Emotionally Focused Therapists in Seattle, WA

Our stories contain places of profound beauty and great pain, and so often relationships are where we experience the deepest joys and wounding. It’s my hope that through building a trusting relationship, we can work together to bring greater flourishing and healing in your relationships with self and others. I enjoy working with couples, families, teens, and adults from an attachment-oriented and trauma-informed framework, and my training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) guides the way I hold the experiences and emotions that my clients bring with them and gives us a roadmap of where to go based on your goals.

Our lives are the context for tremendous brokenness and tremendous beauty. I would love to walk alongside you as you tend to the brokenness and discover the beauty. I specialize in supporting individuals and couples towards healing and hope using research based therapy approaches. I provide a safe place to process life changes or relationship challenges. I work from a systems perspective, meaning issues do not exist in isolation but in the context of families, communities, and cultures.

I am a relationship and sex therapist who works with couples, groups, and individuals. I offer therapy in person in Seward Park, and online. My goal is to create an warm environment that centers your unique lived experience - you are the expert of your life. I hope to support your goals for therapy such as increasing connection, intimacy, knowledge of self, acceptance, growth, and healing. I work with all gender, sexual, romantic and relationship identities. I am sex positive and HAES-aligned.

You are a high performer who is stuck & looking for outside help. You want to have a secure & loving relationship. You want to heal from past hurts, connect with your inner compass & shift towards healthier ways of living. In couples counseling, my husband & I work as a team to help couples grow together. As former high tech & legal professionals, we understand how work demands can impact your quality of life. As parents, we get how children are both a joy & a stressor in relationships. As an intercultural couple, we recognize the challenges in bridging different world views.

I moved to Seattle in 2017 after spending the previous ten years on the East Coast in New York City and Washington, DC. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska as a Jewish gay kid who always felt “out of place” in a community where these identities were largely invisible. I also lost my mother to cancer at the tender age of 16 while attempting to accept my gay identity. As a therapist, these experiences have helped me develop resiliency and to better understand how oppressive systems can create feelings of loneliness, isolation, despair, and hopelessness.

As a relational therapist, I work with couples, families, and individuals, exploring patterns in our relationships as well as our larger connection to community, culture and society. Together, we examine how these different parts of our system impact us and each other. I see therapy as a collaborative space where we can deepen our understanding of our experiences and move toward change and healing.

I work together with my wife, Karin, to help couples who are struggling with conflict, emotional distance, or distress. If you're fighting too much, avoiding important issues altogether, or feeling disconnected from your partner, we can help you learn how to better navigate your differences and experience a deeper, more compassionate connection with each other.

Life is messy and sometimes we get stuck in repetitive patterns that leave us disconnected from ourselves and others. I am here to help you get unstuck so that you can live life with more ease and authenticity. I offer a warm and honest approach that helps you examine and shift your habitual ways of being to promote growth and connection. Whether you are feeling overwhelmed, experiencing a life transition, or having relationship distress, I am here with curiosity and an open heart to begin the process of healing. I am easy-going and approachable and help you access your inner wiser self.

My specialties are premarital and couple counseling, issues around sexuality for men and women, and counseling individuals with anxiety, depression and life changes. Couples and individuals who find me helpful often find that they feel stuck and unhappy. They have been unable to reason themselves out of their difficulties yet desperately want to change. They need help figuring out what is going on beneath the surface and how to use this newfound knowledge to heal. People who work with me want someone who is collaborative and nonjudgmental.

You may be struggling to see and believe in the goodness of yourself and others. You desire a change in these relationships. I support my clients in finding a compassionate and just relationship with themselves and the world around them by exploring implicit and explicit material in their historical and current narratives. I engage and help clients in an emotionally-focused and somatically-present space. We take our biggest steps to healing when we feel cared for, loved, and heard.

I am a queer relationship, individual, and sex therapist. I offer a collaborative, holistic, hands-on approach to therapy. I enjoy working with various relationships and adult individuals. I primarily focus on serving the LGBTQIA2+ community, women, non-binary, and genderfluid folks, those looking for increased connection in their relationships, those who want to explore their sexuality and enrich their sexual selves. I recognize that it takes a lot of courage to start therapy. I aim to provide a space for you to feel genuinely heard, understood, and seen – no matter what you are dealing with.

Are you and your partner feeling disconnected? Maybe you’ve been arguing a lot these days. Or perhaps you want to strengthen your relationship and learn the skills to prevent problems before they even begin. You're ready to experience new ways of connecting with each other, but aren't sure where to start. Couples therapy is a space where you and your partner can explore what a fulfilling relationship looks like for you. You're in the right place if you want to work on communicating productively, reducing conflict, increasing understanding, building trust, navigating differences, and deepening intimacy and connection.

When you get stuck, it's wise to enlist the support of professionals. An experienced therapist can help you create secure and meaningful relationships, overcome emotional pain, find clarity and meaning, and handle stressful situations effectively. My counseling practice often involves supporting people who struggle with relationships, depression, anxiety, trauma, and coping with difficulties. Couples work involves breaking through old, stuck patterns that create conflict and disconnection to create strong and satisfying partnerships.

I am a systemic and attachment-based therapist that works with individuals, couples, families, and other multisystem clients. My passion lies in working with those with queer, trans, and gender non-conforming identities, as well as interests or concerns surrounding sex, intimacy, kink, and polyamorous/non-traditional relationships. I aim to create a safe and affirming space for clients to explore their identities and relationships. I recognize the unique challenges and experiences faced by individuals within marginalized communities and am committed to providing culturally competent care within my therapeutic practice.

Implementing a client-centered and trauma-informed, I support clients on their mental health journey through empathic understanding, empowerment, and a belief in their ability to evolve and heal. I value cultural humility, a lifelong process that involves acknowledging my limitations as a counselor, suspension of judgment, meeting clients where they are, and respecting diverse experiences and points of view.

I believe we humans all have inherent goodness, beauty, and resiliency to us. Unfortunately life leaves none of us unscathed whether it be from harmful systems, family of origin dynamics, life circumstances, toxic relationships, traumatic events, or even our own self sabotaging behaviors. Regardless of how it happens, we can find ourselves feeling stuck or in pieces. While there are many wonderful healing practices out there, I believe that therapy is a great way to start understanding how we got to where we are and to begin to grow in new directions, with the hope of living a more vibrant, grounded, and creative life.

Wherever you are in your therapeutic journey, my first goal is to offer a warm, empathetic space where you can be comfortable exploring the questions that brought you here. I welcome individuals, couples, kids, teens, and families and I am a long-practicing ally to BIPOC and LGTBQIA+ communities.

I specialize in couples therapy, where I help partners work toward relational repair after infidelity, betrayal, or ongoing conflict. I also work with individuals who want to work through attachment and relationship issues, identity development, spirituality, trauma, anxiety, and depression. Therapy is work that asks a great deal from us, but it also holds potential for meaningful change: to awaken to your own life, to make strides toward repairing broken bonds, and to imagine new possibilities and new ways of being, for yourself and for your relationships.

As a fully certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist, and a Level 2 EFT Individual Therapist Joseph's approach is rooted in Attachment Theory. Joseph assists his clients to become fully aware of unrecognized, unshared, connective primary emotions and reactive, disconnecting secondary emotions. He helps couples, men, and women cultivate greater awareness and acceptance of emotion. With empathic support he will help you develop the ability to communicate primary and secondary emotion in powerful ways that will foster increased intimacy with partners, spouses, and others.