Gottman-trained therapy for real change.

Built on what actually predicts whether love lasts.

The Gottman Method grew out of more than four decades of research at Dr. John Gottman's "Love Lab" at the University of Washington, where he and his colleagues observed thousands of real couples — newlyweds, long-married partners, couples in crisis — and tracked them longitudinally for years. The result is one of the only therapeutic models that can predict, with documented accuracy in the high 80s and 90s, whether a couple will stay together or separate based on how they interact during a fifteen-minute conflict.

From that research, John and Julie Gottman built a framework called the Sound Relationship House. The "floors" of the house describe the things healthy couples do — building deep love maps of each other's inner worlds, sharing fondness and admiration, turning toward small bids for attention rather than away from them, accepting one another's influence, managing conflict instead of trying to eliminate it, making life dreams come true together, and creating shared meaning. The "walls" are trust and commitment. The work of therapy is figuring out which floors are sturdy and which are sagging, and reinforcing what's needed.

Gottman also identified four specific patterns — what he called the Four Horsemen — that reliably predict relational distress: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Each has an antidote, and learning to recognize and replace them is one of the most concrete shifts couples experience. Contempt softens into appreciation. Defensiveness gives way to taking responsibility for a piece. The cycle changes.

What makes this different from open-ended talk therapy is that it's pattern-based and skill-based. We're not just processing what came up last week — we're working with a map, naming what we see, and practicing specific repair attempts and conversations. Progress is measurable, and you tend to know what you're building toward.

How I work with this.

I use Gottman as the structural foundation, but I don't run sessions as a worksheet. The framework gives shape to work that can otherwise feel like endless circular conversation — it tells us where to look and what to build. Around that structure, I bring in somatic awareness (what's happening in your bodies as the conflict rises), attachment theory (what each of you learned about love long before you met), and mindfulness (the pause that makes a different response possible at all).

In practice that means the assessment is rigorous, the interventions are specific, and the conversations stay alive. You'll leave sessions with something concrete to try, and we'll come back to what actually happened — not in a graded way, but in a curious one. The point is not to perform the method correctly; it's to use it to find each other again.

Who this really helps.

What the work looks like.

The first three or four sessions are a structured Gottman assessment — a joint conversation about your history and what's bringing you in, individual sessions with each of you, and the Gottman Relationship Checkup, a detailed inventory that surfaces the specific places your Sound Relationship House is strong and the places it's straining. After that I share what I'm seeing, and we shape the work together.

From there we meet weekly in 50, 75, or 90-minute sessions, all online via secure video. The middle phase of the work is where most of the change happens — building skills around the patterns we've identified, practicing repair attempts, slowing down the conflict cycle in real time so a different ending becomes possible. We track what's shifting, and we adjust as we go.

Common questions.

Where this connects.