love your life. live well in love.™
dr rae sandler simon | licensed clinical psychologist
Couples
If you love someone, the greatest gift you can give them is your presence."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
Ready to Reconnect? Expert Couples Therapy to Build Lasting Love
When your relationship feels stuck, you deserve a therapist who specializes in couples counseling - not someone who simply offers it. Relationship therapy is my passion, my expertise, and the heart of my work as a psychologist.
I've completed advanced training through The Couples Institute in “The Developmental Model of Couples Therapy,” and for over 20 years, I’ve continued to sharpen my skills through additional skills' training, conferences, research, and professional education. You can trust that you're getting expert support backed by years of dedication to helping couples thrive.
Whether you're engaged, newly married, or have spent decades together, I help couples strengthen communication, rebuild trust, and deepen their connection. Many experience meaningful changes in as few as six sessions.
The skills you learn here don't just transform your marriage or partnership - they create lasting positive changes across every relationship in your life.
My Approach to Couples Work
Every couple is different and so is every session. I draw from multiple evidence-based frameworks to meet you where you are, combining the depth of relational and psychodynamic work with the momentum of solution-focused strategies. My approach is warm, direct, and grounded in the belief that lasting change happens when both partners feel seen, challenged, and supported.
I believe you already have many of the strengths and resources you need, sometimes you just need help seeing them clearly. Solution-Focused Therapy shifts the conversation from what's broken to what's possible. Rather than spending an extensive amount of sessions excavating the history of your problems, we focus on your preferred future: What does your relationship look like when it's working well? What are you already doing that moves you in that direction?
This approach is collaborative, empowering, and often surprisingly efficient. It's especially helpful for couples who feel stuck in repetitive arguments and want to build forward momentum quickly.
Developed by Terry Real, Relational Life Therapy is a direct, no-nonsense approach to couples work (and individual work) that I find deeply effective. RLT integrates psychodynamic principles, family systems theory, trauma work, and real-world relational skills into a framework designed for lasting change.
What makes RLT different is its willingness to be honest from the very first session. I'll gently but clearly name the patterns I see, including the ways each partner may be contributing to the disconnection, because real intimacy requires real accountability. RLT helps partners move out of "one-up" (grandiosity) and "one-down" (shame) positions into a place of genuine equality, where authentic connection becomes possible.
I also use RLT principles extensively in my individual work with clients navigating relationship challenges, self-worth, and patterns rooted in family-of-origin dynamics.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Relationships ask us to hold difficult emotions - hurt, fear, disappointment, uncertainty - without letting those emotions run the show. ACT helps both partners develop psychological flexibility: the ability to be present with what you're feeling, even when it's uncomfortable, while still choosing to act in ways that align with the relationship you actually want.
In our work together, ACT shows up when we practice stepping back from reactive thought patterns (i.e. "they always" and "they never" stories, the inner critic, the urge to withdraw or control) and reconnecting with the values that brought you together in the first place. It's especially powerful for couples caught in cycles of avoidance or emotional shutdown.
Cognitive-Behavioral Approaches (CBT)
Our thoughts shape how we experience our partner, often more than we realize. Cognitive-behavioral strategies help couples identify the automatic interpretations, assumptions, and mental filters that fuel conflict and distance. When one partner reads a sigh as rejection, or a forgotten errand as carelessness, that interpretation becomes the reality they respond to.
I use CBT-informed tools to help you both slow down, examine the stories you're telling yourselves about each other, and build more accurate, generous ways of understanding what's really happening between you. This work is practical, concrete, and often produces quick shifts in how you experience day-to-day interactions.
Psychodynamic & Attachment-Informed Work
We all bring the relational patterns of our earliest experiences into our adult partnerships. Psychodynamic work helps couples understand how family-of-origin dynamics, unresolved grief, and deeply held beliefs about love, trust, and safety are quietly shaping the conflicts and disconnections happening right now.
Drawing on attachment theory, I help partners recognize their own attachment styles and understand how those styles interact, often creating a dance of pursuit and withdrawal that neither partner consciously chose. When you can see the pattern clearly, you can begin to change it. This is some of the deepest and most transformative work we do together.
Integrative & Mindfulness-Based Practices
Underneath everything I do is an integrative philosophy that honors both Western evidence-based psychotherapy and Eastern practices including mindfulness, movement, and intentional presence. I believe that lasting relational change isn't just cognitive - it's embodied. Learning to pause, breathe, and respond rather than react is one of the most powerful relationship skills there is.
In session, this might look like a moment of grounding before a difficult conversation, a breath practice to interrupt a familiar cycle of reactivity, or simply the invitation to slow down enough to actually feel what's happening in your body and in the space between you. These small shifts often open the door to everything else.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In our work together, you can expect me to be warm, present, and direct. I won't just listen. I'll teach, coach, and sometimes lovingly challenge you. Sessions often include a blend of conversation, skill-building, and real-time practice of new ways of communicating and connecting.
I don't believe in a one-size-fits-all approach, and I'll never force you into a framework that doesn't fit. Instead, I draw from all of these modalities fluidly, choosing what serves you and your relationship in each moment. Some sessions will be deeply emotional. Others will be practical and skills-based. Most will be both.
My goal is not to keep you in therapy forever. Rather, it’s to give you the tools, insight, and self-awareness to nurture your relationship long after our work together pauses or ends. Some couples come for a handful of sessions. Others stay for months. And many return after a long break - sometimes years later - when a new chapter brings new challenges: a move, a baby, a health crisis, a loss, a season that simply feels harder than expected.
That’s not a setback. That’s how good therapy often works. I think of couples work as building a foundation your partnership can draw upon throughout the life you’re building together...not because something is broken, but because what you’ve built is worth taking care of.
Many couples ask whether I ever meet with partners individually as part of our work together. Yes, I do! When individual work is done thoughtfully, it can be one of the most powerful parts of the process. Individual sessions create space to go deeper into something you're carrying - like a pattern, a feeling, a conversation you're not yet sure how to have - without the pressure of your partner in the room. They also help me understand each of you more fully, which makes our couples work sharper and more effective. Individual sessions aren't always the right move, and we'll decide together whether and when they make sense for where you are as a couple.
You deserve a strong, fulfilling relationship. Let's build it together.
