Couples & Partnerships
I offer couples therapy & marriage counseling in Pasadena, CA, along with therapy for non-traditional, non-monogamous partnerships. My therapeutic work is based on the belief that safe attachment, love, and connection are core to the human experience.
I provide couples therapy & marriage counseling to a diverse array of partnerships, including:
LGBTQIA+ partnerships
New parents
Polycules & ethically non-monogamous partnerships
Partners in different life stages
Long-distance relationships
Culturally & ethnically diverse relationships
Why Couples Enter Therapy
Couples & partners often come into therapy for many reasons, including:
ATTACHMENT RUPTURES
Couples may struggle with feeling safely attached to one another. This can happen suddenly, for example after a betrayal, or creep up over time due to detachment, lack of reciprocity, or longterm resentment.
CONFLICT & RUPTURE REPAIR
Every person bring their own unique conflict and communication strategies into their relationships. These strategies, often learned during early development, may need updating or complete overhaul.
SEX & INTIMACY ISSUES
Many couples face ongoing sex and intimacy issues, caused by many factors. Issues like life transitions, physiological changes, emotional ruptures, differences in body maps and pleasure, and internalized beliefs around gender, relationships, sexuality, roles, and norms can deeply impact sexual connection.
DIFFERENT LOVE LANGUAGES
Couples often enter relationships with very different love languages, including different implicit expectations around emotional expressivity, connection, quality time, acts of service, relationship structure, values, and beliefs. These differences can cause feelings of misalignment, invalidation, and lack of felt safety.
PATTERNS OF WITHDRAWAL & PURSUIT
We all learned how to connect (or disconnect) in childhood with our caregivers and primary attachments. Often, we’re unconsciously drawn to repeating those attachment patterns, as we are acclimatized to them. However, when relationships with primary caregivers involved feelings of neglect, pain, disconnection and lack of safety, we may find ourselves falling into adult relationships that reengage those feelings and patterns of withdrawal and pursuit as a result.
LIFE TRANSITION ISSUES
Life brings endless transitions: moves, illnesses, children, blended families, divorce, remarriage, physical changes, aging, grief, and loss. Because of these transitions, our relationships will naturally evolve alongside them. Couples therapy can create a contained space for finding added support and strategies together during the storm of life.
PREVENTATIVE CARE
I work with many couples who simply want to get ahead of relational fallout by intentionally reflecting on their relationship, values, communication, and connection. I offer secular premarital counseling and couples counseling to help guide this work.
REAUTHORING VALUES
We all bring our assumed biases, dominant cultural beliefs and ideologies into our relationships. As a result, sometimes these inherited values, legacy burdens, and traditions are taken for granted as normalized until we find ourselves building new families with others. Couples therapy can be a place for us to reflect on these assumptions and intentionally choose new values together as a team.
DOMESTIC LABOR ISSUES
Issues of domestic labor continue to be a central issue with many of the couples I counsel, and in therapy we can work on strategies and create new agreements that serve the realities and values of each couple.
How I Work with Couples & Partnerships
HISTORY TAKING
At the beginning of couples therapy, I spend time getting to know the couple’s story. I pay close attention to culture, trauma history, reported challenges, emotional blueprints, body language, verbal language, roles, each person’s narratives, and overarching themes. I often do breakout sessions one-on-one with each individual to connect more deeply and build stronger foundations of trust and rapport.
REFLECTING PROCESSES
Using Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT), I reflect back noted patterns of emotional pursuit, withdrawal, connection and disconnection in each partnership. I integrate an Internal Family System (IFS) lens to understand the protective parts driving these behaviors and the intended and unintended impacts on connection and felt safety.
DEEPENING EMOTIONS
In couples counseling we spend time carefully looking at emotions, including primary and secondary emotions, their impacts on physical sensation, and core messages tethered to them. As an attachment therapist, I’m always interested in what attachment with caregivers looked like in early life. For example, how did each person in the partnership learn (or did not learn) to receive comfort and connection? What did emotional attunement look like? How were emotional needs met, or not met? And how did issues like culture, religion, acculturation, ethnicity, generation, gender, and lived experience impact connection, attachment, and emotional development? As a result, we begin to draw connections between how these internalized beliefs and patterns are likely showing up in both macro and micro ways in the relationship.
TURNING TOWARDS
During the working phase of couples therapy, I will often ask each person to turn towards one another to share their emotional experiences when it feels safe enough to do so. These moments are known as enactments, and they allow us to begin forging new patterns of connection, communication, and emotional vulnerability during sessions. We spend time processing how the enactments land, and working to soften protective parts that may be continuing to show up.
I would be honored to support you and your partner(s)!
If this sounds aligned with your needs
LINKS
LOCATION
Sandoval Therapy
491 South Marengo Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91101
