I am a licensed clinical psychologist providing online couples therapy for high-achieving couples — executives, entrepreneurs, business owners, professionals and their partners. Maybe you both have demanding careers, or maybe one of you builds the career while the other runs everything else. Either way, the relationship shouldn't get the leftovers.
Underneath most recurring fights is a real need that never got named. Name it concretely, and it becomes something you can act on.
You do not need a diagnosis or a crisis to start. Naming the thing accurately is usually the first useful hour of work.
What couples bring me
High performance shows up in relationships in more than one configuration, and each one creates its own pain points. All of them belong here — and both partners get taken seriously.
Both of you perform all day and come home with nothing left. The relationship runs on fumes, and neither of you can remember who's supposed to refill the tank.
The pressure to provide is real. So is the invisible, around the clock labor of running a home or raising children — work that doesn't clock out and rarely gets credited. Different stress, equally legitimate, and a setup for mutual resentment when neither feels seen.
Children turned the partnership into shift work. You disagree about discipline, divide labor by exhaustion, and the marriage got demoted to co-management.
Nothing is broken. You simply want a better partnership than the one running on autopilot — and you'd rather invest now than repair later.
Complicated emotions are usually unmet needs wearing disguises. My job is to help you find the need under the fight, say it in plain terms, and turn it into action — not to referee the same argument indefinitely.
The directness is a choice. What sits underneath it is training — the Gottman Method, Structural Family Therapy, Family Systems Therapy, and Problem Solving Therapy for couples. Four traditions that disagree about plenty, and agree that the pattern between two people is the thing worth treating.
We cut beneath the blame and the noise to what each of you actually needs — respect, relief, attention, appreciation, autonomy — including the needs neither of you has said out loud.
"I need more support" isn't actionable. "Take the morning routine on Tuesdays and Thursdays" is. We translate each need into specific, observable terms your partner can actually deliver on.
You leave with explicit agreements — who does what, by when — and we track whether satisfaction actually moves. If it doesn't, we renegotiate. That's the work.
Formal training
No endless archaeology. Clear needs, concrete asks, measurable improvement in how the relationship feels to live in.
Much of what couples fight about is really the household system failing them. Fix the system, and the fights lose their fuel.
Very few high performing couples arrive because the relationship failed. They arrive because the career won every close call for years, and the marriage quietly absorbed the cost. Nobody decided that. It accumulated.
You have had this fight enough times to predict it. One of you pushes for connection, the other withdraws to keep the peace, and both read the other's move as the problem. The content changes — money, in-laws, whose weekend it is — but the pattern does not. Couples therapy that only referees the current argument leaves the loop intact.
You close the laptop and bring the same operating stance through the door: decisive, efficient, running triage. It is what makes you effective at three o'clock and what makes you unreachable at eight. Your partner experiences competence where they wanted presence, and eventually stops asking.
One partner carries the sense of being an item on a calendar that always yields. The resentment builds slowly and rarely announces itself directly — it surfaces as distance, as sharpness over small things, or as a conversation that has become purely logistical.
The income arrived, the title arrived, and the marriage is lonelier than it was before either. That gap is disorienting, and it is common enough that it is nearly a rule rather than an exception among the couples I see.
If the career pressure is the larger problem and the marriage is where it is landing, executive burnout therapy may be the more direct starting point. If one of you consistently gives way to keep things smooth and resents it later, that pattern has a name — see nice guy syndrome. If the strain sits around a decision you are both circling — a move, an exit, a new chapter — see life transitions.
That is usually the most useful thing you can bring me. A repeating argument is a visible symptom of an invisible pattern — typically one partner pursuing and the other withdrawing, each response provoking the next. The work is identifying the loop and changing the moves, not adjudicating who was right on Tuesday.
Routinely. Chronic career pressure does not usually break a good relationship outright; it erodes the surplus that made the relationship easy. Couples who used to absorb small frictions stop having the capacity to, and the same marriage starts to feel harder without anything obvious having changed.
I am active in the room. I will name the pattern I see, including the part each of you is contributing, rather than validating two competing accounts and letting the hour run out. Most couples who seek me out have already tried the version where someone mostly listens.
No, and the couples who come earlier tend to need less. Plenty of the work I do is with people who are basically fine and want to stop drifting — renegotiating how the two of you operate before resentment has had years to set.
That is most of my practice. Executives, founders, business owners, physicians, attorneys and senior professionals, along with their partners — including couples where one person carries the career and the other carries everything else. The pressures are specific, and I do not need them explained from scratch.
Yes — all sessions are online, by secure video. Both partners can join from the same room or from two different places, which is often what makes a shared hour possible in the first place. I am authorized under PSYPACT to work with clients located in 40 states plus Washington, DC.
Often, yes. What matters is where each of you is physically located during the session, and both locations need to be states where I am authorized to practice. PSYPACT covers 40 states plus Washington, DC — you can check the current list on my where I practice page.
Sessions are by secure video, which removes the commute and makes a shared hour far easier to protect. Most dual career couples find that the scheduling problem was never the real obstacle — the harder part is agreeing that the relationship deserves an hour that neither of you will move.
People search for all of those, and in practice they describe overlapping work. Whether you call it couples therapy, marriage therapy, marriage counseling or relationship counseling, what happens in the room is the same: identifying the pattern between you and changing it.
I offer a free 15 minute consultation call to talk through what's going on and clarify whether I'm the right person to help. No cost, and no pressure. Couples sessions are held by secure video, together or in any configuration that works.
Already know you are ready? Skip the call and book your first appointment now.