Online Couples Therapy In Ohio & Across PSYPACT states
Serious Help for Christian, military, and complex marriages and families
For marriages that feel fractured — but not finished.
You don’t recognize your marriage anymore.
Maybe an affair has come to light — and everything feels unstable. Maybe the fights have escalated to the point where you don’t recognize yourself or your partner in the middle of them.
You’ve gone from being partners to adversaries. Or worse — polite roommates.
You may be:
– Reeling from disclosure of infidelity.
– Stuck in the same escalating argument on repeat.
– Living in emotional distance that crept in so slowly you didn’t see it happening.
– Avoiding intimacy because it feels tense, complicated, or loaded.
– Wondering if a same-sex attraction disclosure means the end.
You grieve the marriage you once had — or the one you hoped to have. You’re probably both wondering:
– How did we get here?
– What does commitment require now?
– Is healing actually possible — or are we just prolonging pain?
When a marriage fractures, it affects everything. Parenting becomes harder. Work suffers. Sleep flees. Ministry feels complicated. The bed you share can feel like a daily reminder of distance.
You still love each other and believe your marriage matters. But you don’t know how to repair what’s been damaged.
When you’ve lost hope for your marriage,
I’ll lend you mine.
If you’re both willing to look honestly at the patterns that developed in your relationship, change is possible. Meaningful repair can happen — even after betrayal.
We don’t rush to “move on,” and we don’t minimize what’s been broken. We slow down long enough to understand what happened, why it happened, and what would need to change for intimacy to be renewed— not just resumed.
Even if one of you feels uncertain right now, I ask you to commit to a defined period of evaluating, examining, and making intentional decisions about the future of your relationship — not forever, but for a period of months.
If military service, deployment, or PTSD are central to your marital strain, you may benefit from my military and veteran couples therapy services.
My Methods for Couples Therapy
My stance is marriage-friendly and repair-oriented. I am rooting for your relationship to survive and thrive — but never at the cost of honesty or truth. My work is structured and evidence-based. Depending on your goals and the challenges your relationship is facing, I draw from several established couples therapy approaches.
Hope-Focused Couples Counseling
As a psychologist certified in Hope-Focused Couples Counseling, this is the primary framework guiding my work. The model focuses on building hope in the relationship — strengthening both the motivation for change (“willpower”) and clear pathways for how to achieve it (“waypower”). Couples learn to interrupt destructive relational patterns, rebuild emotional safety, and work toward change as a team both inside and outside the therapy room.
Getting Past the Affair
When infidelity has occurred, I incorporate the structured recovery framework developed by Doug Snyder, Donald Baucom, and Kristina Coop Gordon. This model helps couples understand what made the relationship vulnerable, process the impact of betrayal, and rebuild trust through deliberate accountability and change. Rather than rushing forgiveness, we move carefully through the stages of healing and reconciliation.
Prepare-Enrich
With premarital couples or couples seeking a more structured assessment process, I often use Prepare-Enrich. This research-based relationship assessment identifies strengths and growth areas and has been shown to reduce couples’ risk of divorce. Couples complete the assessment first, then we use the results to build practical relationship skills and strengthen communication, expectations, and long-term partnership.
Faith-Integrated Couples Therapy (Optional)
For couples who want to incorporate their Christian faith into therapy, we can thoughtfully integrate spiritual perspectives into the counseling process. This may include exploring biblical concepts of covenant, forgiveness, and reconciliation while maintaining psychological integrity and emotional honesty. Faith is never used to silence pain or pressure reconciliation, but to help couples pursue repair in a way that reflects their deepest convictions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can couples therapy really help after an affair?
Yes — when both partners are willing to engage honestly in the process. Infidelity feels devastating and undermines the commitment that is the bedrock of the marriage covenant. In therapy, we slow things down, establish boundaries, understand what made the marriage vulnerable, and rebuild trust deliberately. Repair is possible — but it requires intentional work from both partners.
How do we know if our marriage is too far gone?
From my perspective, if at least one of you is willing to work on the marriage, it is not too far gone.
There are situations where couples therapy isn’t recommended — such as ongoing violence, severe untreated addiction, or an active affair where one partner isn’t willing to end it. That’s one reason I do a thorough assessment at the beginning. I want to make sure therapy helps your relationship, not harms it.
If both of you are willing to engage honestly in the process, meaningful change is possible.
Is there anyone who shouldn’t see you for couples’ therapy?
Couples therapy is not appropriate in every situation.
I do not recommend couples therapy when:
– There is ongoing physical violence.
– One partner is actively engaged in an affair and unwilling to end it.
– Severe addiction is present and untreated.
– One partner is fully committed to ending the marriage and unwilling to explore repair.
In these situations, individual therapy or other supports may be more appropriate. We will assess carefully at the beginning to ensure therapy is helpful — not harmful.
What if one of us isn’t sure we want to stay married?
That uncertainty is common.
Rather than making permanent decisions in the middle of emotional upheaval, I ask couples to commit to a defined period of careful evaluation. We examine the marriage honestly before deciding whether to rebuild or separate.
You do not have to decide the future in your first session.
Is couples therapy appropriate if we are considering separation?
Yes — as long as you’re considering, not fully committed to, separation.
Couples therapy can be used either to rebuild the marriage or to reach a thoughtful, intentional decision about its future. My goal is to avoid reactive decisions made in the heat of crisis. There are therapists who specialize in helping couples navigate separation well, which may be a better fit if you have already decided to end your relationship.
What if one of us is unsure about therapy?
It’s common for one partner to feel hesitant.
While couples therapy works best when both of you are engaged together, I’ve often worked with individuals on marital or family issues when the other person isn’t ready to participate. Sometimes that includes inviting a spouse into a session or two later on. If you start doing individual therapy with me, I can help you find a couples’ therapist later if your spouse does decide to engage in therapy.
Even if you’re not sure, we can start with a consultation and talk it through.
What if we argue constantly — or one of us shuts down?
That is exactly the kind of pattern we address.
I do not allow sessions to become another place to rehearse destructive fights. I step in when conversations escalate and teach you how to interrupt those cycles before they damage the relationship further.
How is couples or family therapy different from individual therapy?
In couples and family therapy, the relationship is the client.
I pay attention not only to what each of you says, but how you interact. I step in when conflict escalates and guide conversations so they are productive rather than damaging.
The goal is not simply insight — it is structural change in the relationship.
Pragmatically, we’ll work together to decide whether individual, couple, or family therapy is the best fit for your needs — and we’ll usually have a sense of that after the consultation call.
If we move forward with couple or family therapy, the first session will be together. After that, I’ll meet individually with each person for an assessment. From then on, we’ll generally meet together for future sessions.
Do both partners need to attend every session?
Generally, I start by meeting with you together as a couple, followed up by meeting with each of you one-on-one to discuss more personal topics and complete an individual assessment.
After that, couples attend sessions together, but there are times when brief individual check-ins can be helpful — particularly when trauma or betrayal is involved.
We’ll decide together what structure best supports the work. The focus always remains on strengthening the relationship and helping both partners move toward clarity, safety, and connection.
However, I do at times see just one partner for therapy with a goal of improving their marriage when the other is unwilling to come.
Can you incorporate our Christian faith into therapy?
Absolutely.
If faith is central to your marriage, we can thoughtfully integrate it into conversations about forgiveness, fidelity, sexual intimacy, and covenant. While I share a Christian worldview, I also work with individuals and families from different faith traditions — or from non-religious perspectives — and help you live according to whatever values matter most to you.
For more information on what this looks like in therapy, see my Christian counseling page.
Do you provide online couples therapy?
Yes.
I provide secure online couples therapy throughout Ohio and across PSYPACT states. Online sessions allow couples to access consistent care without commuting and often make scheduling easier.
Research shows that online couples therapy can be just as effective as in-person therapy when both partners are engaged. Many couples appreciate the privacy and flexibility it offers.
Do you work with mixed-orientation marriages, or marriages in which one member of the couple is not exclusively heterosexual?
Yes, working with married sexual or gender minorities is one of my specialties. This work requires an understanding of how to work with individuals questioning their attraction, orientation, and sexual or gender identity well, and an understanding of how these issues play out in a marital relationship. Support for both the partner sharing their concerns and the one surprised by them is important, and therapy with me encourages communication and considering both partners’ needs. See my Christian Sexual minority page for more information.
Do you see families as well as couples?
Yes. While I primarily focus on couples, I work with families as well, particularly parents dealing with adult children. In family therapy, I help families reestablish positive patterns of interaction and establish trust and safety in relationships.
I don’t work much with younger children in families unless the family is impacted by one of my other specialties (trauma, faith-based counseling, military/veteran families, questions about sexual or gender identity). I don’t generally do family therapy solely for child behavioral issues.