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
- ADHD & Neurodivergent relationships
- Polycules & ethically non-monogamous relationships
- Couples navigating betrayal trauma & infidelity
- New parents
- Culturally & ethnically diverse relationships
- I support couples & relationships throughout Pasadena, South Pasadena, San Marino, Eagle Rock, Glendale, and greater LA.
Common Reasons Couples Seek Therapy
Couples and partners seek couples therapy in Pasadena for many different reasons. While every relationship is unique, many share common patterns of disconnection, conflict, or emotional strain.
Attachment Ruptures
Couples can lose a sense of safety and secure connection sometimes suddenly after a betrayal, or gradually over time through emotional distance, unmet needs, or long-standing resentment. Couples therapy in Pasadena helps partners rebuild emotional safety and restore a sense of connection.
Rebuilding Trust After Betrayal
Many couples seek 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 patterns that may have existed long before the betrayal.
Emotional Disconnection & Cycles of Conflict
Many of us learned how to connect or disconnect through early relationships with caregivers. When those experiences involved neglect, pain, or inconsistency, we may unconsciously repeat those patterns in adulthood.
This can show up as cycles of withdrawal and pursuit instead of mutual understanding. Couples therapy in Pasadena helps you recognize and shift these patterns with empathy and support.
Sexual Disconnection & Intimacy Issues in Relationships
Many couples in Pasadena and Los Angeles experience ongoing challenges with intimacy and sexual connection. These may be influenced by life transitions, stress, physiological changes, emotional ruptures, or internalized beliefs around relationships and sexuality. Therapy creates a safe space to explore these challenges and rebuild connection both emotionally and physically.
Conflicting Needs in Relationships
Partners often enter relationships with different needs for connection, affection, communication, and emotional safety. When these needs are not understood or met, it can lead to feelings of misalignment or disconnection. Couples therapy in Pasadena provides a space to better understand each other and work toward shared meaning and connection.
ADHD & Neurodivergent Relationship Challenges
Neurodivergent couples including those navigating ADHD, autism, or mixed neurotypes often experience unique relationship dynamics that may be misunderstood in traditional therapy settings.
As a clinician specializing in ADHD and neurodiversity, I support couples in navigating differences in communication, sensory needs, emotional regulation, and processing styles.
Therapy becomes a space to reduce shame, increase understanding, and build strategies that truly work for both partners.
Impacts of Trauma in Relationships
Many couples seeking couples therapy in Pasadena arrive with deep attachment wounds or trauma histories even after doing individual therapy. These patterns can continue to show up in relationships as intense conflict, emotional reactivity, or repeated ruptures that feel difficult to resolve.
In therapy, we explore how these experiences are impacting your relationship today and work together to create new pathways toward safety, trust, and emotional connection.
Life Transitions Affecting Couples
Life brings constant change moves, health challenges, children, blended families, divorce, remarriage, aging, grief, and loss. These transitions can shift the rhythm of a relationship and introduce new stressors.
Couples therapy in Pasadena offers a grounded space to navigate these changes, strengthen your partnership, and build supportive strategies together.
Parenting Conflicts & Relationship Strain in Couples
Couples in Pasadena and Los Angeles often come from diverse cultural backgrounds and lived experiences, which can shape parenting styles in different ways. These differences can create tension, especially when each partner brings their own values, beliefs, and childhood experiences into parenting.
Whether you’re navigating co-parenting challenges, raising children together, or struggling to align on discipline, emotional needs, or structure, therapy provides a space to explore these differences with curiosity and understanding.
This work helps you realign as a parenting team while strengthening your relationship.
Preventative Care & Premarital Counseling
Not all couples come to therapy in crisis. Some seek couples counseling in Pasadena from a place of curiosity and intention wanting to strengthen their relationship before challenges arise. I offer secular premarital counseling and relationship support to help couples build a strong foundation, deepen connection, and grow together.
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 in Pasadena
Reflecting Processes
In our first sessions, I take time to deeply understand your story both as individuals and as a partnership. I pay close attention to each partner’s narrative, relational roles, communication patterns, and body language. We also explore culture, trauma history, emotional blueprints, and what has felt most challenging in your relationship. When helpful, I may offer one-on-one breakout sessions to build trust and deepen insight into each person’s experience.
Deepening Emotions
Together, we explore both primary and secondary emotions how they show up in the body, what they signal, and the core beliefs connected to them. As an attachment-based therapist, I help you understand how early experiences shaped your ability to receive comfort, express emotions, and feel safe in connection. We also consider how identity, culture, and lived experiences influence emotional patterns. This process helps uncover the deeper dynamics driving conflict and disconnection in your relationship.
Turning Towards
During sessions, I gently guide partners to share their emotional experiences with each other in real time, when it feels safe to do so. These moments often called enactments create opportunities to practice new ways of connecting, listening, and responding with vulnerability. We move slowly and intentionally, helping soften protective patterns and build new experiences of trust, safety, and emotional 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.
Articles for Couples on the Blog
LINKS
LOCATION
Danielle Palomares, LMFT
Couples Therapy & Trauma Therapy
Office in Pasadena, CA
By appointment only
CONTACT
(626) 209-9055
danielle@palomarestherapy.com
