Couples/Marital Therapy

Couples often seek help when they are are encountering roadblocks or lacking intimacy—repeating the same destructive argument, a trust rupture or infidelity, lack of understanding or compassion, disagreement about priorities, disparate needs for closeness and space leading to feelings of neglect or overwhelm, or general malaise in the relationship. Dr. Neuhof and her team take an in-depth assessment and therapeutic approach to assisting couples in gaining insight into their dynamics, which we are rooted in their shared journey as well as families of origin. We will meet with the couple together for 1-2 sessions and generally recommend at least one individual session so that we can learn more about the couple’s core issues from both the individual and couple’s perspectives, taking care to consider each person’s wishes, desires, fears, and needs.

We will strive to get to know your story as a couple, and ultimately shed insight into your core relational themes. We are flexible in our approach, ready to hone in on a circumscribed problem or assess and address broad life domains including ideas about family, culture and traditions, communication, boundaries, a shared ‘home’, responsibilities, finances, intimacy, play, and future.

Insight alone can foster feelings of greater connection and calm for couples. We will glean information about your respective attachment styles and how they were formed, the understanding of which essentially provides a roadmap for each partner’s emotional needs and patterns. Based on our ongoing evaluation of your needs and desires and how they interplay, we can recommend proven-effective strategies to improve your communication and mutual respect, and to enhance compassion and shared intimacy. We can provide guidance in the creation of rituals that strengthen a couple’s bond and identity as one. When a couple experiences new ways of being and relating to one another both inside and out of the therapy room—hope, clarity, and excitement may emerge about the possibilities for building a healthy relationship, family, home, and future.

Issues we may deal with include dating, premarital counseling, sexual intimacy, becoming parents or parenting dilemmas, an emotional or sexual affair, other issues of mistrust, negotiating life’s trials ranging from finances to in-law relationships, and conscious uncoupling in separation or divorce. Our philosophical approach to couples or marriage therapy represents an integration of ideas and techniques form Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, Relational-Cultural Psychotherapy, Bowen’s Family Systems Theory and Attachment Theory as well as evidence-based approaches including Trauma-Informed Care, Somatic-Experiencing and nervous system regulation, and the Gottman Method. Brief and longer-term therapy is available.

Trauma-Informed Care

Dr. Neuhof specializes in trauma therapy and will work with individuals personally or consult closely with the NPC treating therapist. We see our work with survivors of sexual, physical, emotional, neglect, and narcissistic abuse as sacred. Your comfort with proceeding at your own pace is of the utmost importance. In fact, part of recovery is learning what this means for you. If we sense that you are anxious, agitated or numbing out during session, we may ask you to tune in to your body sensations, thoughts and feelings, and consider whether you are overwhelmed. We will either sit with you in this place of raw emotion or help you take a step back in order to ground and build up the inner scaffolding, so that you can process more while staying connected. Some techniques we may use to help you ‘titrate’ or gradually sit with triggering material are the Emotion Freedom Technique (Tapping), Bilateral Stimulation, the Voo Sounding from Somatic Experiencing (SEP), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) self-soothing methods (see our resource page for links of evidence-based nervous system regulation practices). We strive to assist our clients in better recognizing, accepting, understanding, and modulating their emotional experience so that they feel more centered and emboldened.

There is no ‘one path’ to healing from the emotional, behavioral, social, sexual, and physiological effects of trauma. We are committed to discovering a path that will enable you to heal wounds and address the impacted areas in your life, in a way that feels right to you. This may entail your sharing and processing fragments or full length memories of abuse, but not necessarily; we can address the aftermath without reopening wounds or explicitly discussing what happened. That said, some people find it liberating to tell their story as they reclaim and integrate parts. Our psychotherapists will share our thoughts about approaches we may take, information about common sequelae of abuse to validate your experience, our feelings and sensations that might reflect warded off parts of yourself, and proven-effective strategies to help you integrate, reclaim, and bloom.

Child & Adolescent Therapy & Parent Support

While Telehealth is not the preferred treatment modality for most children, if the child is highly verbal and we jointly determine that Telehealth is in their best interest, our pediatric Psychotherapists employ journaling, narrative therapy, bibliotherapy, humor, and other mediums to address the child or teenager’s concerns in a non-threatening way. Such playful and creative therapeutic encounters facilitate self-understanding via emotional identification, expression and nervous system regulation. Artistic, narrative, somatic and playfulness can also liberate one from intrusive thoughts or self-limiting beliefs by bypassing rigid automatic cognitions to connect with one’s emotional and creative reservoirs. 

Caretaker guidance is an integral part of our work with children and younger adolescents. Psychotherapy is a safe place to explore and address concerns regarding your or your partner’s emotional reactions to parenting and when old wounds are triggered, questions about traditions, rules and discipline, the impact of childbirth, and family stressors on your concerns for your child or adolescent. 

For parents

“Ghosts in the nursery” is a metaphor that represents the process by which parent survivors of trauma unconsciously reenact patterns of (sometimes grave) misattunement with their children leading to fear, confusion or mistrust. In therapy, these patterns can be unearthed and linked to forgotten or buried memories, freeing up the parent to feel (sometimes for the first time), process and resolve such early experiences. The healing of the parent’s inner child enables them to be more available for their own children. In contrast, “angels in the nursery” represents a parent’s identification with a loving and protective parental figure. This reparative process can happen lifelong. When parents internalize this positive self-concept and in turn see goodness in their own children, intergenerational patterns of dismissive or abusive parenting can be transformed into secure and loving attachments. We will work with parents on these concerns or recommend individual therapy, so that they may better understand and sensitively respond to their children or teenagers while taking care of themselves.