Couples Therapy in Pasadena & Los Angeles
Relationships are meant to be a source of connection, but too often they feel like constant conflict, emotional distance, or a disconnected roommate dynamic. As a Certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist in Pasadena serving the Los Angeles area, I help couples navigate communication breakdowns, betrayal, emotional disconnection, and chronic conflict with warmth and clinical depth. My trauma‑informed, LGBTQ+ affirming approach, grounded in attachment theory, supports partners in rebuilding trust, deepening connection, and growing together.
I work with relationships in a wide range of contexts, including:
- LGBTQIA+ partnerships
- Neurodivergent relationships
- New parents
- Polycules & ethically non-monogamous partnerships
- Partners in different life stages
- Long-distance relationships
- Culturally & ethnically diverse relationships
- I support relationships throughout Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Eagle Rock, Glendale, and greater LA.
Common Reasons Couples Seek Therapy
Couples & partners often come into therapy for many reasons, including:
ATTACHMENT RUPTURES
Couples can lose a sense of safety and secure connection, sometimes suddenly after a betrayal, or gradually over time through detachment, unmet needs, or long‑standing resentment.
REBUILDING TRUST AFTER BETRAYAL
Couples often come to therapy after affairs, major disclosures, or other breaches of trust. In these moments, it can feel like the ground has disappeared beneath you. Couples therapy offers a compassionate space to rebuild trust, process the pain, and understand the deeper dynamics that may have existed long before the betrayal.
EMOTIONAL DISCONNECTION & CYCLES OF CONFLICT
Many of us learned how to connect (or disconnect) in childhood with our caregivers or primary attachment figures. When early relationships involved neglect, pain, traumatic experiences or disconnection, adults may unconsciously repeat those patterns falling into cycles of withdrawal and pursuit instead of mutual regulation. Couples therapy helps you understand and shift these patterns with empathy and support.
SEXUAL DISCONNECTION & INTIMACY ISSUES IN RELATIONSHIPS
Many couples in Pasadena and Los Angeles 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.
CONFLICTING NEEDS IN RELATIONSHIPS
Couples often enter a relationship with very different emotional needs for connection, expression, affection, quality time, or emotional safety. When these needs aren’t understood or met, it can feel like misalignment, invalidation, or a lack of felt safety. Couples therapy creates a space where these differences can be understood and navigated together.
ADHD & NEURODIVERGENCE CHALLENGES IN RELATIONSHIPS
Neurodivergent couples and mixed neurotype relationships can experience unique challenges that are often misunderstood in traditional therapy settings. As a clinician who specializes in ADHD and neurodiversity, I help couples navigate differences in communication, sensory needs, executive functioning, emotional regulation, and processing speed. Therapy becomes a space to reduce shame, increase understanding, and build relational strategies that actually work for your brains. Whether you’re navigating ADHD, autism, or other forms of neurodivergence, your relationship will be approached with nuance, compassion, and respect for both partners’ needs.
IMPACTS OF TRAUMA IN RELATIONSHIPS
Many couples arrive with deep attachment wounds or trauma histories, even after extensive individual therapy, and find that old patterns still show up in their relationships. These histories can show up as intense conflict, emotional volatility, or repeated ruptures that feel hard to shift. In couples therapy, we explore how these patterns are impacting your connection today and how you can create new pathways toward safety, trust, and emotional attunement together.
LIFE TRANSITIONS AFFECTING COUPLES
Life brings many changes: moves, health issues, children, blended families, divorce, remarriage, aging, grief, and loss. These transitions can shift relational rhythms and create new stressors. Couples therapy offers a grounded space to find support and strategies together during these times of change.
PARENTING CONFLICTS & RELATIONSHIP STRAIN IN COUPLES
Couples in Los Angeles and Pasadena often straddle multiple intersectionalities and backgrounds, which impacts parenting. Different parenting styles can create deep friction in a relationship, especially when each partner brings their own unique childhood experiences, values, or trauma histories into the parenting dynamic. Couples therapy provides a space to explore these differences with curiosity. Whether you’re navigating co-parenting tensions, newly raising children together, or struggling to get on the same page around discipline, emotional needs, or structure, this work can help you realign as a parenting team while strengthening your partnership.
PREVENTATIVE CARE
Some couples come not in crisis, but in curiosity, wanting to reflect on their relationship before challenges intensify. I offer secular premarital counseling and couples counseling to support intentional growth and deep connection.
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
REFLECTING PROCESSES
In our first sessions, I take time to deeply understand your story as individuals and as a partnership. I pay close attention to each partner’s narrative, relational roles, communication patterns, and body language. I also explore culture, trauma history, emotional blueprints, and what has felt most challenging. When helpful, I offer one-on-one breakout sessions to build trust and deepen insight into each person’s experience.
REFLECTING PROCESSES
Using Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT), I reflect back patterns of emotional pursuit, withdrawal, connection, and disconnection that emerge between partners. I also draw from ego states or Internal Family Systems (IFS) to help identify the protective parts behind these behaviors and how they impact connection, vulnerability, and felt safety.
DEEPENING EMOTIONS
Together, we explore both primary and secondary emotions, how they feel in the body, what they signal, and the core beliefs tied to them. As an attachment-based therapist, I often explore how each partner learned (or didn’t learn) to receive comfort, express emotion, and build emotional safety early in life. We also consider how culture, religion, ethnicity, gender, generation, and lived experience shape emotional development. These reflections help us understand the deeper emotional dynamics at play and how they might be showing up in your current relationship patterns.
TURNING TOWARDS
During sessions, I invite partners to share their emotional experiences with each other in real time when it feels safe enough to do so. These moments, known as enactments, allow couples to practice new ways of connecting, listening, and being emotionally vulnerable together in session. We process these interactions slowly, with care, helping to soften protective parts and build new patterns of trust and responsiveness.
Common Questions About Couples Therapy
What happens in the first couples therapy session?
Our first session focuses on understanding your unique relationship dynamic and determining whether I’m the right fit to support you. We’ll explore your goals, what’s working in your relationship, what feels stuck, and begin to map the patterns that may be getting in the way of connection.
Do both partners need to be fully committed for therapy to work?
It’s common for one partner to feel more hesitant than the other when starting couples therapy and it’s completely normal for it to take time to build trust in the process and with the therapist. Sometimes couples arrive at a breaking point, with one partner leaning out of the relationship while the other leans in. In these situations, we may explore Discernment Therapy, a focused approach that supports both of you in clarifying whether to stay and work on the relationship or to separate with clarity and care. A key part of the therapeutic process is honoring each partner’s readiness, perspective, and truth, without pressure or judgment.
What modalities do you use for realtionship and couples therapy?
I am certified in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT), which is my primary approach in working with relationships. As an integrative therapist, I also draw from polyvagal theory, Narrative Therapy, parts work, and EMDR for couples. I will be completing advanced training in the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT) in early 2026.
Whether you’re navigating emotional disconnection, communication breakdowns, betrayal, or just longing to feel close again, you’re not alone. Couples therapy can offer a path toward healing, reconnection, and deeper understanding.
If you’re ready to explore how therapy can support your relationship, I’d be honored to walk alongside you.
LINKS
LOCATION
Sandoval Therapy
491 South Marengo Avenue
Pasadena, CA 91101
