MIDTOWN MANHATTAN · TELEHEALTH

Couples Therapy & Marriage Counseling

My work with couples is grounded primarily in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), an empirically supported approach to couples’ treatment.

EFT helps couples address two powerful forces: the need for closeness and the fear of vulnerability. In relationships, the tension between this need and this fear can produce distressing and reactive interpersonal cycles that can be difficult to change without guidance.

With EFT, the work focuses first on identifying these cycles and on developing a shared understanding of how each partner’s perceptions and reactions contribute to their persistence. As this understanding deepens, the therapist helps the couples experiment with new ways of communicating and of expressing their needs. With practice, these new and more effective communications begin to replace the painful and reactive cycles and begin to foster connections that feel safe and solid.

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More Information on Couples’ Therapy

In my work with couples, I mostly employ EFT as a treatment modality. The main underlying assumptions in EFT are that partners want to feel emotionally closer to each other but also want to protect themselves from emotional pain and vulnerability.

This tension between a need for more closeness and the urge to protect oneself may, for example, yield a so called “pursuer-withdrawer” dynamic where one partner is making great efforts to connect, and the other partner feels under siege and is trying to protect themselves from their partner’s “demands.”

Though couples’ dynamics may follow a certain pattern, like this “pursuer-withdrawer” dynamic, each couple’s dynamic is also unique, as it emerges from the shared experiences of two people with unique psychologies.
With EFT, the work starts by identifying and clarifying the cycle of interpersonal behaviors that produces the couple’s distress. This cycle is maintained by the distinct perceptions partners have of themselves and of the other. Such a cycle may start, for example, with something as seemingly innocuous as one partner saying “good morning” to the other. Already embedded within that simple greeting however, is the entire shared history of the couple’s challenges with closeness. To the partner who says “good morning,” that greeting may represent yet another attempt to get some attention or affection back from the other. To that other partner however, that “good morning” may sound like an alarm signaling danger – the danger that he may not respond in the way she wants and that she will then get angry and throw his entire day “off track.” So, rather than run that risk, he decides to “play it safe” and instead leaves the home quietly in order to avoid another argument. That quiet departure is then interpreted by the first partner as confirmation that he doesn’t want to spend time with her or doesn’t care about her. This is the kind of interpersonal cycle that can escalate and bring great pain to both partners in a relationship.
EFT begins with identifying and clarifying what is happening in these interpersonal cycles. During this phase of treatment, I work with each partner in turn while the other listens to what their partner is sharing. Over the course of sessions, I then help the couple try out new ways of communicating and connecting with the aim of dissolving or superseding the prior, painful interpersonal cycles. An assumption with EFT is that partners want to feel emotionally closer and, at the same time, want to shield themselves from emotional vulnerability.
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