For Conscious Couples Navigating Meaningful Transitions In Commitment, Intimacy, And Connection

As a conscious couples navigating meaningful transitions—whether you’re preparing for commitment, adjusting to parenthood, rebuilding intimacy, shifting to non-monogamy or new relationship arrangements, or facing moments of uncertainty and distance. This depth-oriented, attachment-informed work helps you slow down, understand your relational patterns, and strengthen both emotional and sexual connection to build or rebuild the relationship you imagined. We support you in to clarify what’s happening between you and move forward with greater care, honesty, and intention.

For Couples Who Love Each Other —And Want To Feel Even More Connected

Many couples who seek support are not on the brink of separation. They care deeply for one another, share values, and have built meaningful lives together. There is affection, loyalty, and a genuine desire to understand each other better.

And yet, even strong, loving relationships can get stuck.

You may recognize yourselves here:

You respect and care for each other, but certain conversations still go off track
Small misunderstandings escalate fast
Emotional closeness is present, but feels inconsistent or fragile under stress
You communicate well in many areas, yet struggle around a few sensitive topics
You sense your relationship has the potential for greater depth, ease, and intimacy

Couples counseling in this context is not about fixing a broken relationship — it's about strengthening what's already there and helping love feel safer, more spacious, and more deeply felt. It's about enhancing your relationship so that as life's stressors and transitions come your way, you're more equipped to turn toward each other to navigate them.

Supporting Conscious Couples Ready For Real Change

Our work with couples is depth-oriented, relational, and emotionally engaged. We view couples counseling as a space to slow down, listen more carefully, and understand the emotional patterns that shape how partners connect — especially during moments of vulnerability.

We integrate established couples frameworks — including the Gottman Method, Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), Internal Family Systems' Intimacy From the Inside Out (IFS/IFIO) and integrative and intersubjective approaches — within a Jungian psychoanalytic perspective that attends to unconscious patterns, attachment histories, and the emotional meanings each partner brings into the relationship.

This allows us to explore:

How you experience one another in the moment
What each of you brings into the relationship from earlier relational experiences
How strengths and protective strategies sometimes collide under stress
What your survival strategies and patterns are, given your attachment and early experiences with caregivers

Rather than treating conflict as a problem to eliminate, we approach it as information — pointing toward unmet needs, fears of disconnection, and longings for closeness, as well as opportunities to better know ourselves, our partners, and to lean in toward vulnerability, intimacy, and healing.

What Couples Often Gain With This Approach

Couples who engage in this work often find that they:

Feel more emotionally attuned and understood by one another
Navigate difficult conversations with less defensiveness and more curiosity
Understand why certain topics feel charged despite goodwill and love
Move beyond familiar roles and interact with greater flexibility
Feel more like a team when approaching life's difficulties
Experience deeper intimacy, trust, and emotional safety

Change emerges not from learning the "right" way to communicate, but from new emotional experiences that deepen connection and restore ease.

What Kinds Of Couples Thrive In This Space

This work is especially well-suited for couples who:

Care deeply about their relationship and want to intentionally invest in it
Have many strengths, but feel their relationship could be richer or they could feel more connected
Want more than surface-level tools or communication tips
Are open to emotional depth and thoughtful self-reflection
Value expertise, nuance, and psychological insight
Have done their own inner work and have some self-awareness of how their own personal histories and patterns impact them

We frequently work with:

Long-term couples seeking renewed intimacy or clarity
High-functioning partners who communicate well, but feel emotionally misaligned or a bit more distant than usual
Couples navigating transitions such as moving toward more commitment, pre-marital support, adjustments to parenting or to opening up their relationship, along with those in blended families, or in new relationships after divorce
Partners wanting to strengthen trust after periods of distance or strain, with experiences of betrayal, ruptures, or breaches in trust

This Work May Not Be The Best Fit For You If...

This approach may not be ideal if you are seeking:

A highly structured or prescriptive program
A therapist to mediate disputes or take sides
Those not interested in learning more, gaining insight, and taking responsibility for their own behaviors
Immediate crisis intervention without ongoing relational work
Those not interested in changing the relationship dynamics that lie beneath the skills and surface level issues

Depth-oriented couples support is an investment in the relationship. It unfolds over time with particular attention to strategically unpacking the cyclical nature of relationship patterns that have established over your lifetime. It addresses each of you and the dynamics you've established in your relationship; it offers care and support as you deepen your understanding of your relationship, your partner, yourself, and the underlying reasons for disconnection, misunderstanding, or hitting bumps in the road, as you navigate stressors and transitions.

What Does Working With Us Look Like

Sessions are collaborative, emotionally focused, and active. We work with both partners together, attending closely to what happens between you in real time, while holding your shared history and intentions in mind.

Sessions may include:

Slowing down emotionally-charged moments
Naming relational patterns as they arise
Exploring feelings with curiosity rather than urgency
Clarifying the deeper meanings beneath misunderstandings
Exploring and naming attachment patterns driving interactions
Purposefully guiding discussion of vulnerable topics while prioritizing connection
Teaching skills that work for enhancing intimacy and your relationship foundation
Exploring relationship boundaries, agreements, and violations
Repairing ruptures and tending to sensitivities to bring closeness

Extended sessions (3 hours on Fridays or Saturdays) are often especially effective for couples navigating transitions, families, busy lives, and for those who would like to dive in on a monthly rather than a weekly basis.

Couples Support From Two Professionals

Most couples benefit from having more than one perspective on what's happening in the room with them and their relationship.

In our co-therapy couples consultation model, couples work simultaneously with two practitioners who specialize in supporting couples:

a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a PhD in Developmental Psychology specializing in couples relationships, parenting and child development with a focus on attachment
and a Philosophical Practitioner with multiple Masters degrees (Philosophy concentrating in Biomedical Ethics; Journalism concentrating in Law) who's work as a practitioner specializes in relational and ethical inquiry with couples

This approach allows us to attend to both the emotional underpinnings of conflict and the meaning, values, and assumptions shaping how partners understand their relationship.

Why Offer Support For Couples By A Couple?

What we offer is something unique in the field of couples therapy and counseling — support for couples by a couple. Our work is specifically designed to help couples think and feel more fully in their relationship, to understand their relationship more deeply, and to feel understood and supported by the lived experiences of a couple who has navigated the complexities of a relationship themselves.

The presence of two practitioners supporting a couple often:

Reduces polarization or the presence of divisiveness and opposition that is inherently held by a couple's system
Helps couples feel more accurately understood and simultaneously validated
Allows multiple perspectives to coexist without collapsing into viewing things as right/wrong
Allows for the sharing of what has successfully worked from a real couple's experience, with examples and strategies that have actually worked and are not just based on theory
Creates a larger holding environment for emotionally-intense work
Multiple perspectives, professionally and personally

More importantly perhaps, is our lived experience as a couple. We bring insight and practical guidance based on our own relationship and experience, as well as knowledge and professional expertise in supporting couples and families navigating transitions in their lives and in their relationship.

This Approach Is Especially Helpful For...

You're a well-functioning, high-achieving couple that live consciously, and you know that transitions in your life and relationship should be navigated with care. You're ready for intentional and meaningful work as you explore or face new territories, whether in your relationship commitments or in life's transitions. You know that even the best relationships need support to adjust to new arrangements, environments, and stressors. And you want to live with more intention, intimacy, and connection.

This approach is often a good fit for couples who:

Feel stuck despite previous couples counseling
Are highly verbal, thoughtful, or intellectually engaged
Experience recurring conflicts rooted in values or meaning
Want both emotional depth and rigorous reflection
Are navigating long-term or high-stakes relationship decisions

It can be particularly helpful for:

Long-term partners looking for a tune-up
Partners in blended families
Couples recovering from betrayal or rupture
Partners at decision points about the future of the relationship
Couples navigating transitions in commitment (i.e., premarital)
Couples transitioning to parenthood
Partners building a new relationship after divorce or recent long-term breakups
Partners establishing new relationship agreements, including non-monogamy and polyamorous relationships

The Couple You'll Be Supported by

Melissa George, PhD, LMFT
I bring over two decades of experience as a clinician, researcher, and university educator, with a depth-oriented, Jungian psychoanalytic approach that blends developmental science with couples and family work. Attachment and couples work is my specialty, as is the impact of transitions on couples and children, such as parenthood, parenting, divorce, and blending families, especially how women navigating these.

Jason Gorbett, MA, MA, PhPrac
As a philosophical practitioner with decades of experience as a writer, I support couples through ethical reflection, relational meaning-making, and careful inquiry into values, assumptions, and patterns. Navigating role identities and communication are my specialties, especially for couples and men navigating work and family life balance, fatherhood, divorce, and blended family life.

As a couple, we've worked together intentionally to develop a shared framework that integrates emotional depth with philosophical clarity, that blends evidence-based couples therapy models with lived experience, and that uniquely supports each couple where they are, attuning to their needs for personal and relational growth.

We not only work together as partners in the therapy room, but we're partners in love and life, and part of a blended family ourselves. We've built an exceptional relationship amidst the stressors that life, work, exes, children/stepchildren, and relationship transitions bring.

This lived experience informs our sensitivity to relational complexity. It gives us a deep understanding of where you've been and what you're going through, and it gives us practical tools to share that have worked for us. We can offer a different kind of hope for you and your relationship because of where we've been and how far we've come.

You Don't Have To Do It Alone

If you love your partner and want your relationship to feel even more connected, resilient, and alive, we invite you to reach out to schedule an initial consultation.

Couples work including consultation & counseling can be a space not just for repair — but for deepening intimacy, strengthening communication, and helping a good relationship grow even stronger. As you face transitions in your life, bolstering the strength of your relationship can ease the uncertainty and stressors you're facing.

If you're ready for insight, growth, and support as you navigate your next transition, please reach out.

Get in Touch