Couples Therapy
It started about the dishwasher. Ten minutes in, nobody is talking about the dishwasher.
You both know the script by now. One of you pushes, because silence feels like being left. One of you goes quiet, because pushing feels like an ambush. Both of those are protection. Both of them work, in the sense that the conversation ends.
Neither one gets you the thing you were actually after, which was to matter to the person across the table.
Whitney Baker, LMFTA. Gottman-trained, attachment-based, thirteen years in mental health and social services.
What we actually do
We slow the fight down until you can both see it. Not who started it. The shape of it. What each move is protecting, what it costs, and what was being asked for underneath.
Once the pattern is visible, something shifts. It stops being evidence about who you are and what you are like, and becomes a thing in the room that the two of you can work on together instead of against each other.
Then we build.
- Saying the thing you have been trying to say for years, in a way it can actually be heard
- Hearing something hard without going underwater
- Interrupting the loop while it is happening, not three days later
- Repairing after it goes badly, because sometimes it will
- Getting back the parts of each other that got buried under logistics
You will have things to try between sessions, and we will talk about how they went. Understanding a pattern and interrupting one are different skills, and only one of them happens in my office.
Whatever brought you here
You keep having the same fight
The most common reason couples call me, and the thing this work is built for. Six years, three moves, same order.
One of you is not sure about therapy
Normal, and skeptics tend to do fine here because the work is concrete rather than open-ended. If your partner will not come at all, start on your own. One person changing their moves changes the whole pattern, and I have watched it happen more times than I can count.
Something happened
Infidelity, a secret that came out, an agreement that got broken. We deal with what happened before we deal with what it meant, in that order, and I will not pretend it is quick. There is a structured way through this and it works, but it asks a lot of both of you.
You have drifted
No blowups, no villain. Just two people running a household who used to be something else to each other, and neither of you can name the day it changed.
One of you might be done
Some couples come to decide rather than to repair. That is a legitimate reason to be here, and it has its own page.
How sessions run
I usually start with both of you together, then mix in an individual session with each of you so I understand the pattern from both sides. Then back to joint work with a clearer map.
Honesty
Couples sometimes come in while one person is holding something significant. An affair, an addiction, a financial situation. It usually surfaces, and it usually surfaces at the worst possible moment. If you are sitting on something, tell me in your individual session and we will figure out what to do with it.
What it costs
Session rates
$170 for 50 minutes. $200 for extended sessions up to 90 minutes, which most couples find more useful, because fifty minutes has a way of ending right when something real opens up.
Private pay. I am out of network for insurance and provide a superbill after every session. Full rates and reimbursement details.
If you want to work faster than weekly sessions allow, the couples intensive is a concentrated format built for couples in the middle of something urgent.
Online across Washington and Idaho. Evening and early morning appointments available.