Couples Therapy in NYC
50 minute psychotherapy sessions offered on a weekly or biweekly basis. for couples, loved ones, friends, polycules, mediation, etc.
Couples therapy in New York and New Jersey that helps partners to improve communication, resolve conflicts, and build stronger relationships. Whether facing trust issues, recurring arguments, or navigating life transitions, sessions provide a collaborative space to foster understanding and intimacy. Group sessions are tailored to help you identify patterns, build coping skills, and achieve growth together.
What does couples therapy look like?
Each session is 50 minutes, offered weekly, and follows an active, direct, integrative and collaborative format that allows you to build skills and understand the disconnects that causing you to feel misunderstood. Your therapist actively guides the conversation, naming patterns as they show up in real time and introducing tools you can use outside the session, so the work builds session over session instead of starting from scratch each time. For couples sessions, we engage in a comprehensive intake process that involves gathering information as a group and individually to help inform treatment.
What we help with
Riverside Wellness works with couples navigating a wide range of presenting concerns, including but not limited to relationship anxiety, infidelity, communication, and major life transitions. Sessions are shaped around your specific situation and needs.
Relationship Anxiety
Infidelity
Life Transitions
Communication
Feeling a persistent worry that something's wrong, that your partner will leave, or that you're too much or not enough. Relationship anxiety is can quietly shape how you communicate, trust, and show up for each other. Therapy can help you to understand where this coming from, the impact of attachment, and can help to build a relationship that feels steadier, for both of you.
Whether it's a single breach of trust or an ongoing pattern, infidelity brings up hard questions that are difficult to work through alone. Sessions create space to process what happened, understand how you got here, and decide together what rebuilding or moving forward separately or together (or something else) can actually look like.
When the same conflict keeps resurfacing or conversations go sideways before they start, it's rarely about the topic itself, rather it's a pattern that repeats regardless of what the conflict started. In session, we help you both see the cycle you're caught in, understand what's driving each side of it, and practice new ways of responding so you can actually break it and develop more sustainable ways to interact.
Whether you're going through a move, pregnancy, a career change, a loss, or something else, major life shifts put pressure on even the strongest relationships. Therapy helps you navigate the transition as a team, so these changes bring you closer together rather than pulling you apart.
Polyamory and Consensual Non-Monogamy
At Riverside Wellness, we have a speciality in working with individuals and couples who are exploring their relationship with polyamory and consensual non-monogamy. Our therapists are skilled and experienced in the specific dynamics of non-monogamous relationships. Sessions can include more than two people and the focus can look similar to any couples work. We may explore communication, boundaries, and trust but applied to the particular complexities that emerge within open and polyamorous relationship structures, such as negotiating agreements, navigating jealousy or new relationship energy and mediating or navigating conflicts between multiple partners at once.
How we blend multiple therapy approaches for you
At Riverside Wellness, we take an adaptive approach to therapy that works to meet you wherever you are at in your needs. We pull from a variety of modalities in order to create an integrated approach to care.
Cognitive Behavioral
Identifying and shifting the thought patterns that drive how you feel and act.
Dialectical Behavioral
Building skills for emotional regulation and tolerating distress without shutting down or reacting.
Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
Grounding the work in your own insight and pace and meeting you exactly where you are.
Psychodynamic
Understanding how past relationships and experiences shape present-day patterns.
Gottman Therapy
Research-based tools for managing conflict, building friendship, and strengthening the everyday patterns that hold a relationship together.
Our Therapists
Lauren Silverman, LCSW
Licensed in NY & NJ
Lauren specializes in treating clients seeking support with LGBTQ+ issues, identity development, and polyamory & consensual non-monogamy. I am skilled in providing affirming and knowledgeable support for individuals navigating diverse relationship structures and dynamics.
Emma Sullivan, LMSW
Licensed in NY & NJ
Emma specializes in anxiety, OCD, perfectionism, burnout, and life transitions, with particular experience supporting clients navigating career stress and identity shifts. Informed by her own background in corporate and tech before becoming a therapist, she takes a warm, trauma-informed approach to help clients build practical tools alongside deeper self-understanding.
Gillian Halper, LMSW
Licensed in NY & NJ
Gillian specializes in working with adults navigating identity, relationship patterns, intimacy concerns, LGBTQ+ issues, and anxiety. She focuses on how communication and boundaries shape self-esteem, helping clients understand where their patterns come from so they have more choice in how they respond. Her approach is trauma-informed, drawing on CBT, psychodynamic, and mindfulness-based therapies.