Dorit Osher

COUPLES THERAPY

Being part of a couple can be one of life’s greatest comforts, offering connection, companionship, and a sense of home with another person. It can also be painful and challenging at times, especially when the connection between you feels strained and finding your way back to one another feels hard.

Many of us are taught to think of love as something that should come naturally. Yet sustaining a close relationship over time often asks much more of us. Love also involves learning, learning how to communicate our needs, respond to one another with care during conflict, and stay connected through stress, difference, and life’s many transitions. Most of us were never explicitly taught these skills, which can make relationship challenges feel especially difficult or confusing when they arise.

I believe our early relationship experiences often shape how we relate in intimate partnerships. Our expectations, hopes, and emotional responses are often influenced by earlier experiences, outside of conscious awareness. Long-term relationships can bring closeness and comfort, while also bringing us into contact with vulnerability, unmet needs, and familiar protective patterns.

Couples may feel stuck in recurring conflict, struggle after a betrayal, feel emotionally or sexually disconnected, or find that over time they have drifted apart. When this happens, familiar patterns such as blame, shutting down, resentment, or avoidance can take hold and become difficult to shift alone.

Couples therapy offers a supportive space to slow things down, better understand these patterns, and strengthen connection. Together we work to help each partner feel heard and understood, communicate more openly, and build greater emotional safety, empathy, and trust.

As a trained psychodynamic couples therapist, I work with couples to understand the emotional patterns in their relationship and how each partner’s history may be shaping the present. Alongside this deeper exploration, we also work with practical strategies to strengthen communication, repair disconnection, and support a more secure and lasting connection.

Areas we may work with together include:

• Communication and conflict
• Emotional and sexual disconnection
• Infidelity and rebuilding trust
• Parenting and family stress
• Life transitions
• Family of origin patterns
• Grief and loss
• Deepening connection

I usually meet you as a couple first and will have separate sessions for each partner to better understand your early relational history and perceptions of the current relationship difficulties. We then return to couple sessions.