You already know how this one ends.
It’ll begin over something small — the calendar, a tone of voice, whose turn it was — and finish exactly where it always finishes. You both know your lines. You could each deliver the other’s. And neither of you has managed to find the way out yet.
There’s nothing to point at. That’s the hard part.
Very few couples arrive here in the middle of a catastrophe. Most arrive because something has gone flat and neither of them can put a finger on when.
Life still runs. The children get where they’re going, the bills get paid, the two of you are perfectly civil. To anyone watching you look entirely fine — which is a good part of what makes it so disorienting. No incident to blame. No villain. Nothing that would explain to an outsider why it feels this lonely.
But the conversations have got shorter. You’ve started choosing your words in advance to avoid setting something off. There are two or three topics you both walk around so smoothly that you’ve stopped noticing you’re doing it. And on the rare occasion you do open something real, it goes wrong quickly enough that you both file it away as proof not to bother next time.
Somewhere in there you stopped being on the same side. Nobody decided it. Managing each other simply became less costly than being close to each other.
You’re not bad at this. You’re inside a pattern — one that is far more ordinary, and far more workable, than it feels from where you’re standing.
Two reasonable people, one machine.
Nearly every couple I see is running a version of this. The words differ. The choreography almost never does. And the crucial thing is that each of you is responding perfectly sensibly to what the other one is doing — which is precisely why it won’t stop on its own.
Goes after it
You register the distance and it frightens you. So you close it — you raise the subject, you press for an answer, you want this dealt with tonight.
They go flat, or quiet, or find a reason to be in another room. What you hear in that is: I’m not worth staying in the room for.
So you press harder. Louder, or more often, or with a sharper edge — because surely if you can just get through to them, something will land.
Underneath it: lonely, and afraid you’re losing them.
Goes quiet
You feel the intensity arriving and everything in you braces. Whatever you say next will probably be the wrong thing, so the safest available move is to say less.
You go calm, or silent, or you step outside to let it cool. What they hear in that is: none of this matters to me.
So you close down further. Not from indifference — because you’ve worked out there’s no version of this you win, and going quiet is the only thing that stops it getting worse.
Underneath it: feeling like a standing disappointment, and dreading making it worse.
Now read those two columns against each other. The pressing makes the going-quiet worse. The going-quiet makes the pressing worse. Neither of you is behaving unreasonably, and between you you’ve assembled something that now runs with nobody driving. What needs dismantling is the machine, not either of the people operating it. Most couples feel something give the first time they see it set out like this.
You don’t need a disaster to justify coming.
Most of the couples I work with are somewhere on this list, and most of them waited a good deal longer than they needed to.
- The same argument, wearing a different coat each time
- Conversations that escalate before either of you sees it coming
- Distance you can’t explain and can’t seem to close
- Running the household well and living like colleagues
- Resentment that has set hard
- An affair or a betrayal you’re trying to come back from
- Trust that got broken some other way
- A baby, an empty house, retirement, illness, a move, a new job
- Desire that doesn’t match, and a sex life neither of you is happy with
- One of you privately wondering whether to stay
This won’t be a weekly slot for reporting the week.
You already know what’s wrong. You’ve told each other, more than once, at length. Telling me the same thing in a calmer room won’t shift it, and I won’t let the sessions turn into that.
-
We lay out the choreography
I want to see the steps in detail — who moves first, what the other does in response, and what each of you privately decides about the other in that moment. Once it’s on the table it stops being a mystery and becomes a sequence with parts that can be changed.
-
I stop it while it’s happening
The cycle will show up in session, and when it does I’ll slow it down or halt it. Not to referee — because that’s the one moment you can both feel what’s actually driving it, and feeling it is what makes it changeable.
-
Each of you finds your own half
Not so blame can be handed out — the reverse. Your half is the only part you have any control over, so it’s the only place your power is. Most people find that a relief once they hear it properly.
-
We aim at something, not away from it
“Stop fighting” is a poor target. Ease, closeness, being on the same side, enjoying each other again — those are places you can both picture, and walking toward something is far easier than walking away from something you can’t name.
And it doesn’t all happen in the room. There’ll be things to practice between sessions — small, specific, genuinely doable. Insight has a famously poor record of changing marriages. Repetition changes marriages.
Warm, and straight enough to be worth the money.
People tend to describe me as warm, steady and fairly direct. I think respect can include challenge — in fact I think leaving the challenge out is a way of not quite turning up. So I’ll like you, and I’ll also tell you what I see.
I treat couples as capable. Not fragile, not damaged, not requiring careful handling. In more than fifteen years focused on this work, I’ve rarely met a pair who didn’t already have what they needed between them — it was just pointed the wrong way.
And this is couples work, not individual therapy with an extra chair pulled up. The training, the structure, the pace of it — all of it is built for two people at once.
Sessions feel more like a workshop than a confessional. Somewhere to try different words, test an unfamiliar move, and find out what happens when you do the opposite of your usual thing. Most couples leave clearer and steadier than they arrived.
What you’d be signing up for.
Both of you, every time
You come as a pair, each time. I don’t run individual sessions alongside the couples work, and nothing one of you tells me gets kept from the other.
Three to six months, usually
Some couples come with one focused question and finish quickly. Others want something more thorough and stay longer. You’re not signing up to anything open-ended.
By video, across New Mexico
HIPAA-compliant video — Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Las Cruces, Farmington, Taos, anywhere in the state. Sit side by side at home, or dial in separately when the week won’t allow it.
Trained specifically for this
An EFT externship, PACT training with Stan Tatkin, Crucible Therapy with David Schnarch, and AASECT certification on the sex therapy side.
What couples ask me before booking.
Is this the same as the sex therapy you do?
They overlap, and plenty of couples need both. The difference is where we start. Couples counseling begins with the pattern between you — the arguing, the distance, the way conversations go wrong. Sex therapy starts with the physical relationship and works outward.
If you’re not sure which you want, don’t worry about choosing correctly. We’ll work that out in the first session, and it’s the same practice either way.
Do we both have to want to be here?
You both have to turn up. You don’t both have to arrive convinced — a fair number of the people I see came because their partner asked, and were privately certain it wouldn’t achieve anything.
Being skeptical is fine. Being unwilling to say anything true is the thing that makes it impossible, and that’s a different problem.
What if one of us isn’t sure about staying?
Then say so, ideally early. It’s far more common than people imagine, and it doesn’t rule this out — but working with two people where one is quietly halfway out is a different job from working with two who are both in. I’d rather know which one I’m doing.
We tried counseling before and it made no difference. Why now?
Usually because the previous round turned into a weekly summary of the week. That’s comfortable, and it changes nothing at all.
I work on the pattern rather than the content of the latest row, I interrupt the cycle while it’s running in front of me, and you go home with something specific to practice. If your last therapist mainly listened, this will feel different fairly quickly.
What if we end up arguing in session?
Genuinely good. If it happens live I can see it rather than take your word for it, and I can stop it mid-flight and ask what just went through each of you. That’s worth considerably more than a tidy account of a fight from last Tuesday.
Recognize the machine?
Then you understand more about what’s happening between you than you did ten minutes ago. A few quick questions to check I’m the right fit, and the form is at the end of them.