Dating and Relationship Therapy in Encino, CA
Individual therapy for the relationship patterns that keep showing up, whether you’re dating, in a relationship, or starting over.
In-person in Encino and online therapy across California
Individual Therapy for Relationship Issues
Individual therapy for relationship issues is a place to understand the patterns that keep showing up in dating, committed relationships, or after a breakup. You attend sessions on your own; a partner does not need to participate. If you want to work on your relationship together, couples therapy may be a better fit.
Looking at Your Side With Self-Compassion
Individual relationship therapy gives you space to look at what happens for you, with honesty and self-compassion.
That does not mean blaming yourself, excusing someone else’s behavior, or pretending the problem is only yours to solve. It means understanding what gets stirred up for you when closeness, conflict, longing, or loss bring up fears of rejection, abandonment, or getting hurt.
How Attachment Shapes Relationship Patterns
Attachment theory helps us understand what you learned to expect from closeness and relationships, including whether closeness felt dependable, conditional, overwhelming, or unavailable.
Those early experiences can shape who you feel drawn to, how you respond when you begin to care about someone, how much reassurance you need, and what happens for you when someone pulls away or moves closer.
If You Are Dating
If you are dating, therapy can help you understand why the strongest chemistry sometimes happens with people who are inconsistent or emotionally unavailable, or why you may avoid dating even though part of you longs for closeness.
We may look at anxious attachment, fear of abandonment, over-functioning, ignoring your own needs, or the push-pull between wanting closeness and protecting yourself from it.
If You Are in a Relationship
If you are in a relationship, individual therapy can help you understand the patterns you and your partner get caught in, even when your partner is not part of the therapy.
This may be helpful when your partner is not interested in therapy, when you are not ready for couples therapy, or when you want to better understand your own patterns before deciding what to do next. Sometimes individual therapy is enough to help you relate differently. Other times, it becomes clearer that working together in couples therapy would be helpful.
If You Are Healing From a Breakup
If you are healing from a breakup, therapy can help you grieve the relationship, understand why it may have been so difficult to let go, and make sense of what happened without turning the ending into a story that you are too much, not enough, or unlovable.
We may explore what made it hard to leave, what you longed for, and what you want to understand before opening yourself to love again.
What We Pay Attention To
We pay attention to what happens in your body, what you feel, how you protect yourself, and what you begin to believe when closeness, uncertainty, or loss brings up fears of rejection, abandonment, disappointment, or being too much. A delayed text, a partner’s tone, or the sudden absence after a breakup can start to feel like proof that you will never find what you want, or that you will be left alone with your feelings.
Moving Toward More Choice
Therapy helps you pause before fears about closeness or rejection become the whole story. Together, we can notice how quickly fear, shame, or the need to protect yourself takes over and ask: Am I responding to the person in front of me, or to something familiar from the past, such as feeling that I have to earn closeness or hold everything together on my own?
Over time, you can recognize your patterns more quickly, understand where they come from, and respond with more clarity and choice. The goal is not to become someone who never feels anxious, never pulls back, or never needs reassurance. It is to understand your patterns well enough that fears of being left, trapped, alone, or losing yourself have less influence over how you respond.
Who This Is For
Dating and relationship therapy may be a good fit if relationships bring up anxiety, self-doubt, shutting down, or the feeling that you should have figured this out by now. The focus is not your relationship status but what keeps happening around closeness, conflict, commitment, and loss.
Therapy for dating anxiety
Therapy for dating anxiety can help if dating feels less like getting to know someone and more like hope and dread on a loop.
You may feel excited before a date, then spend hours replaying what you said or wondering what the silence means. We can look at that post-date spiral, rejection sensitivity, the need for reassurance, and what makes the uncertainty feel so difficult to tolerate.
For some people, dating anxiety is closely connected to attachment. Inconsistent communication can feel especially difficult when you have come to expect that closeness may disappear. The goal is not to become detached or stop caring. It is to slow the urgency, understand what gets stirred up, and date without losing sight of your own needs and self-respect.
Dating app burnout can be part of this. When dating becomes endless swiping, ghosting, and bracing for disappointment, therapy can help you protect your energy without becoming so guarded that it becomes difficult to let someone in.
Dating With Anxious Attachment
Dating with anxious attachment can feel confusing. The longing for closeness may be intense, and so can the fear of losing it. You may become deeply invested before you know whether someone is emotionally available, read a lot into changes in communication, or feel increasingly anxious when someone seems less responsive.
You may find yourself seeking reassurance, reaching out more when someone pulls away, or having difficulty knowing whether your reaction is about what is happening now or something familiar from earlier relationships. These responses often make sense in the context of what you have learned to expect from closeness.
The goal is not to stop needing other people or convince yourself that distance does not matter. Therapy can help you understand what makes uncertainty so activating, recognize when fear is influencing how you respond, and have more choice about what you do next.
Dating With Avoidant Attachment
Dating with avoidant attachment may look like losing interest when someone becomes more emotionally available, feeling uneasy when a relationship starts to become more serious, or pulling away when someone wants greater closeness. You may find yourself wanting connection and then questioning the relationship once it begins to feel more important.
Sometimes this means focusing more on someone’s flaws, feeling overwhelmed by another person’s needs, fearing engulfment, needing more distance after moments of closeness, or wondering whether you really want the relationship at all. Therapy can help you understand what is behind the urge to pull away, without assuming that every concern you have about a relationship is about attachment or that you should ignore reasons the relationship may not be right for you.
If you recognize avoidant attachment patterns in yourself, therapy does not have to turn “avoidant” into a label that defines you. You may be used to relying on yourself, needing less from other people, or keeping some emotional distance. Depending on someone or letting yourself be known may feel vulnerable or uncomfortable.
The goal is not to force yourself to want more closeness than feels right. Therapy can help you understand why distance has been important to you, notice when the urge to pull away is connected to something familiar from the past, and distinguish that from times when you genuinely do not want the relationship. Over time, you can have more choice about when to move closer, when to ask for space, and what kind of relationship allows for both connection and autonomy.
If you are in a relationship
If you are in a relationship, individual therapy can help you understand the patterns you and your partner get caught in, even when your partner is not part of the therapy.
You may notice that the same conflicts, fears, or frustrations seem to follow you from one relationship to another. You may repeatedly become involved with people who are emotionally unavailable, feel responsible for holding relationships together, or pull away when someone gets too close.
We can look at what keeps drawing you into the same relationship patterns, including how earlier relationships and family-of-origin patterns may be shaping what you expect from closeness, conflict, and commitment. Understanding where these patterns come from can help you recognize them sooner, before they automatically shape what you do next.
The goal is not to decide who is at fault. It is to understand your part in the pattern without taking responsibility for what belongs to someone else, and to have more choice in what you do next.
Dating after divorce therapy
Dating after divorce can bring up questions you may not have expected. You may be unsure whether you are ready to date again, find it difficult to trust someone new, or question your own judgment after the end of a marriage.
Therapy can give you space to understand what you want now, what you do not want to repeat, and how the relationship you left may still be affecting the way you approach dating. If you are co-parenting, we can also talk about the added complexity of dating while remaining connected to a former partner through your children.
The goal is not to push yourself to “move on” or start over before you are ready. It is to help you enter this next part of your life with a clearer understanding of yourself, your relationships, and what you want to create differently.
Therapy After a Breakup
A breakup can leave you grieving not only the relationship, but also the future you imagined with that person. You may find yourself replaying what happened, wondering what you missed, struggling with the loss of contact, or questioning whether you will ever find the kind of relationship you want.
Therapy can help you make sense of what happened and why the relationship may have been so difficult to let go of. We may look at what you longed for, what you were hoping would change, and what you want to carry forward or do differently before opening yourself up to someone new.
You Can Begin With Your Own Work
You do not need a partner to begin understanding what keeps happening in your relationships. In individual therapy, we can look at the patterns that show up in dating, committed relationships, and breakups, including what draws you toward certain people, what happens when closeness feels uncertain, and what makes it difficult to trust your own judgment.
My approach to dating and relationship therapy is attachment-based and focused on understanding what is underneath these patterns, rather than giving you dating tips, scripts, or rules about what you should do.
I offer dating and relationship therapy in Encino, serving clients from across the Los Angeles area, as well as online throughout California.
How I Work With Relationship Patterns
We can talk about what happened on a date, during an argument, after a breakup, or in a longterm relationship. But therapy is also a place to understand why certain situations affect you so strongly and why some ways of relating can be so difficult to change.
We may look at what happens when you are unsure where you stand with someone, how you react when someone pulls away or wants more closeness, and how earlier relationships and family-of-origin patterns may be affecting what you expect from the people you become close to.
I have practiced as a therapist since 2007, and my work with dating and relationship concerns is attachment-based. Rather than giving you rules about what you should do or deciding whether a relationship is right for you, I help you understand what is happening for you so you can make choices with more clarity.
You can learn more about my approach on my Attachment-Based Therapy page.
Understanding the Relationship Pattern
Therapy can help you notice what tends to happen when relationships become important to you. You may over-explain, people-please, pull away, rely only on yourself, become involved with emotionally unavailable people, or have difficulty letting go of a relationship even when it is no longer meeting your needs.
We can look at how attachment and family-of-origin patterns may be shaping what you expect from closeness and relationships. You may find that different relationships bring up some of the same fears, reactions, or ways of protecting yourself.
Understanding these patterns is not about finding something wrong with you. It is about making sense of why certain reactions and ways of relating have been so difficult to change.
If You Are Dating
If you are dating, we can look at what happens as you get to know someone: what draws you in, what makes you anxious, when you begin to doubt yourself, and what happens when someone’s interest feels mutual or uncertain.
We may also explore why hot-and-cold communication can feel exciting, why consistency may feel unfamiliar at first, or why you find yourself working harder for closeness when someone is less available.
Therapy is not about turning dating into a checklist or telling you what decision to make. The goal is to help you understand your reactions, stay aware of your own needs, recognize red flags, and make choices with more clarity.
If You Are in a Relationship
When you are in a relationship, we can look at the cycle you and your partner get caught in. One person may reach for more closeness while the other pulls away. One may seek more reassurance or insist on talking things through, while the other feels criticized, pressured, or trapped.
In individual therapy, we focus on understanding your part in that cycle without assuming that the problems in the relationship are yours to fix. We can look at what happens for you before you pursue, shut down, accommodate, become defensive, or give up.
Sometimes individual therapy helps you understand your own part in the relationship more clearly. Other times, it becomes clear that working together in couples therapy would be more helpful.
If You Are Healing After a Breakup
If you are healing after a breakup, therapy can make room for grief, anger, relief, longing, confusion, and the loss of the future you imagined with that person.
We can look at the relationship honestly, including what was painful, what you may have minimized, what you hoped would change, and why it may have been so difficult to let go.
Breakup recovery is not simply about “moving on.” It is about making sense of what happened without turning the ending into proof that you are destined to repeat the same patterns in every relationship.Recognizing the Pull Sooner
This work is not about blaming yourself, deciding that every difficult partner is “avoidant” or “narcissistic,” or assuming that every relationship problem comes from your attachment patterns.
It is about recognizing the pull sooner, such as when you begin to abandon yourself, feel like it is up to you to keep the relationship going, or try to make a one-sided relationship work.
Over time, you can notice these moments earlier, have more choice in what you do next, and become clearer about what you need for a relationship to feel mutual and dependable.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I do this work if my partner won't come?
Why do I keep dating or partnering with the same kind of person?
What is the difference between couples therapy and individual relationship therapy?
In couples therapy, both partners attend and the relationship itself is the focus of the work. In individual relationship therapy, you come on your own and we focus on your experiences, reactions, relationship patterns, what you want, and how you respond. Individual therapy can be helpful whether you are single, dating, in a relationship, or deciding what you want to do about one.
If you and your partner want to work together on the relationship, couples therapy may be a better fit.
How do I know if my relationship anxiety is normal or a sign of something bigger?
Can therapy help me date with anxious attachment?
Should I do therapy after a breakup?
Therapy after a breakup may be helpful if you feel stuck in what happened, feel like the relationship is playing on repeat in your mind, are having trouble adjusting to the loss, or find that the breakup is affecting your sleep, work, self-esteem, or ability to move forward. It can also be useful if the ending brings up fears or reactions you have experienced in other relationships, or leaves you unsure about what you want in future relationships.
You do not have to be in crisis to come to therapy after a breakup. Sometimes having a place to sort through what happened can help you grieve, regain perspective, and become clearer about what you want going forward.
How long does this work take?
Ready to understand why the same relationship patterns keep repeating? Let’s talk.
Schedule your free 30-minute phone consultation. We’ll talk about what you’re looking for and whether I might be a good fit for what you need.