Couples Therapy in Los Angeles

Virtual therapy available throughout all of California

Therapy for Couples Seeking Clarity, Compassion, and a Stronger Emotional Bond

In couples therapy, the focus is not on assigning blame, but on understanding the cycle you’re caught in together. When stress, resentment, or unresolved hurt builds, even strong relationships can begin to feel fragile or stuck. Therapy provides a structured, supportive space to strengthen communication, heal relational wounds, and rebuild intimacy—so your relationship can feel more stable, responsive, and alive.

Couples therapy offers a supportive space to rebuild connection, improve communication, and become emotionally attuned to the patterns that keep you stuck. Together, we explore the emotions and unmet needs beneath conflict, helping you and your partner feel seen, heard, and understood. Whether you’re navigating recurring arguments, disconnection, or simply want to strengthen your bond, couples therapy can help create a more secure and fulfilling relationship.

How I work with couples

Most couples have been in a state of disconnection, pain and/or numbness for too long before seeking support. Caught in a pattern that can feel helpless and dysfunctional. There are always two sides of the experience and most of my couples come into therapy with different understands of the problem. ‘Sure, we don’t communicate well, but its because they don’t listen to me’ meanwhile your partner might feel like they’ve been begging to be seen or ‘at wits’ end’ with all the frustrating and unmet emotional needs. 

Couples therapy is not about figuring out who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s not about blaming one person over the other. 

I work with my couples to stop litigating and learn how to listen. We can start to build globalizing stories in our heads that become black and white, lack nuance and lack the humanity in ourselves and our partner. We fight. Explode. Suppress. Cope. Stay disconnected or brush it under the rug. It’s a vicious cycle that’s hard to break out of - but there’s hope.

I encourage my couples to bring their fights into the room. I will listen to how you talk to each other, how you try to negotiate for your needs, shut down or invalidate the other. I don’t allow my couples to waste a session going back and forth arguing and hurting one another further. I step in and point out ways I notice you harming one another. I bring compassionate awareness to these defenses to make each of you an expert in your relationship. 

We get out of blame and building stories and we move into what you’re feeling and needing.  

Conflict is about connection

When we don’t know how to ask for what we need, we resort to learned behaviors that keep us stuck and emotionally deprived.

  • we blame our partner for not seeing us, rather than asking to be seen

  • we emotionally isolate when we feel unheard or misunderstood, leaving our partner more confused

  • we numb, scroll, medicate to avoid confronting the pain we feel and the emotional needs that are not being met

  • we fall into cycles of dismissing, invalidating and even gaslighting, making communication unsafe and painful

  • We move farther away from ourselves and abandon each other

Relationships take work. I know we are told that when you find your person, everything should click and fall into place. “Shouldn’t they just know?” I hear this all the time. Anything from doing the dishes, taking out the trash to knowing you’re having a bad day or using a word that triggers you. We hold this idea that if our partner really loved us, they would know how we’re feeling. We forget our partner is having their own internal experience. We rob ourselves of the healing that comes when we are able to express our emotional needs and actually feel safe, seen and loved by the person closest to us.

This is emotional intimacy.

Part of my work with couples focuses on taking accountability for our feelings. We learn there is a difference between saying “I felt hurt and want you to understand how I felt” and saying “You always do this, you never listen to me, you don’t care how I feel”. We either explode into nasty fights that leave us exhausted and hurt or we emotionally isolate and move farther and farther away from repair. Couples therapy creates a space to see where you’re missing each other, how you’re failing to own your side and opportunities for connection that aren’t been taken.

Our significant other should be our partner. They are not responsible for our feelings but there needs to be safety and trust that we can share the deepest parts of our feelings without insults, blames or invalidation. Building this foundation is so fulfilling.

My Approach

How I work with clients…

Many of my clients come into therapy feeling lost and overwhelmed with anxious thoughts of worry, fear, self criticism with nowhere to go. Deep feelings they don’t know how to talk about. Desires. Insecurities. Regrets. Shame. Pain. Wants. Needs. I get it. We can only hold it all together for so long until something in us breaks - and we finally ask for help. As a therapist, I am active and engaging. I am not going to sit quietly nodding while you vent, update or complain. I will share my thoughts, insights, reflections and sometimes, my own experience when appropriate.

Our work begins with getting a full picture of your life, sharing stories of what you’ve been through, developing a sense of safety in how we talk about your life. I will listen to you deeply and make sure you feel safe and connected to me. Many of us have to build a sense of armor to protect ourselves, and this can lead to dysfunctional patterns that helped us survive a difficult childhood or time in our lives that needs to be un-learned as we become adults who actually have more control over our lives and our stories. I’m here to help you figure this out.

Common Struggles with Couples

  • When emotional reactivity takes over, partners often respond from old wounds rather than the present moment. Couples therapy helps identify these patterns and create space for more regulated, intentional responses that support connection instead of conflict.

  • Lasting change in relationships requires self-awareness and the willingness to own your part in relational patterns. Couples therapy helps each partner recognize their triggers, defenses, and contributions to conflict: creating space for accountability, growth, and more honest connection. Owning your part doesn’t mean taking all the blame; it means understanding how your reactions, behaviors, and avoidance impact the relationship. Therapy supports this awareness so responsibility can replace defensiveness and real repair can begin.

  • When one or both partners carry unresolved trauma, conflict can feel threatening rather than manageable. Couples therapy helps slow these interactions down, creating safety so old wounds don’t continue to shape how partners see, hear, and respond to each other.

  • Betrayal in a relationship—whether emotional, sexual, or financial—can deeply disrupt safety and connection. Therapy provides a structured space to process the rupture, address the underlying dynamics, and determine a path forward that honors honesty and emotional integrity.

  • High-conflict relationships are often driven by intense emotions, mis-attunement, and repeated cycles of escalation that leave both partners feeling unheard and defensive. Couples therapy helps slow these interactions down, clarify what each partner is actually responding to, and create safer ways to communicate during conflict.

  • When emotional needs go unmet, couples often experience resentment, distance, or repeated conflict without fully understanding why. Couples therapy helps identify these needs, learn how to express them safely, and respond to one another with greater attunement and care.

  • When intimacy fades, many couples feel confused, rejected, or unsure how to reconnect. Therapy provides a space to explore the emotional and relational barriers to intimacy and develop new ways of feeling close—both emotionally and physically.

Schedule A Consultation

Offices

Larchmont Village
&
West Hollywood

Primary hours of operation:
Monday-Friday, 10AM - 6PM
Limited availability on weekends and after 6PM

Phone: (323) 372-6855

Email: Elliemdoherty@gmail.com