Your Questions,
Answered

My office is located at 1901 First Avenue in Bankers Hill — a quiet, central neighborhood on the edge of Hillcrest, minutes from Balboa Park and downtown San Diego.

Street parking is available on First Avenue and the surrounding streets, as well as in an underground free parking garage. The building is elevator accessible.

Yes!

I think it does — though not in the way people sometimes expect. I'm not a better therapist for gay male couples simply because I share an identity. What my own experience gives me is a kind of embodied understanding that no amount of training fully replicates.

I know what it is to navigate the world as a gay person. I know what long-term gay partnership actually feels like from the inside — the particular joys, the particular pressures, the ways the outside world seeps in. That understanding lives in my body, not just my training. And when you're sitting across from someone talking about something tender and true, that difference is palpable.

Technically, many licensed therapists can see couples. But couples therapy is genuinely its own discipline — and doing it well requires specific, advanced training that most general therapists simply don't have.

Think of it this way: a family doctor can treat a lot of things, but if you need heart surgery, you want a cardiologist. Couples therapy is a specialty, not a service add-on. The dynamics of two people in a room — the attachment patterns, the communication cycles, the way conflict escalates and repair fails — require a completely different set of skills than individual therapy.

Because 50 minutes isn't enough — and the research backs that up.

Couples therapy is fundamentally different from individual therapy. You are two people, with two nervous systems, two histories, and a dynamic between you that takes time to fully surface in a room. Studies on couples therapy outcomes consistently show that extended sessions produce significantly better results — more insight, more repair, more lasting change — than standard-length sessions.

Here's the practical reality: the first 15 to 20 minutes of most couples sessions are spent arriving. You've come from work, from traffic, from whatever happened this morning. You need time to settle, to shift out of the day and into each other. In a 50-minute session that leaves you 30 minutes of real work — which is rarely enough to get past the surface issue and into what's actually underneath it.

At 80 minutes, we have room to go deep. We can open something up and begin to resolve it in the same session, rather than sending you home with something raw and unfinished. We can move through conflict and into repair before you walk out the door. You leave having done real work — not just having started it.

This is one of the reasons outcomes at this practice are strong. Eighty minutes is not a luxury. It is how good couples therapy should actually work."

The honest answer is — probably not like anything you're expecting.

A lot of people come in with a picture of what therapy looks like. The therapist sits back, listens carefully, reflects things back in careful neutral language, and the hour ends with a homework assignment. That is not what happens here.

I'm active. I notice things — the moment one of you shuts down, the way a certain topic makes the room go quiet, the thing you almost said and then didn't. I'll name those things. Not to put anyone on the spot, but because those moments are usually where the real work lives, and I've spent enough time in this room to know it's worth going there.

I'm also warm — genuinely, not professionally. I care about the people who sit across from me. I care about your relationship. That's not a therapeutic posture, it's just true, and most people feel it pretty quickly.

What you'll get is someone who is fully present, deeply experienced in queer relationships, and completely invested in helping you find your way back to each other. Someone who will challenge you when it matters and hold you when it's hard — and who knows the difference.

As one couple put it after our first session: 'We expected a cold therapist. We got a person who really cares.'

I liked that. That's what I'm going for.

Here are some numbers worth sitting with.

The average California wedding costs $35,000. The average uncontested divorce in California costs $15,000 to $30,000 — and contested divorces routinely climb into six figures.

The average couple waits six years after problems begin before seeking therapy, by which point patterns are deeply entrenched and the work is harder than it needed to be.

A full course of couples therapy at this practice — 12 to 20 sessions of focused, expert, LGBTQ+-affirming work — typically runs between $3,000 and $5,000.

You will spend more on your wedding flowers than on a course of therapy that could change the entire trajectory of your relationship.

There is also a cost that doesn't appear in any spreadsheet — the cost of years spent in a relationship that is technically intact but quietly miserable. The slow erosion of intimacy. The distance that becomes the new normal. The version of your life together that never quite gets lived. That cost is real, and it compounds.

Couples therapy is not cheap. Neither is everything you stand to lose without it. Measured against what it protects — and what it makes possible — it is one of the most straightforward investments two people can make in each other."

That's usually the second question couples ask. The first is whether this will actually work.

Let me answer both.

Most couples I work with feel something shift within the first four to six sessions — not resolution, but movement. The sense that something is changing, that there's a new way of seeing what's been happening between you. That matters, because momentum is everything in this work.

From there, it depends on what you're carrying. Couples who come in relatively early — before patterns have calcified, before real damage has accumulated — often do powerful work in 12 to 15 sessions. Couples who have been struggling for years, or who are working through something significant like betrayal or a major life rupture, may need more time and deserve more time.

What doesn't vary is my commitment to working toward an endpoint. I believe in therapy that equips you and releases you — not therapy that becomes a permanent fixture in your life. Every session we do should be moving you closer to not needing me anymore. That is exactly what I'm working toward from the moment we begin.

80-minute couples therapy $250

Most credit cards and Health Savings account cards accepted.

Yes, that is true. I will gladly provide you with what the insurance industry calls a "superbill," which you can submit for reimbursement in the rare event that you have coverage.

The insurance system was built around a simple question: is this person sick?

If yes, treatment is covered. Couples therapy doesn't answer that question — there's no diagnosis for 'we've grown apart' or 'we keep having the same fight' or 'we love each other but can't reach each other anymore.' So insurance steps back and calls it not medically necessary.

What they mean is: it doesn't fit our model. What they're missing is everything.

Research is unambiguous that relationship quality is one of the strongest predictors of physical health, mental health, and longevity. A strong partnership reduces stress, improves immune function, and protects against depression and anxiety. By almost any meaningful medical measure, your relationship is your health. Insurance just hasn't caught up to that yet.