Get Unstuck. Understand Each Other. Reconnect.
COUPLES THERAPY
IN WASHINGTON
You may love each other and still feel stuck in patterns you don’t know how to change. The same arguments keep happening, communication breaks down, or the closeness you once shared feels harder to find. Couples therapy can help you understand what is happening beneath these patterns and begin building a different way of relating to one another.
Maybe This Sounds Familiar?
“We keep having the same argument.”
It may start with something small and quickly become something much bigger. One person pushes to talk while the other pulls away. You become defensive, frustrated, critical, or shut down. Eventually, you may not even remember what started the argument.
Or maybe you don’t fight much anymore. Instead, there is distance. Conversations are mostly about schedules, work, children, or responsibilities. You function well together, but something important between you feels missing.
Sometimes the relationship has experienced a more significant rupture—an affair, betrayal, broken trust, or an accumulation of hurts that neither of you knows how to repair.
These experiences can look very different, but they often have something in common: the relationship has become caught in a pattern that neither partner knows how to change alone.
What Brings Couples to Therapy
Decisions & Transitions
Marriage, parenting, careers, family pressures, relocation, or other life changes are placing new demands on your relationship.
Trust & Infidelity
A betrayal or breach of trust has changed your relationship, leaving you uncertain about how to rebuild trust and repair.
Intimacy
Affection, vulnerability, emotional closeness, or physical intimacy has diminished, leaving you struggling to feel connected.
Emotional Disconnection
You care deeply about each other, but no longer feel as close, understood, or emotionally connected as you once did.
Communication & Conflict
You struggle to talk about important things without arguments, defensiveness, criticism, or withdrawing from one another.
Relational Patterns
Your responses during conflict have created a recurring cycle that leaves one or both of you feeling misunderstood or alone.
The Core Differentiator
THE ARGUMENT USUALLY ISN’T JUST ABOUT THE ARGUMENT
Couples often arrive in therapy focused on the content of their disagreements—money, sex, parenting, household responsibilities, family, work, or how much time someone spends on their phone.
Those issues matter. But underneath them are often deeper questions: Do you understand me? Do I matter to you? Can I depend on you? Is it safe to be vulnerable with you?
Couples therapy helps slow down the cycle so you can begin to recognize what happens between you when those deeper emotions and needs are activated. Instead of simply learning how to argue more politely, the goal is to help you understand yourselves and one another differently.
As that understanding grows, couples can begin creating new ways of communicating, responding to conflict, and connecting emotionally.
How Couples Get Stuck
RELATIONSHIPS DEVELOP PATTERS
01 — Something Happens
One partner feels hurt, dismissed, criticized, unimportant, overwhelmed, or disconnected.
02 — You Protect Yourself
You criticize, pursue, explain, defend, withdraw, shut down, fix, or avoid.
03 — Your Partner Reacts
Their response activates something in you, and the cycle continues.
Over time, couples can become so familiar with this cycle that it feels like the other person is the problem. Couples therapy helps shift the focus from fighting each other to recognizing—and changing—the pattern happening between you.
What Couples Therapy Looks Like
WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT?
Understand What Happens Between You
We begin by understanding your relationship, what brings you to therapy, and the patterns that emerge when things become difficult.
Go Beneath the Surface
We help you slow down interactions and better understand the emotions, needs, experiences, and vulnerabilities underneath your reactions.
Practice Something Different
As you understand the pattern more clearly, therapy creates opportunities to communicate differently, take emotional risks, repair hurt, and build greater connection.
*Couples therapy is collaborative and active. Your therapist will help you notice what is happening between you in the room rather than simply deciding who is right or assigning communication homework.
Relationship Repair & Infidelity
CAN A RELATIONSHIP RECOVER AFTER INFIDELITY?
Infidelity can fundamentally disrupt a couple’s sense of safety and trust. The partner who was hurt may struggle with anger, grief, uncertainty, or a need to understand what happened. The other partner may experience guilt, shame, defensiveness, or uncertainty about how to help repair the damage.
There is no shortcut through this process, and therapy cannot guarantee that a relationship will stay together. But when both partners are willing to engage honestly in the work, couples therapy can create space to understand the impact of what happened, address the underlying relationship dynamics, rebuild emotional safety, and determine what moving forward together may look like.
Not Every Couple Comes in Crisis
YOU DON'T HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL YOUR STUCK
Some couples come to therapy because their relationship is in significant distress. Others come because they value their relationship and want to understand it more deeply.
Couples therapy can provide space to strengthen communication, explore recurring patterns, deepen emotional intimacy, navigate a transition, or prepare intentionally for marriage.
If you're engaged or considering marriage, premarital counseling can help you have important conversations about the relationship you want to build together.
Meet the Therapists
THERAPISTS WHO WORK WITH COUPLES
Peter Rivera,
PhD, LMFT
Peter works extensively with couples navigating recurring conflict, communication difficulties, premarital concerns, emotional disconnection, infidelity, and relationship repair. His style is engaged, direct, and collaborative, helping couples understand what is happening beneath their conflict and develop new ways of relating.
In-person Seattle + Telehealth Washington
$175 / 45-minute session
Eric Eagleson, LMFTA
Eric particularly enjoys working with couples around communication, attachment, emotional intimacy, and recurring behavioral patterns. His straightforward and approachable style helps couples better understand the ways they respond to one another and develop greater emotional awareness and connection.
Telehealth throughout Washington
$165 / 45-minute session
Seattle + Online Couples Therapy
COUPLES THERAPY IN SEATTLE & ONLINE THROUGHOUT WASHINGTON
Peter provides in-person couples therapy from our Seattle office as well as telehealth throughout Washington.
Eric provides couples therapy through secure telehealth for clients located throughout Washington.
Whether you prefer meeting in person or online, the goal is the same: finding a therapist who feels like a good fit for both partners and can help you engage meaningfully in the work.