Therapy to help you understand the repeating pattern of distress that is disconnecting you from your partner and bring ease, connection, and trust back into your relationship.
Relationships can be difficult. You deserve therapy that works.
Therapy to help you understand the repeating pattern of distress that is disconnecting you from your partner and bring ease, connection, and trust back into your relationship. Serving Sacramento & all California.
It shouldn’t be so hard to ask someone you’ve known forever to hold your hand.
Relationships are a big part of our lives; they are where we give and get love.
But sometimes, love gets complicated. Life’s stressors sneak in, causing unexpected tension and distance that can leave you feeling alone during some of the toughest times. You might find yourself asking, ‘Where is the person who said they would stand by me? My Rock? Where did our love go?
We’re here to help, offering effective strategies to strengthen your bond and make things feel a bit more like they used to.
In traditional couples therapy, topics might include how to talk to each other, behave, or solve problems.
Emotionally Focused Therapy EFT), on the other hand, goes deeper. It looks into the feelings that cause actions and reactions, giving couples a safe place to talk about, explore, and heal hurt feelings. It’s common for both people in a relationship to want the same things, but they have trouble communicating what they want.
Couples therapy can help you find the space to better understand your feelings, communicate more effectively, and work towards a healthier relationship.
Rebuilding trust is challenging, but not impossible. We’re here to support both of you in healing and creating a strong foundation for your future together.
It’s okay not to have all the answers right now. Together, we will work to identify the areas that need extra attention, and explore ways to help you move forward.
Sacramento Psychologist, Certified EFT Therapist and Supervisor, Founder of Sage River Psychotherapy
We start by listening to your story.
Before Sage River Psychotherapy was a practice, it was a promise—to meet people in their pain without rushing to fix it. That promise lives at the heart of everything we do.
We believe therapy begins when you feel truly seen. When someone sits with you—not to analyze, diagnose, or correct—but to listen deeply. Whether you’re feeling overwhelmed, shut down, disconnected, or just tired of pretending you’re okay, we start exactly where you are.
We help you make sense of your inner world—your nervous system’s signals, your learned patterns, your emotional landscape—so you can begin to move through life with more ease, more self-trust, and more honest connection.
Our team uses the science of relational neurobiology alongside a deep respect for your pace. Together, we help you rediscover the strength, clarity, and aliveness that’s already within you.
Come as you are. Stay as long as you need. We’ll be here.
Couples Issues, Mixed-Race Couples, Neurodiverse Couples, Self-Esteem, Anxiety,
Childhood Trauma, Complex PTSD, Relational Trauma, Grief
Couples Issues, Men’s Issues
Childhood Trauma, Complex PTSD, Identity, Transition, Collective Trauma,
Healing Shame
Couples Issues, Relational Challenges, Depression, Grief, Suicide Loss, Attachment Issues, Life Transitions
We take the time to understand each partner's perspectives, feelings and challenges individually.
We help couples meet heart-to-heart outside the distress cycle that is blocking their ability to understand and take care of each other.
Couples who take care of each other and themselves can then work shoulder-to-shoulder on finding creative solutions to even the most challenging problems.
The only requirement is a willingness to begin.
If you still love each other and you both want to rebuild a closer, more easeful connection, then yes, we can help. You will feel what we, at Sage River Psychotherapy, call the experiential difference from the first session. Rather than helping you solve a particular argument or teaching you to talk about the argument differently, we help you feel the way you are having the same argument (or avoiding the same argument) over and over again–the content changes, but the process is the same.
Here’s a little experiment–take the last three conflicts with your spouse and imagine watching them with the sound on “mute.” Does the same person tense up, walk away, hang their head, put their hands up defensively, say little, or get loud to try to make the argument stop? Does the same person look desperately frustrated, getting more tense the more the other one shuts down, tears on the inside, visible frustration with not being able to get through to the one they love?
Every couple has a cycle that grabs them over and over again. We help you get deep into the roots of that process and make changes way down there so that you can feel more like yourself again and your relationship becomes what it has always wanted to be–stable, strong, connected.
First, we get it. You’re right–this is expensive. 75-minute sessions are “one-and-a-half” sessions, so the fee is 150% of a standard therapy session. Someone who called us once said, “you know, it’s cheaper than divorce!” That’s true–and it’s also infinitely more rewarding. Because your relationship with your partner is so central, it has a way of affecting everything–it’s easier to work, parent, sleep, and enjoy life when your primary relationship is going well.
Here’s why we do 75-minute sessions–we used to do 50-minute sessions and it didn’t work. When they do process research on experiential couples therapy, they find that shifts most often begin to occur around the 45-50 minute mark. This means that when you do 50-minute sessions, you open up all the pain and then just when you’re about to bring the medicine, you say goodbye. Like going to a doctor who says, “so it hurts when I press here?”…and then…that’s it! What we have found is that longer sessions are more effective, and that once couples try it, they find they wouldn’t want to shortchange the experience they’re having together.
Again, we get it–you are busy and committing to weekly therapy sessions is really really challenging. The thing is–just like with medicine–dosage matters, and meeting (at least) weekly seems to be the just right dose for most couples. There are three parts to therapeutic change–exploring the pain, having a new experience, and integrating that new experience so your body remembers it and your life starts to feel better.
When the frequency is less than weekly (especially at the beginning of therapy), we have found that you won’t be able to get traction and the integration doesn’t happen. The process then becomes exploring the pain (ouch), experiencing the new, having ten rounds of the old and completing losing the new, exploring the pain again at your next session (ouch)…on and on. Not fun. Instead, let’s do what it takes to truly help your life feel better.
We offer options for in-person and online sessions, and we encourage you to do what feels most comfortable for you. That said, we can share that prior to 2022, we were “in-person therapy snobs.” We believed that therapy (especially couples therapy) could only happen when everyone is in the same room.
One of the silver linings of what we all went through is that we learned that we were absolutely wrong. We have found that, yes, online couples therapy is just as effective, and for some couples (e.g. one’s with young kids or busy schedules…so 90% of human couples), it is the thing that makes the process possible. We have even found hidden benefits–e.g. having healing conversations in your living room means your living room becomes the place your body remembers connecting deeply with your partner.
While we have found online couples therapy to be very effective, we have found that it is usually less effective when you and your partner aren’t in the same room and able to turn toward each other to heal. There is something that happens for couples when they meet “heart-to-heart, eyeball-to-eyeball,” as one of our EFT mentors used to say.
If there is no way for you and your partner to be in the same room for regular sessions, please feel free to call us to talk about your situation. We may still be able to help you. We would just need a chance to talk to you about what is happening in your relationship and about your goals for therapy.
If it takes time to reach that point, wouldn’t it be worth the journey?
If you’re ready to get started, please get in touch via our contact form, call/text, or by emailing us directly. Calls and emails will be responded to as soon as possible (within 24 hours).
916-234-0456
info@sagerivertherapy.com
Couples therapy to help you bring ease, connection, and trust back into your relationship.
Couples therapy to help you bring ease, connection, and trust back into your relationship.
