You don’t need
more love.
You need better
language.
Dr. Mara Ellison, MA, LMFT — trained at the Gottman Institute and featured in The Atlantic and On Being — helps couples find the words for the silence that keeps growing between them.
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Featured & trained
Why you keep fighting about the dishes — but it was never about the dishes.
Attachment theory explains that we each carry a blueprint for intimacy formed before we had words for it. When your partner goes quiet after a hard day, you read abandonment. They call that space. Neither reading is wrong. Both are incomplete.
“The fight was never about who forgot to call. It was about whether you were still being chosen.”
In our first session, we map your attachment pattern alongside your partner's. The goal isn't diagnosis — it's translation. You leave with a shared vocabulary where "I need space" and "don't leave" can finally coexist in the same sentence.
“We'd been together six years and I still felt like I was reading tea leaves every time he went quiet. I thought I was being needy. He thought he was giving me room. We were both trying to love each other correctly and completely missing.”
After three sessions
Sofia named her pattern as anxious-preoccupied; James recognized his as dismissive-avoidant. They built a 90-second check-in ritual. The silence stopped meaning something was wrong.
“I'd been in therapy for two years working on myself. I came to Attune alone because my husband wouldn't come. By session four I had language for what I needed from him that wasn't "be different." He started coming to session six.”
After three sessions
Rachel learned to make repair bids without over-explaining. Her husband recognized when a bid was being made. Their fights still happen — they just end now.
The apology that lands versus the one that reopens the wound.
Most couples know how to apologize. Very few know how to repair. An apology addresses what happened. A repair conversation addresses what it meant — and what the other person needed to hear instead.
“You've said sorry a hundred times. What you haven't said yet is: I understand why that broke something.”
We practice the four-part repair sequence: name what you did, acknowledge the impact, express genuine understanding of why it hurt, and make a specific behavioral commitment. Not a script — a structure you eventually internalize.
Recognizing the pattern is the first step. The next is learning the repair.
Book Your First SessionEvery small moment is a question. Most go unanswered.
John Gottman identified that couples make hundreds of "bids for connection" daily — a comment about the weather, a hand on the shoulder, a joke that doesn't land. Partners who stay together don't make fewer bids. They turn toward them more often.
“He mentioned the podcast three times. I was checking my email. That's where it starts — not with the big fight, but with the small look away.”
We spend one full session cataloguing your bid patterns — which ones you make, which ones you miss, and which ones you've stopped making because the return felt too uncertain. This is the granular work. It changes Thursday nights.
“We run a company together and travel separately half the year. We were efficient. We had systems. We'd optimized our marriage into a calendar. One night Amara said she felt like a well-managed employee. That was the sentence that brought us here.”
After three sessions
They identified that David's travel check-ins were logistical, not relational. They created a single non-logistical question for every call. The logistics didn't change. The marriage did.