How We Help

Individual Therapy

We work with adults dealing with anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction, and relationship difficulties. Our approach is strength-based and solution-focused, while recognizing that many of the patterns we struggle with as adults are rooted in earlier experiences and relationships.

Individual therapy is tailored to each client. We help clients identify the patterns that are keeping them stuck, understand the experiences and relationships that shaped those patterns, and develop healthier, more adaptive ways of responding to old challenges.

Couples Therapy

It may be time to rethink marriage as a 50/50 business deal. It isn't. And people don't simply "fall out of love" the way a child falls out of bed.

Every couple develops patterns that are unique to their relationship. Regardless of what brings a couple into therapy, each partner will need to look honestly at their own part and ask what they can do to contribute to the solution. We believe that, regardless of the past, each person is responsible for the quality of their own life.

That means that when a couple walks into therapy, there are really three clients in the room: each partner and the marriage itself. All three need attention.

We work with couples struggling with communication, chronic conflict, emotional distance, addiction, infidelity, and broken trust. When betrayal or infidelity has occurred, we take the injury seriously. The first priority is establishing safety, accountability, and honesty before asking a couple to move toward forgiveness or repair.

Our approach helps couples understand not only what they are fighting about, but the patterns underneath those conflicts. We help each partner understand their own reactions, communicate more effectively, and develop new ways of responding to one another.

We have seen couples come through extraordinarily painful crises and build relationships that are healthier and more honest than what existed before. That kind of healing requires more than good intentions. It requires both partners to be willing to do the work necessary for genuine change.

Addiction Recovery

“If you have a mood- or mind-altering solution to a feelings problem, and your solution causes even more problems—but you continue to use it as a solution anyway—you are probably addicted.”
— John Leadem

That may be one of the simplest ways to understand addiction.

Addiction is not defined only by how much or how often someone drinks, uses a drug, or engages in a behavior. A central question is whether a person continues turning to something for relief despite the problems it is creating.

For many years, clinicians have used the CAGE questionnaire as one simple screening tool for problematic alcohol use:

C — Cut down: Have you ever felt that you should cut down on your drinking?
A — Annoyed: Have people close to you become annoyed or concerned about your drinking?
G — Guilty: Have you ever felt guilty about your drinking?
E — Eye-opener: Have you ever needed a drink first thing in the morning to steady yourself or relieve the effects of drinking?

Two or more positive responses have traditionally indicated the need for further assessment. A screening tool does not make a diagnosis, but it can help identify when something deserves a closer look.

Process Addictions

Drugs and alcohol are not the only things people can use to change the way they feel.

Certain behaviors can also become repetitive, compulsive, and increasingly difficult to control despite mounting consequences. Gambling is the clearest example recognized in current psychiatric diagnostic systems. Clinically, similar patterns may also be seen around sex, pornography, eating, spending, and other highly reinforcing behaviors.

Whatever the behavior, our treatment begins with the same basic questions: What does this do for you? What happens when you try to stop? What is it costing you? And why do you keep returning to it despite those costs?

Pornography & Compulsive Sexual Behavior

Compulsive pornography use and sexual behavior can become deeply entrenched patterns involving craving, secrecy, loss of control, escalation, and continued behavior despite serious personal and relationship consequences.

Research examining the brains of individuals with compulsive sexual behavior has found heightened reactivity to sexual cues in brain regions involved in motivation and reward, including the ventral striatum. Researchers have identified important similarities between these responses and processes observed in substance use and other addictive disorders (University of Cambridge, 2014). We believe that treating out-of-control compulsive sexual behavior within an addiction and recovery framework is firmly grounded in current clinical research.

Treatment begins by helping clients stop the unwanted behavior and establish stability. From there, considerable attention is given to understanding each client's individual relapse process: the triggers, emotional states, thinking patterns, opportunities, justifications, and seemingly small decisions that precede acting out. The better a client understands that process, the earlier they can intervene.

Recovery also requires addressing the underlying emotional and relational patterns that made the addictive behavior useful in the first place. The goal is not simply abstinence. It is learning how to live without repeatedly needing the old behavior as a solution.

When appropriate, we strongly support participation in 12-step recovery fellowships alongside psychotherapy. Depending on the individual, these may include Sex Addicts Anonymous (SAA), Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous (SLAA), or Sexaholics Anonymous (SA). Meetings, sponsorship, fellowship, and step work can provide forms of accountability and peer support that psychotherapy was never designed to replace.

Trauma

Painful experiences do not necessarily remain in the past simply because the events themselves are over.

Our brains learn from experience. What has happened to us influences what we expect, what we fear, what feels safe, and how we respond when something in the present reminds us of something painful from the past.

For some people, traumatic experiences result in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Symptoms may include intrusive memories, nightmares, avoidance, hypervigilance, emotional numbness, changes in mood and thinking, and feeling as though the nervous system remains on alert long after the danger has passed.

But trauma can affect people even when they do not meet the criteria for PTSD. It can shape relationships, emotional regulation, self-perception, trust, attachment, and the ways people respond when they feel threatened, rejected, ashamed, or overwhelmed.

Our clinicians use trauma-informed and evidence-based approaches to help clients understand these responses, process painful experiences, and develop greater emotional stability and flexibility.

Betrayal Trauma

Discovering infidelity, pornography use, sexual secrets, or longstanding deception by a spouse can profoundly destabilize a person's sense of safety.

The injury is not limited to discovering a sexual behavior. A betrayed partner may suddenly question what was true, what was false, how long the deception existed, and whether the person they depended upon can still be trusted.

Betrayed partners may experience:

• Hypervigilance and an intense need for information
• Intrusive thoughts, images, nightmares, or panic
• Severe anger, grief, and rapidly changing emotions
• Shame, self-doubt, and self-blame
• Emotional numbness or detachment
• Loss of self-esteem
• Difficulty concentrating or functioning normally
• Profound loss of trust and emotional safety

Betrayal presents a particularly difficult therapeutic problem. After many kinds of interpersonal injury, establishing safety may involve creating distance from the person who caused the harm. In a marriage that both partners hope to repair, the injured spouse may instead be trying to heal while remaining in a relationship with the very person whose behavior shattered that sense of safety.

That requires careful clinical work.

We help individuals and couples through the immediate crisis following discovery, establishing appropriate boundaries and safety, disclosure, recovery from compulsive sexual behavior, rebuilding trust, and eventually determining what genuine relationship repair can look like.

Effective betrayal work must hold two realities at the same time: the betrayed partner's injury must not be minimized, and the partner who caused that injury must take responsibility for meaningful change.

We also offer a weekly therapy group for men recovering from sex addiction and infidelity who want to understand their wives' experience of betrayal and learn how to become active participants in the healing and repair of their marriages.