Couples Therapy for High-Achieving Professionals

When You're Both High-Performers

You have built careers, led teams, and closed deals, and you are used to solving the problem and moving to the next one, but the same moves that work in a boardroom land badly at home, where your partner did not hire you to manage them.

High-achieving couples walk in with a set of problems most general therapy never names.

• Dual-career dynamics: When both of you are running at capacity all day, the evening has no energy left for an actual conversation, and the relationship lives on logistics.
• Competition that creeps in: Whose career takes the hit this season, whose crisis is bigger, and whose work is treated as the real one.
• Perfectionism at home: The standard that built the career turns into an impossible scorecard for the marriage, and neither of you can hit it.
• Transactional relating: You start treating the partnership like a well-run project, efficient and cold, and then you cannot figure out where the warmth went.
• Success masking problems: The outside looks impressive while you are disconnected at home, and you have gotten good at not mentioning it in public.

Why Traditional Couples Therapy Falls Short

Most couples therapy was built around one career and one person who had weekday time for feelings. It was not built for two people who both lead all day and come home used up. High achievers also resist the instruction to just sit and talk about your feelings. You want to know why a move works, you want the framework, and you want a tool you can use before the next fight, not a slogan about communicating better.

How long therapy takes depends on the work you do between sessions. We generally start weekly so that work has a rhythm, and we space the sessions out as the changes stick.

See also: frequently asked questions.

A Different Approach

I work with professional couples who need the format to respect the life they are already living.

• Evidence-based methods: Emotionally Focused Therapy and the Gottman Method, so you can see the research under the intervention instead of being asked to take a technique on faith.
• 90-minute sessions: Each meeting is long enough to reach the issue and practice a response before you log off, and we generally start weekly, then space sessions out as the changes stick.
• Virtual format: There is no commute and no waiting room, and you meet from the office or from home on a secure video platform.
• Flexible scheduling: Early morning, evening, and weekend times, for calendars that do not have a free Tuesday at noon.
• Direct communication: We name the core issue and work it. I will not spend the hour on a warm-up that never arrives at the point.

Read more

• Emotionally Focused Therapy
• Gottman Method couples therapy

Common Issues I See

Professional couples usually call when one of these has become impossible to keep managing.

• You are doing well at work and living like roommates the minute you get home.
• Arguments escalate fast, because both of you are used to winning and neither of you is used to yielding.
• One career keeps taking the priority, and the resentment has stopped being a passing mood.
• You are in the room and still at the office, and your partner can tell.
• Sex has dropped off because both of you are exhausted, and you have started calling that normal.
• A promotion, an exit, or a growth spurt at work is straining the relationship instead of making it easier.

The Stakes Are Higher

For high-achieving couples, the marriage problem does not stay in the marriage. It shows up in your sleep, your focus, and the way you lead. A strained relationship spends the energy the rest of your life is counting on.

The drive that built the career can be pointed at the pattern, which is what makes the work between sessions actually happen. Sessions are $750 for 90 minutes. I do not accept insurance, and I can give you a superbill for out-of-network reimbursement. I am licensed in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, and you need to be physically in one of those states during the session.