the other listen without falling into familiar defensive roles.
No, you don't have to be married
We work with all kinds of partnerships: married, dating, pre-marital, even co-founders and creative collaborators whose work depends on their bond.Whatever form it takes, when two people are meaningfully entangled — emotionally, practically, creatively — the same dynamics apply: projection, attachment patterns, the roles each person falls into, and the ways early relational templates shape how you move toward and away from each other. And often, the more meaningful the entanglement, the more charge can flare up. Intensity doesn't always mean romantic love; it can arise wherever there's intimacy, dependency, shared vision, or unspoken expectation. When partners understand the emotional logic behind their reactions, they gain the space to pause, reflect, and relate differently.
What Sessions Are Like: Listening Beneath the Surface
In sessions, both partners meet together with the clinician. We often take a moment from your week — a conflict, a misunderstanding, or a moment of distance — and slow it down. Instead of focusing on who said what, we look at how each of you interpreted it and why it touched something familiar. Couples therapy helps you translate these reactions. What looks like a disagreement about dishes or plans often carries the weight of something older: early attachment wounds, unmet longings, or fears that predate the relationship itself.
We explore areas like:
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the roles you learned in your family (emotional rock, harmonizer, achiever, invisible one)
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the relational survival strategies you developed
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the emotional patterns you carry loyalty to
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the ways you reenact old positions with each other without meaning to, and how they show up in mundane interactions
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the projections you place onto your partner — the disowned parts of yourself that show up in who you choose and how you clash
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the unconscious contracts you've formed about who gets to need, who gets to speak, who carries emotion
When these patterns come into view, something shifts: each partner is no longer fighting the other, but fighting an old familiar story that doesn't fit anymore. Sometimes this brings clarity. Other times, it brings tenderness — a recognition that each partner has been protecting something vulnerable inside themselves.
The work can feel lively, painful, illuminating, even funny. Our clinicians draw from psychodynamic, relational, attachment, and family systems perspectives. Several are pursuing advanced training in couples and sex therapy. And most of us have been in couples therapy ourselves.
Shadow, Projection, and the Unconscious Bond
From a Jungian lens, intimate relationships inevitably activate shadow material, the parts of ourselves we've disowned, denied, or never fully integrated. Your partner becomes a screen onto which you project what you cannot yet see in yourself. The qualities that first attracted you may later become sources of frustration. The partner who seemed confident now feels controlling. The one who seemed easygoing now feels avoidant.
Relationships don't just reveal who we are, they reveal who we've been trying not to be. Couples therapy creates space to withdraw these projections, to recognize that the anger or disappointment you feel toward your partner often points back toward something unfinished within yourself. This doesn't mean your grievances aren't real. It means they carry more than one truth.
Working with projection doesn't absolve anyone of responsibility. It deepens it. You become accountable not only for your behavior but for the inner figures that appear uninvited in your partnership: the inner critic, the wounded child, the defended self. And as each partner does this work, the relationship itself becomes less reactive, more spacious, capable of holding complexity without collapsing into blame.
A unique aspect of couples therapy is how it helps you know yourself more fully in front of your partner. There are parts of us that only show themselves in relationship, and therapy provides a space to encounter them together.
Your partner becomes a screen onto which you project what you cannot yet see in yourself
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