When connection feels harder than it should
Most couples who reach out to me are not in crisis. They are tired.
Tired of the same argument that ends the same way. Tired of feeling unseen by the person who is supposed to know them best. Tired of carrying a question they cannot quite name — Is this still working? Can we still find each other?
Some come after a specific rupture: an affair, a loss, a parenting decision that revealed how far apart they had drifted. Others come because something quieter has been eroding — months of polite distance, intimacy that has gone flat, conversations that stay safe and shallow.
Couples therapy with me is a place to slow down, look at what is actually happening between you, and find a way back to each other that holds.
How I work
My approach to couples is grounded in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the model developed by Dr. Sue Johnson and recognized by the American Psychological Association as an evidence-based treatment for relationship distress. EFT is built on attachment science: the understanding that we are wired, across the lifespan, to need secure connection with the people closest to us. When that connection feels threatened, we do not fight about the dishes or the in-laws — we fight about whether we matter to each other.
EFT helps couples identify the painful cycle they keep falling into, slow it down enough to see what is underneath, and rebuild the emotional safety that makes everything else possible.
I also draw on Gottman Method principles — particularly around conflict management, repair attempts, and the research on what predicts long-term relationship health — and on my broader training in attachment-based and depth-oriented therapy. The work is integrative, but the heart of it is helping you both feel less alone in the relationship.
Couples I work with
I work with couples navigating:
Recurring conflict that does not resolve — the same fight, different week
Disconnection and emotional distance — living parallel lives rather than shared ones
Affairs and breaches of trust — both the immediate crisis and the longer work of deciding what is possible
Life transitions that have strained the relationship — new parenthood, career shifts, immigration, illness
Cross-cultural relationships — particularly couples where one or both partners are navigating Chinese, East Asian, or immigrant family contexts
Pre-commitment and pre-marital work — for couples wanting to enter the next stage with intention
I do not work with couples in active domestic violence situations, or when one partner is unwilling to participate in the work. These situations need different resources, and I am glad to help you find them.
How I think about this work
I see couples therapy as an invitation to slow down — to step out of the heat of the recurring fight and look, together, at what is actually happening between you. Not who is right, not whose version of the story wins, but what the two of you keep doing to each other without quite meaning to, and what each of you is reaching for underneath it.
I am not a therapist who hands out communication scripts or assigns homework as the main event. What I find more useful is helping you both notice, in the moment, the small shifts in tone or body or silence that send the relationship in one direction or another — and then helping you say the thing that is actually true, instead of the thing that is safe.
I work bilingually in English and Mandarin, and I have spent most of my adult life moving between Chinese and American contexts — as a clinician, as someone raising a child here, as a person who reads, thinks, and feels in both languages. That experience shows up in how I work with couples. When one partner is more at home in Chinese, or when the relationship itself carries the weight of two cultures, two families, two sets of unspoken rules about love and obligation, none of that has to be translated or simplified for me. It can come into the room as it is.