Couples and Marriage
Two people who have stopped being able to hear each other
Most couples who come here are not in crisis. They are tired.
It is the same disagreement in slightly different clothes, for years. One of you raises it, the other goes quiet, and both of you are completely certain the other one started it. Or it is a house where two people are perfectly polite and nothing else is happening.
Couples work here starts by getting both people understood, separately and together, before anybody proposes anything. That is slower than advice and it is the reason it holds.
The first conversation is free and it lasts 55 minutes.
Open seven days a week.
The argument that never finishes
What we work on first is not the content of the argument, which is usually not the point. It is the loop the two of you get into once it starts.
Most couples can describe that loop in about four minutes if somebody asks the right question, and almost none of them have ever been asked. Once it is on the table it stops being a fight about the dishwasher and starts being a thing the two of you can look at together, which is a different room entirely.
What else we work with
Disconnection. Living like roommates. Logistics, schedules, children, and nothing else in six months.
Intimacy, including a relationship where it has stopped and neither of you knows how to raise it without it becoming an accusation.
Couples after a brain injury, a stroke, or a diagnosis like cancer, dementia or Alzheimer’s. When one person has changed and the relationship has to work out what it is now. Very few couples therapists work with this and it is one of the gaps this practice was built around.
Couples in a household that is grieving, or absorbing another loss or transition: a job, children leaving home, a move. Particularly when the two of you are moving through it at completely different speeds, which is the norm rather than the exception.
Separation and co-parenting, when the answer turns out to be no and there are children in the middle of it.
When one of you is not sure anymore
Ordinary couples therapy quietly assumes both people want the relationship to work. Often one of you has stopped being sure, and has not said so, and the work goes nowhere for a year because nobody named it.
So we name it early. In the first session we ask both of you, separately, where you actually are. Not to force a decision. Because the honest answer changes what the work should be.
If you are both in, we do couples therapy.
If one of you is genuinely undecided, we say that out loud and slow down. What helps then is understanding how you arrived here and what each of you would need for it to be different, which is a real piece of work and a different one from communication skills.
And if the honest answer is that it is over, finding that out deliberately, with both of you in the room, is better than another year of hoping. Some of the most useful work we do ends that way, and it ends better than it would have.
How the first sessions are structured
Couples work here opens with a four session evaluation, so that what we are working on is agreed rather than assumed. Most couples have the immediate issues named inside the first six to eight sessions.
- A structured first session with both of you, on what is happening now and how the relationship got here.
- A session with each of you separately, on your own view of it. This is not an opportunity to tell secrets. We cannot guarantee to keep them and we will say so before you start.
- A collaborative treatment planning session, where we agree specifically what the work is going to be.
After that the work is structured too, rather than open ended conversation.
Two things that have their own pages
After an affair. Affair and betrayal recovery has a specific structure and its own page.
Before the wedding. Premarital counseling, four to six structured sessions, for couples who would rather find out now.
How we work
The Gottman Method. Both of the clinicians who take couples here are Gottman trained. It is the most researched approach to couples work there is, and its main practical virtue is that it gives you something to do rather than something to feel.
Neither of them is Gottman certified, and we would rather say that than let you assume it. Certification is a separate and expensive credentialing step that would raise what you pay without changing what happens in the room.
- Emotionally Focused Therapy, for the attachment layer underneath the argument.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Narrative Therapy. One of our two couples clinicians is a Marriage and Family Therapist Associate.
- Individual sessions inside couples work, where they help. Sometimes one person needs an hour on their own before the joint work can move.
- Rules of fair fighting. Practical guidelines for handling conflict better, which most couples have never been given.
- The four horsemen, which are central to the Gottman approach. We identify which of them are running in your relationship and work on those specifically.
- The five A’s, for how earlier relational wounds are still shaping what happens between you now.
Nobody gets sided with. That is a technical principle in this method rather than a courtesy, and it is the thing most couples are quietly checking for in the first session.
Where we see couples
In person at our Tigard office, which is ten minutes from Portland and close to Beaverton, Lake Oswego, Tualatin and Sherwood. Most couples work better in the room and we recommend it where it is practical.
By video anywhere in Oregon, which is how we see couples in Salem, Eugene, Albany, Bend and further out. It works, and it works particularly well for couples who would otherwise not go at all because of the drive.
7440 SW Hunziker Road, Suite E, Tigard, Oregon 97223 · Seven days a week, including weekends.
What this costs
$230 for a couples session with a licensed clinician, $205 with a supervised associate.
Insurance frequently does not cover couples work, and we would rather say that here than after your first session. Insurers pay for the treatment of a diagnosed condition in one person, and a relationship is not one. Where a plan does cover it we will tell you before you start. Where it does not, the self-pay rate above is the rate.
Questions people ask
Does couples counseling work if only one of us wants to be there?
Sometimes, and it is worth naming out loud in the first session rather than pretending otherwise. If one of you has already decided privately, couples therapy is the wrong tool and we will say so rather than take your money for it.
How do I bring it up with my partner?
Most people find it lands better as a request than as a verdict. “I want us to be better and I want help doing it” tends to go further than a list of what is wrong.
Is it too late?
We do not know, and neither does anybody else until the work starts. Coming late is common. Coming after a decision has already been made privately is the harder version, and even that is workable.
Can we come if we are not married?
Yes. Long-term partners, people living together, people who have been together twenty years and never married. Nothing on this page requires a certificate.
How many sessions?
Communication work is often shorter than people expect. Work after a betrayal is usually months. You will get an honest estimate after the consultation rather than a package.
Can we do this by video?
Yes, anywhere in Oregon. We will be straight with you about the tradeoff, which is real but smaller than most people assume.
Book a free 55 minute consultation
An hour, at no cost, for both of you. You will speak with a clinician rather than an intake screener.
Book online · In person in Tigard, by video anywhere in Oregon