As I have indicated earlier on this site, the primary emphasis of my practice since 1997 has been to provide individual therapy, marriage counseling and couples therapy in the Orlando area. I make a distinction between marriage counseling and couples therapy in the scope of how I work. Certainly much of my couples work involves marital issues. Yet there are other aspects to why a couple may come into therapy. For instance, they may need to process complications with children, parents, careers, and illnesses just to name a few of the concerns with which I have worked.

In the previous psychotherapy section I went into some detail of how I work which carries over to couples therapy. Still, there are distinctions between working with couples and individual therapy.

Rather than an individual focus, couples therapy explores the relational dynamics of how two individuals form a satisfying intimate bond from which they can build lives together of shared values and goals. The interactional space that exists between a couple encompasses how communication unfolds, how we cope with conflict, how to manage and express expectations, how we create the conditions for intimacy, how we maintain connection and how we develop a sense of trust and safety in each other.  So many facets of everyday life, career, financial, children, health, joys and heartaches  can stress a relationship.  In "working through" the content issues, attention is also paid to the process (how things are done) which often has a significant relational impact.  It is not unusual that in improving the process of how things are managed that the content problems fall into place.

The best results are often achieved in couples therapy when each person is willing to look at how he or she is impacting the relationship rather than always looking at their partner to assume full ownership or responsibility. Of course in certain situations one person's actions have dramatically impacted the relationship and needs to be addressed thoroughly.

There are times when I meet with each person individually, typically in the context of relational issues. Some patients do have an individual therapist in addition to working in couples therapy. Often we need extended sessions (60 to 90 minutes) especially in the beginning phase of therapy to thoroughly evaluate and begin to address concerns.  Also, it is not unusual for some issues to have become so contentious that tensions are elevated requiring additional time to work through them.