Services offered & Populations Served

Whether you’re struggling to connect with your partner, feeling stuck in recurring arguments, or simply wanting to strengthen an already solid relationship, Gottman Method Couples Therapy offers a structured, research-based path forward.

Founded on over four decades of research by Drs. John and Julie Gottman, this approach is grounded in what makes relationships succeed—or fail. It’s not about assigning blame or dissecting your childhoods (though those things may come up). It’s about learning the skills and tools you need to build a relationship that thrives.

So, what can you expect if you start Gottman Couples Therapy?

The process starts with a comprehensive look at your relationship:

• Joint Session: You'll meet with your therapist together to share what brings you to therapy and your goals.
   
• Individual Sessions: Each partner gets a private session to share personal history and perspective.
   
• Online Relationship Checkup: You'll complete a Gottman-designed questionnaire assessing areas like friendship, intimacy, conflict, trust, and shared meaning.
   

This phase isn’t just about gathering data—it sets the foundation for a truly personalized therapy plan.

After the assessment, your therapist will provide feedback and recommend a plan. Sessions are then tailored to your specific needs, using interventions from the Gottmans’ Sound Relationship House Theory—a model built on the building blocks of healthy relationships.

You’ll work on skills like:

• Managing conflict effectively (not avoiding it!)
   
• Enhancing fondness and admiration
   
• Turning toward each other instead of away
   
• Building shared meaning and life dreams

Gottman therapy is hands-on and practical. You’ll learn and practice concrete tools—like how to soften startup in conflict, how to repair in the middle of a fight, and how to listen to understand rather than respond.

Many couples appreciate the structured nature of sessions. You’ll walk away from most meetings with something to try, reflect on, or talk about at home.

Every couple has conflict—what matters is how you handle it. Gottman therapy isn’t about eliminating all disagreements or creating a fairy-tale dynamic. It’s about helping you understand each other better and turn toward each other with empathy even when things are hard.

Many couples start to notice small but meaningful shifts after just a few sessions—like reduced tension or feeling more seen by their partner. But deep, lasting change takes time and consistent effort. Your therapist will guide you at a pace that supports growth without overwhelming either partner.

Gottman Couples Therapy offers a hopeful, structured, and compassionate space for couples of all kinds to reconnect, rebuild, and thrive. Whether you’re in crisis or simply want to enrich your connection, it’s never too early—or too late—to invest in your relationship.

The 4-Dimensional Wheel of Sexual Experience was developed by sex therapist and researcher Dr. Gina Ogden. But its wisdom is much older. This model draws from sacred traditions across the globe that have long understood human beings as multidimensional.

• The Pachakuti Mesa Tradition is ancient Peruvian Andean shamanic wisdom, centered around a sacred altar (mesa) used for healing, ceremony, and spiritual integration. It honors the interconnectedness of body, mind, heart, and spirit.
• The Medicine Wheel in many Indigenous cultures honors the four directions—North, East, South, and West—each representing aspects of self and elements.
• Taoist and Ayurvedic traditions speak of balance—between body, mind, spirit, and emotion—as the path to health.

While the 4-Dimensional Wheel is deeply inspired by ancient healing traditions it is also supported by modern psychological research. Dr. Gina Ogden developed the model through years of qualitative inquiry, including thousands of interviews and clinical sessions with individuals and couples across diverse backgrounds. Her research consistently showed that healing and transformation occur most powerfully when we engage the full spectrum of experience rather than isolating any single part. In this way, the 4-D Wheel bridges sacred wisdom with evidence-based practice, offering a model that is both intuitively resonant and clinically grounded.

The 4-Dimensional Wheel organizes our experience into four domains:

Thoughts, beliefs, stories, questions, judgments, identities. This is the internal narrator that tries to “make sense” of your experience.

Sensation, tension, pleasure, pain, arousal, movement. The body doesn’t use words—it tells the truth in temperature shifts, clenched jaws, muscle tension, or the sigh that comes after a good cry.

Your emotional landscape. Joy, grief, fear, shame, love, vulnerability. This quadrant reminds us that feelings are not problems to solve—they’re messengers.

Often the most neglected (or shame-filled) quadrant, Spirit holds our sense of purpose, intuition, awe, ritual, faith, connection to something greater. It’s not about religion—unless that’s your thing—it’s about meaning beyond the self.

You’re a whole person. A beautifully complex being with thoughts, sensations, feelings, and meaning-making all tangled up together. The 4-D Wheel helps us honor that.

Traditional talk therapy models—especially those grounded in psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, or solution-focused approaches—tend to privilege the mind above all else. They focus on identifying thoughts, analyzing patterns, reframing beliefs, and constructing narratives to make sense of distress. While these tools can be incredibly powerful, especially for insight and problem-solving, they often leave out the wisdom of the body, the truth of emotional experience, and the role of spiritual or existential meaning. For clients navigating issues like intimacy, identity, trauma, or sexuality, this over-reliance on cognition can feel limiting—like trying to explain a song by only reading the lyrics. Healing, for many, requires more than talking about feelings; it asks us to feel them, embody them, and integrate them across every dimension of self.

Likewise, many traditional sex therapy models—especially those rooted in medical or behavioral frameworks—focus heavily on the body as the primary site of dysfunction and intervention. They often emphasize performance, genital function, arousal phases, and physical techniques, assuming that if the "plumbing works," the person is healed. While this can be helpful for some, it risks reducing complex erotic, emotional, and relational experiences into mechanical issues to be fixed. This body-centric focus often leaves out the deeper context—like internalized shame, relational dynamics, spiritual disconnection, or emotional factors—that shape how we experience sexuality. In doing so, it unintentionally mirrors the very fragmentation so many clients are already wrestling with.

What if you stopped trying to “fix” parts of yourself in isolation, and instead began to listen to all of you—Mind, Body, Heart, and Spirit—as a sacred chorus? That’s the power of the 4-D Wheel. 

It’s a living, breathing invitation to come home to yourself. To notice the ache in your chest and the story in your head. To honor the desire in your belly and the whisper of your intuition. To stop asking, “Which part of me is right?”—and start asking, “What are all the parts of me communicating?”

Healing doesn’t come from silencing the uncomfortable or spotlighting the convenient. It comes from integration, from making room at the table for every part of you. That is where the magic happens—in the messy, honest, embodied wholeness of being human.