Couples Therapy in Los Angeles, CA
You’re not failing at your relationship. You’re running two different systems in the same house.
Couples therapy for high intensity adults and the people who love them — in Los Angeles and online.
This therapy is for
Couples come here at all kinds of moments. Before marriage, wanting a real foundation before life stress tests it. After a neurodivergent diagnosis, when the weight of parenting has taken everything and left almost nothing for each other. Inside two demanding careers, navigating the resentment and competition that builds when there isn’t enough space for both. Through the slow erosion of sex and intimacy. Through the money conversations that are never really about money. And after an affair — emotional or physical — sitting with the question of whether what’s broken can actually be repaired.
It can. Not always. But more often than people expect when they first walk in.
Anxious - Avoidant Relationship Dynamic
You have the same fight on rotation. The words change. The underlying dynamic doesn’t.
One partner pursues. The other withdraws. One needs reassurance and the other experiences that need as pressure. One wants more closeness and the other experiences closeness as a loss of control. Someone is always too much. Someone is always not enough. This is the anxious-avoidant dance — and once you’re in it, every conflict pulls you deeper into the same steps.
Or it’s quieter than that. No fighting at all. Just two people in the same space, managing their own experience, parallel instead of together. Polite. Functional. Lonely in a way that’s hard to name because nothing is technically wrong.
When function becomes dysfunction
For couples where one or both partners are high intensity, it often looks like one person running a system built for performance and control, and a partner who keeps colliding with the edges of it. Feeling managed instead of loved. Feeling like they’re asking for too much by wanting to actually be felt.
The high intensity partner isn’t cold. They’re protected. There’s a difference — and it matters.
Sometimes it starts with something specific. A wedding. A new baby. A move, a job change, a loss, a betrayal — emotional or sexual. External pressure that destabilizes what felt stable enough. And sometimes there’s no single moment. Just the long slow trudge of disconnection and friction over time, leading to something bigger and scarier that neither of you wants to look at directly.
What’s Actually Happening Inside
Most couples conflicts aren’t really about the thing they’re about. The argument about the dishes, the silence after the party, the fight that started over logistics and ended somewhere no one expected — these are attachment moments in disguise. Bids for connection that got lost in translation.
When one or both partners carry anxiety, OCD, or a nervous system wired for high performance, the relationship becomes a place where two protection systems meet. And protection systems are not built for intimacy. They’re built for safety. Those are not always the same thing.
The pursuit and withdrawal cycle, the emotional shutdown, the need for control, the walls that go up exactly when connection is most needed — this isn’t dysfunction. It’s two people doing the most sophisticated thing they know how to do to stay safe. It just happens to be incompatible with being close.
What’s possible
Not a perfect relationship. A real one.
One where conflict doesn’t mean catastrophe. Where you fight and come back — faster, cleaner, without the wreckage. Where one partner reaching doesn’t send the other into shutdown. Where intimacy isn’t something that has to be earned or rationed or carefully controlled.
You stop having the same fight and start having the actual conversation underneath it. You repair faster. You reach more and manage less. You learn to be vulnerable with each other — and not just emotionally. Playful. Sensual. Present in ways that got buried under the friction.
The high intensity partner learns that vulnerability doesn’t cost them what they think it does. The other partner stops feeling like a request that keeps getting denied. And both of you stop treating the relationship like a problem to be managed and start treating it like something worth actually showing up for.
You’re still yourselves. You still have edges and histories and hard days. But you’re in it together now — actually together — instead of parallel and protected.
Meet your Los Angeles Couples Therapist
I’ve spent over a decade working with people who are very good at holding it together. High achievers, deep thinkers, people who have read all the books and still can’t turn their brain off at night.
That’s not a coincidence — it’s who I’m here for. I’m not here to pathologize your drive or tell you to slow down. I’m here to help you figure out why the thing that built your life is starting to cost you — and what’s possible on the other side of that.
I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in OCD, high-functioning anxiety, and couples work. I’m Gottman trained and attachment-informed, and I bring a direct, engaged presence into the room. You won’t have to explain yourself from scratch or perform insight you don’t feel yet. We just start where you are.
How We Work:
Couples therapy with me is relational and systems-focused. We’re not here to referee. We’re here to understand what each of you is actually doing — and why — so you can start responding to each other instead of reacting to each other.
A big part of that is understanding how you each communicate and how you each experience conflict. Not to assign a label but to make the dynamic visible — so you can both see the cycle you’re in instead of just living inside it.
We look at how you understand conflict and what you believe it means when it happens. We work on how you fight — because the goal isn’t to stop fighting. It’s to become a better fighter. Cleaner. Above the belt. To stop going to the places that cause damage and leave small fractures that never quite heal.
We work on rupture and repair — how to move from black and white thinking, from me or them, to both of us, same team. How to re-enter connection after a hard moment with safety and clarity instead of more distance. How to recognize a bid for connection even when it doesn’t look like one. How to understand that your partner’s love language isn’t a flaw in their translation — it’s a dialect you can learn.
Using an attachment-based, emotionally focused approach alongside OCD-informed and somatic frameworks where relevant, we work to identify the cycle that keeps pulling you both under. Not to assign blame. Not to declare a winner. But to make the dynamic visible enough that you can both step outside of it.
Sessions are online, flexible, and held with equal respect for both partners.
What You Can Expect:
To finally understand the cycle — not just survive it.
To feel less like opponents and more like two people dealing with the same problem from opposite sides.
A shared language for conflict that keeps you above the belt and out of the places that do real damage.
Real skills for rupture repair — how to find each other again after a hard moment.
A relationship that feels less managed and more inhabited.
And the experience of actually being known by someone — not just accommodated.
Ready to close the gap?
You’ve both been trying. That counts for something. But trying harder inside the same dynamic usually just makes the dynamic louder.
Start with a free 15-minute consultation — online, confidential, and without pressure. Just a real conversation about where you are and what you’re looking for.