Couples Therapy for Early-career Faculty
Both of you love the professional careers you’ve built, and whether one or both of you are in an early-career academic role, you are acutely aware of its unique demands and the pressures it can place on a relationship. You love the life you’ve built together. And yet, the lived reality of making both your marriage and career work has you feeling pressure at the seams.
Perhaps these feel familiar…
Mentoring, teaching, and committee work (not to mention travel for conferences) feel like they take up plenty of time, and it feels like you’re always trying to find more room for writing. Quality time together gets the short end of the stick, and lately it feels like you’re on autopilot in your relationship. It’s not a crisis, but it doesn’t feel connected.
That R01 deadline is looming, and it’s the first month of the fall semester. You thought you might have been able to get away for your anniversary, but it’s looking like you’ll have to try again next year. You’re both more disappointed than you let on.
The tenure clock is ticking, and your biological clock isn’t keeping time. Conversations about starting a family feel especially fraught with the added complexity of career impact, and it’s draining both of you so much you avoid the topic.
The two-body “problem” is more like a nightmare. The complexities and contingency plans are overwhelming. A simple reference to where you will be “next year” can devolve a conversation into blame and resentment.
Your child wakes up with a fever, and the jockeying begins about whose day can be rearranged and who will stay home. It feels like a competition - and you’re not on the same team.
You both recognize the demands of this role, but living in it together lately feels impossible, and you’re starting to worry if the only way back to connection is to overhaul your whole life. You’ve built a life and career you genuinely love, but it feels so hard to actually enjoy it when the two of you feel disconnected.
You’re desperately hoping things will “slow down” next semester.
What We Do in Sessions
Couples therapy at this stage is a chance to intentionally slow all of this spin. It’s dedicated time to hear and see one another clearly. To reassure one another. To find your way back.
We’ll start with a session with both of you together. I’ll learn about your relationship and history together. We’ll start to talk through goals. Then, I’ll meet with each of you 1:1. This is your chance to share with me your story, and how things are feeling for you in the relationship, before we move into the rest of our work all together.
In session, we will be honest and unflinching about the real demands of your work. We will also create space to identify and voice your equally real longings and desires in your relationship. This is where we rebuild the bond between the two of you, so you can feel like you’re in it together.
I won’t give you homework - our work is contained in session. That’s where the change happens. You show up, commit to the work with an open mind, and I will move you through it.
My approach is empathetic, intentional, and warm. You can trust that I won’t let things get too heated, and I’m not afraid to interrupt to ensure we stay on track. I am not a “smile and nod” therapist. You can also trust that I won’t serve as a judge, handing down rulings or taking sides. In couples therapy, I see your relationship as my client. My job is to help the two of you feel like you’re in it together.
Our work is confidential and private.
Many of my clients wait too long to reach out. They are waiting for things to get better with time, or with the next semester’s schedule, or the next job transition. The truth is, time doesn’t improve your connection, but it can entrench disconnection and resentment. Reaching out for evidence-based support now prevents months and years of living a less full life than both of you desire.
What Getting Better Looks Like
Not a whole new life, but a new way of being in it. Together.
When your child wakes up sick, it starts to feel like you’re on the same team strategizing together. When work means you have to miss something important, you can lean into trusting that you’ll find a way to reconnect. The resentment fades when you know how to reassure one another in new ways, and ask for what you need more clearly.
What you want is for both of you are able to ask for what you want and know your partner will respond calmly. Or for both of you to feel like your partner actually listens, that you can say what you need to say and solve problems together without things getting heated.
The goal of couples work isn’t zero conflict: all relationships include ruptures and necessary and healing repairs. But after therapy, every rupture doesn’t feel like proof that their entire life has to change before it can feel better. They start to trust one another in new ways.
What I hear clients say most often is that they start to feel that they’re “in it together” and the security they derive from that is an immense relief. The work demands don’t go away, but it all feels so much more doable now. They are free to do the work they’re meant to do in the world, for their students, their field, and colleagues. And they can enjoy their life with their partner at the same time.
If this would feel like a relief to you, schedule a 25 min consult today. I’m looking forward to connecting with you.