For Couples Navigating Love & Relationship In Blended Families

You're building a relationship while navigating the complexity of a blended family — exes, children, shifting roles, and old relational patterns. Couples counseling with us offers a depth-oriented space to strengthen your bond, understand unconscious dynamics, clarify boundaries, and create a solid foundation during transitions. Integrating insight with relational and attachment based strategies, this work supports conscious partnership, emotional maturity, and building a relationship that can hold both love and complexity.

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Build A Solid Foundation While Navigating Complexity

You love each other — and yet your relationship feels like it's on constantly shifting sands.

You're not only learning how to be good partners to one another, you're navigating ex-partners, children and stepchildren, co-parenting dynamics, shifting loyalties, and old relational patterns that resurface under pressure. The demands are real, and the emotional complexity can quietly erode (or suddenly explode) even the strongest connection.

Couples work with us offers you a space to slow down and get your footing again, to make meaning of what's happening below the surface, and to intentionally build a steady foundation that can hold both love and the complexities of modern life.

When Love Meets Layers Of Complexity

Blended families ask more of a relationship than most people are prepared for. You're trying to build a strong, safe, secure foundation for a healthy, loving new partnership that will be different than the previous ones and last a lifetime, yet you're bringing in more history, old patterns, and relationship dynamics from the past including exes, co-parents, and children. The unconscious dynamics of the past create more tension, conflict, and attachment wounding that create a minefield of potential dangers which keep you hypervigilant and ever-navigating the potential explosions and uncertainty all around you.

You may notice:

Repeating conflicts that feel disproportionate or confusing
Feeling like you're competing with the past — exes, previous family systems, old wounds
Tension around parenting roles, authority, and boundaries
A sense that one or both of you is over-functioning, under-functioning, or emotionally withdrawing
Fear that if things don't stabilize soon, resentment will harden and the relationship won't sustain the chaos

These struggles are not a sign that something is "wrong" with you or your relationship. They're inevitable as you enter into blended families. And they uniquely offer invitations to understand the inner dynamics shaping how you relate — to each other and to the family system you're creating. In fact, struggles create challenges for you to navigate building a healthier, safer, more trusting and loving container through which you can face any external stressor that may come your way.

A Depth-Oriented Approach To Couples Work

This work is rooted in a Jungian, depth-oriented perspective, which means we focus on what lies beneath the surface of level communication and relationship skills. We also offer practical strategies from evidence-based couples therapy models, including The Gottman Method, Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), and Internal Family Systems/Intimacy From the Inside Out (IFS/IFIO).

However, with a depth approach we uniquely attend to the unconscious patterns, projections, attachment wounds, and archetypal roles that emerge when two life histories — and family systems — collide.

Together, we pay attention to:

How your personal histories and early relational templates are shaping your current conflicts
The ways unresolved grief, loyalty binds, or shadow material show up in your partnership
The emotional meaning behind power struggles, withdrawal, reactivity, or over-responsibility
What each of you is being asked to grow into during this transition

This is work for couples who want more than quick fixes — you want lasting change, emotional maturity, and a relationship that feels grounded and intentional. And you value guidance and support from a couple who's been through it too, who understand what you're going through — not just because we learned it in school — but because we have experienced it ourselves, survived it, and are thriving on the other side of it.

What You Will Work On Together

In session with us, you and your partner will have support from us as a couple to:

Strengthen your emotional bond while honoring individual needs
Enhance communication, intimacy, and partnership
Develop clarity around roles, boundaries, and expectations within the blended family
Navigate ex-partner dynamics without letting them dominate your relationship
Interrupt recurring cycles rooted in past relationships or family-of-origin patterns
Build trust, stability, and shared meaning during a time of transition
Create a partnership that feels like a secure base — not another source of stress

The goal is not perfection — in fact, it has to be messy for growth. The goal is conscious partnership — one where you better understand yourselves, each other, and the new family systems you're shaping.

Is This Work Right For You?

This work is well-suited for couples who:

Are forming or stabilizing a blended family
Value emotional depth, insight, and self-reflection
Are willing to look at their own inner dynamics — not just their partner's behavior
Want to invest in their relationship as a long-term foundation for their family
Are seeking unique evidence-based couples therapy support from a couple who has lived experience
Want to strengthen their partnership, connection, communication, and alignment
Want to build an exceptional relationship
Are looking for a more conscious approach to coupling and navigating transitions in blended family life

What Sessions 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 meaning beneath misunderstandings
Exploring and naming attachment driven cycles when they arise
Offering education and insight on the nature of blending families
Building a stronger relationship foundation through skills for intimacy and connection
Focusing on practices of love that create and exceptional relationship
Navigating boundaries with exes, past lives, and children
Guided discussions of vulnerable topics and tending to sensitivities
Attention to understanding the unique experiences of each partner navigating blended family life

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

Two Professionals Supporting You As A Couples

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.

The Benefits Of Working With 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 designed specifically to help couples think and feel more fully in relationship, to understand their relationship more deeply, and to feel understood and supported — by the lived experiences of a couple who's 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 worked successfully from a 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

The Couple Who Will Support You

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.

Building A Relationship That Can Hold The Whole Family

Blended families don’t need more pressure to "get it right."

They need space to slow down, understand what's unfolding, and choose a different way forward — together.

Couples counseling with us offers you a place to do that work with care, depth, and intention — so your relationship becomes a steady center rather than another source of stress.

If you're ready to invest in your partnership and build a foundation that becomes an exceptional relationship — holding all the complexity of love and life in a blended family — we invite you to reach out!

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