premarital & early marriage counseling.

Dialogue therapy for engaged and newly married couples.

Falling in love and building a life together are not quite the same thing.

Engagement and the early years of marriage offer couples a unique opportunity to understand not only who they are together, but what each person brings into the relationship from the life they lived before they met.

Every partner enters a marriage with a relational history. Family-of-origin experiences, attachment patterns, previous relationships, personality differences, and ways of responding to stress and conflict all become part of the relationship—often without our realizing it.

Premarital and early-marriage counseling offers couples the opportunity to explore these patterns before misunderstandings and resentments become deeply established.

My approach to this work is grounded in Dialogue Therapy and informed by attachment theory, mindfulness, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and Jungian depth psychotherapy. Rather than offering a checklist of topics couples should agree upon before marriage, we explore something deeper: How the two of you will remain in relationship when you do not agree.

Exploring your past, present, & future.

Together, we explore three interconnected parts of your relationship:

Your Past.

What did each of you learn about love, conflict, intimacy, money, family, independence, vulnerability, caregiving, spirituality, and power in the relationships that shaped you?

Your Present.

What patterns are already emerging between you? What happens when one of you feels hurt, criticized, misunderstood, controlled, rejected, or disconnected? How do your attachment needs, personality differences, and individual threat responses interact?

Your Future.

What kind of marriage do you want to create? Which patterns and traditions do you want to carry forward—and which would you like to change?

The goal is not to determine whether your histories or personalities are compatible. It is to understand them well enough that you can make conscious choices about the relationship you are creating together.

Learning how to dialogue.

Dialogue Therapy teaches couples to approach differences with greater awareness and curiosity with three foundational skills:

Speaking for Self.

Expressing your own experience, feelings, needs, and perceptions rather than defining your partner's intentions or character.

Listening Mindfully.

Listening to understand your partner's experience rather than preparing a defense, rebuttal, correction, or solution.

Remaining Curious.

Developing the ability to wonder about what is happening within yourself, within your partner, and between the two of you, particularly when you experience something differently.

The purpose of dialogue is not to eliminate disagreement. It is to help couples develop a relationship in which difficult conversations can occur without difference automatically becoming disconnection.

understanding what happens when you are triggered.

I introduce the Snow Globe Effect to help couples understand what happens when something in the relationship activates an old fear, attachment wound, or threat response.

Each of us experiences relationships through a subjective lens shaped by our histories, memories, beliefs, expectations, and ways of protecting ourselves. When the snow globe gets shaken, emotions and defenses can begin swirling, making it difficult to see beyond our own interpretation of what is happening.

Your partner has a snow globe, too.

Part of our work is learning to recognize what shakes each person's snow globe—and what helps the snow settle again. Couples can begin responding to the vulnerability underneath a reaction rather than becoming caught in the reaction itself.