In practice since my first Doctor's degree in psychology (Cornell, 1979), I returned to graduate school for my second degree 25 years later in Marriage & Family Therapy, earned a FL license, and have worked first in clinics, then in independent practice ever since. I was also trained and board certified in clinical hypnotherapy.
Unlike most marriage therapists, I have no long-term clients, because I don't waste my valued clients' time and money on psychoanalyzing them and seeking the ancient "root causes" of their current challenges. The past cannot be changed, but your future is entirely in your hands. Thus, I go straight to the strengths you bring to your current situation and focus on empowering you to create quick and easy solutions that work almost instantly and endure indefineitely. Simply put, I help marriages repair and refresh themselves by focusing on solutions, not by analyzing problems. One obvious benefit is that I need just a handful of sessions (usally 3 or 4, sometimes fewer), instead of weekly sessions that last for months or even longer. Another delightful consequence of solution focused therapy is that sessions are actually fun and leave people feeling more hopeful and optimistic each time. As a result, no couple quits because they feel a lack of progress; they terminate therapy, at my encouragement, when they know that they have rediscovered the road to happiness together.
So strong is my comitment to helping couples (married or not), that I usually decline to see a "half couple." Decades of practice have taught me that helping couples goes well beyond "fixing" individual partners (despite hearing such requests often); couples, and especially marriages, have a life of their own, and the skill set needed to help them is quite different from that used for individual therapy.
