Do I need to bring my partner?

Not necessarily. A lot of people work on sexual anxiety individually. If there's a relational dynamic feeding the pattern, we might bring your partner in for a few sessions.

I feel anxious during sex but I don't know why. Is that normal?

You don't need a clear reason for your body to feel unsafe during intimacy. Sometimes it's years of cultural messages about how sex should look. Sometimes it's a pattern your nervous system built so gradually you never clocked the origin. We work with what your body is doing now.

Is this the same as therapy for sexual trauma?

Different entry point. Trauma therapy works with what happened to you and how your body still responds. Anxiety therapy works with the self-monitoring and performance pressure that take you out of sex, whether or not there's a specific event behind it. If you're not sure which fits, we'll figure it out in the consult.

What if I'm embarrassed to talk about this?

Most people are, at first. You don't need to walk in ready to describe your sex life in detail. We start where you are.

Sex & Relationship Therapy for

Communication & Conflict

You know how the fight ends.

Let’s Change if it starts.

You don’t want to fight this much, but no tool has changed it.

You can feel it coming. Your partner's tone shifts, or the pause before their answer runs a beat too long, and something in you is already bracing. Ten minutes later you're both in the scene you swore you wouldn't do again, watching yourselves say the lines from somewhere behind your own eyes.

Somewhere in your house there's a book about this, and possibly a deck of conversation cards. "I feel" statements, active listening, repeating back what you heard: none of it is wrong, and none of it survives contact with your partner's tone of voice on a bad night. Your communication skills don’t matter if you’re unable to regulate yourself or attune to your partner in the moment.

So if communication workshops keep disappointing you, maybe it’s not about the words you say. Maybe it’s about the how. How you’re feeling, what it reminds you of, and how to feel that while staying in present with your partner. And that’s exactly where we start. Getting to know how your nervous systems perceive each other, how it feels to be in conflict, and any other subconscious things at play that make the words fall flat.

This is not a sign your relationship is failing

"We have communication issues" is the most common thing couples say when they call a therapist. Some couples have the loud version. Plenty have the quiet one: no fights, no conversations either, two polite adults managing a household around a silence that has opinions.

That counts as a communication issue too, and it may be the more urgent kind. The cycle doesn't care whether you're married, dating, decades in, monogamous or not; it builds itself between any two nervous systems that have learned each other's alarms. And in a city like New York, where both of you are running depleted by 7pm, the fight usually gets your worst hours and none of your best.

69% of relationship conflict is about

perpetual problems that never fully resolve

(The Gottman Institute)

The ugliest fights are protective.

It’s not about stopping conflict all together. Learn how to handle it knowing it may never resolve, and that’s okay. Tolerate the uncertainty, the discomfort, while fighting for the relationship you want to have, instead of just fighting your partner.

Each of you is guarding something old, and the guarding is what keeps colliding. Nobody in that scene is the villain, including you. So what is your half of the fight protecting, and when did it start doing that job?

GET STARTED

How I can help

I'm active in the room, and I'll interrupt the pattern while it's happening, because that's when it can change. Rather than rehearsing better sentences, we work underneath them:

what happens in your body when your partner's voice shifts
what you're each protecting
what you need in that moment that you've never once said out loud

You'll learn to speak for the angry part instead of from it, which your partner will experience as a different person talking.

I work with two partners at a time, by telehealth in New York and Oregon, from a differentiation-based couples model with IFS/IFIO underneath. If every fight is secretly about sex, we'll follow it there: that's usually mismatched desire wearing a chore-war costume. If the fights started after a betrayal, that's its own work. And all of this lives inside my broader relationship therapy practice.

One thing I want to name explicitly: I can't work with couples if physical or sexual abuse is happening. Couples therapy asks both people to be vulnerable in front of each other, and that's not a safe thing to ask when one of you is being hurt. If that's your situation, reach out anyway. I'll help you find the right support, which starts with individual safety, not a shared room.

WHERE YOU ARE NOW

It's the argument about the dishes that’s never about the dishes. Being told "you always do this" and hearing your own mouth say "well you never," while some saner part of you watches in disbelief. It's apologizing just to get it over with, and the special exhaustion of having the same conversation for the fourth year in a row.

WHERE WE’RE GOING

We slow the cycle down in session, live, until you can each catch what your body does in the half-second before you attack or check out. You get curious about what your half is protecting. Your partner gets to hear the need underneath your anger, said plainly, for the first time.

WHAT THAT LOOKS LIKE in practice

What does your body do when their tone shifts? Which sentence starts the pattern, and what would happen if it didn't get its usual answer? What do you need in that moment that you've never said out loud?

Those are the questions we work with.

The fight keeps happening because it's guarding something that hasn't been named yet.

Ready to start?

Free 30 minute consultation. We'll talk about the fight, the silence, or whatever the two of you are living in, and whether this approach fits.

BOOK

Rate & Fees

$300 for 50 minute sessions

I don’t accept insurance and am private pay only, with superbills for out-of-network reimbursement.

Longer sessions available by request for a pro-rated fee.

FAQs

Yes, and they're the smaller half of the work. Skills hold up only as far as your nervous system lets them, so we build the capacity first and the phrasing second.
Very. Repetition is information: the fight keeps happening because it's trying to unconsciously resolve something that you haven’t been able to yet. Finding out what is the job.
You may need this more than the loud couples do. Avoided conflict doesn't dissolve, and it tends to move into the bedroom, the finances, or the distance between you on the couch.
Conflict and abuse are different things. If you're frightened of your partner, couples therapy usually isn't the right first step, and I'll help you find the right one on our consult call.

Couples communication therapy in Brooklyn, NY I work with New York couples via secure telehealth, in person coming soon. If the two of you are tired of having the same fight in a small apartment, let's talk.

Couples communication therapy in Portland, OR Licensed in Oregon, seeing Portland-area couples virtually. If the fight or the silence has been running things and workshops haven't touched it, I'd love to connect.

You might also be navigating

Mismatched Desire - when the fight is secretly about sex

Infidelity Recovery - when the fights started after a betrayal

People Pleasing - when one of you says yes to everything and resents it

Relationship Therapy - the broader work this page lives inside