Frequently Asked Questions

Blackwood, New Jersey. That's South Jersey, and if you can get there, that's where we'll sit.

When getting there isn't workable, whether that's the drive, the childcare, or the two of you coming from two different directions at the end of a workday, we meet online instead.

You'll receive a link to log on with me. Click it at your appointment time and you're in the room.

The part worth planning is where you'll be sitting when you click. Online works best when you have somewhere nobody will walk in on you and an hour that belongs to no one else.

That matters more for couples than most people expect, because the two of you are about to say things to each other that need somewhere to land.

Call the office at (856) 395-9536 or write to me at aliveandwelltherapy@gmail.com. Either one reaches me directly. The number is an office line, so it takes calls rather than texts.

Tell me a little about what's going on. It doesn't need to be organized or fair or finished, and it doesn't have to be the version you'd say in front of the other person.

If you'd rather hear me on the phone before anything gets scheduled, ask for a consultation and you'll have one.

It's a phone call, it's free, and it exists so you can find out whether I'm the right person for what's going on before you commit to anything further.

Ask me the blunt ones. Whether I've worked with something like yours before, what I'd want to do with it, and anything you'd rather not ask with your partner in the room.

If this isn't work I should be taking, you'll hear that from me on the phone rather than three months from now.

Ask for a consultation when you call or write, and we'll set it up.

45 to 60 minutes.

That's long enough to get past the version of the story you've already rehearsed, and short enough that nobody has to hold the hardest part of it open all afternoon.

That depends on what you brought in.

A specific decision sitting in front of you is a different piece of work from years of accumulated hurt that nobody ever addressed, and I won't know which one I'm looking at until we've been at it a little while. Handing you a number I couldn't stand behind would be the easy thing to do at the front end, and I don't do that.

What I can tell you is that we'll name out loud, early, what you came in for. From there you'll be able to tell for yourself whether we're getting closer to it.

Adults, 25 and older. Men and women individually, couples, and families.

Most of the family work turns out to be a parent and a grown child who love each other and can't get a single sentence across the table intact.

Anyone under 25 is outside what I do, and you'll hear that from me on the first phone call rather than three weeks into something.

Yes. A good deal of what I do is one person in the chair.

Usually it's somebody who has watched the same painful thing happen in relationship after relationship and has run out of explanations for why it keeps landing on them.

Most of that traces back further than whoever you're with now, into what you learned about closeness and what it costs long before you had any say in the matter. That's the part we go after.

Emotionally Focused Therapy is the main frame, and I'm trained in it. Most of the hour goes to the pattern the two of you fall into every time Tuesday comes around, and very little of it to refereeing Tuesday's argument itself.

One of you moves toward and one of you moves away, and the harder the first one pushes, the further the second one goes.

Therapists call that pursuer and withdrawer. You two probably have a shorter name for it.

With a parent and a grown child it's the same work, aimed at what each of you does the moment the other one starts talking and at where each of you learned to do it.

Gottman Method work, family-of-origin and psychodynamic work, narrative therapy and CBT come in where they earn their place.

I'll stop the two of you in the middle of an argument you've had a hundred times and ask what went through you in the half second before you said the next thing. It's a strange question to get the first few times, and the answer is almost never what either of you had assumed.

Underneath all of it I'm working toward an emotionally corrective experience, where the two of you get through a hard conversation in a way you haven't managed to get through it on your own.

One thing to know going in: this work asks something of you. Nobody gets to sit still and have a relationship repaired around them.

I earned my master's in Marriage and Family Therapy from Liberty University, and my bachelor's in biblical studies from Cairn University.

Licensed, yes. I'm a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in New Jersey and in Pennsylvania, and I'm also a certified Prepare and Enrich facilitator and a Certified Life Coach.

No. Sides are how a therapist loses one of the two people in the room, and I need both of you.

Accountability is a separate matter, and you'll get plenty of that. Somebody has to notice the distance between what the two of you say you want and what you're actually doing on a Wednesday night, and that job is mine.

What I ask of both of you is that you come at each other curious instead of accusational. A great deal of what arrives as an attack started out as a request that came out sideways.

It can be, if that's what you're looking for.

The practice I came from was a Christian counseling practice, and faith runs through how I understand this work. Say the word and Scripture comes into the room with us.

For anyone who'd rather it stayed outside the room, it stays outside, and nothing else about the work changes. Whatever language you and I each use for it, we want the same things for your family: honesty, repair, somebody keeping their word.

There is more common ground than people expect, and that's where we build.

No. There's a couch and there are two chairs, all of it comfy cozy, and you're welcome to sit wherever and however you feel most comfortable.

Feet up is allowed.

Weather permitting, we don't have to stay inside at all. We can take a walk or sit outside, and you're allowed to be the one who asks for that.

Walking side by side takes some of the pressure off, and there are conversations that come easier when nobody has to hold eye contact for a full hour.

Recommended, for anyone who wears it. You can take that two ways: as a fair warning about how these sessions tend to go, and as permission.

The Puffs are right there on the table and that's most of what they're for. Nothing that comes out of you in that room will be too much for me to sit with.

Crying in front of your partner is often the first fully honest thing that's happened between the two of you in a long while. If you're in that chair by yourself, it's usually the first time it's happened anywhere at all.

Better it happens here, with me in the room, than in the car on the way home.

Dogs, in the past. No pets right now, so nothing is going to climb into your lap in the middle of a hard sentence.

Yes, and I reserve the right to use my discretion in answering them.

Ask anyway. You're about to tell me things you haven't told anybody, and wanting to know something about the person on the other side of that is reasonable.

Most of it I'll answer. When I don't, you'll hear me say so rather than watch me slide around it, and the reason will almost always be that my life would be taking up your hour.

The hour is yours.