Couples Therapy

Dr. Easterlin’s clinical work with couples provides a forum for partners/spouses to uncover ineffective "cycles" of relating by understanding each other's attachment style.  Dr. Easterlin believes that receptivity, attunement to one another, and safety within the relationship leads to deeper physical and emotional intimacy and better teamwork as life partners and as parents.  She integrates current attachment research and affective neuroscience to help couples understand where their patterns arise from.  An understanding of these factors as it connects to clients’ own nervous system intelligently illuminates how relationships affect the emotions, brain and nervous system, and how the brain and nervous system relate to emotions in one’s current life, particularly with one’s intimate partner. This exploration helps couples find the areas of negative reactive cycles more easily and find their way new experiences of being together that are more satisfying and productive. 

Starting with an in-depth Partner Attachment Interview (PAI) (Stan Tatkin, 2007), Dr. Easterlin helps couples more quickly find the areas of difficulty, creating a “map” of the interpersonal territory of conflict.  Everyone knows when they are stuck, but using this map, couples are able to more quickly and easily navigate their way to more secure and positive areas of togetherness.  Dr. Easterlin works to help couples bring insights and skills into their everyday lives so that they become the experts on repair and reconnection.  Practicing new skills fosters new neural pathways and can improve brain chemistry, generating optimism and positive feelings of security and closeness. Although she works with couples presenting many different challenges such as tension about money, sex, parenting, and infidelity, Dr. Easterlin is one of the few psychologists in the Bay Area who has a deep understanding of ADHD and its impact on families and couples.  She has worked with many individuals and couples to understand and develop strategies to surmount challenges unique to ADHD.  As an expert on couples therapy and ADHD, she contributed a chapter on parenting to a recent book for clinicians on working with ADHD in couples counseling [insert icon here].  Her expertise comes from depth training as well as University research positions in which she performed clinical interventions aimed at improving ADHD symptoms as well as marital satisfaction.  Dr. Easterlin worked as a Research Psychologist in Dr. John Gottman's relationship laboratory at the University of Washington where she conducted therapeutic interventions aimed at improving positive emotions in couples.  She also conducted ADHD assessments, interventions, and parent training for many years at UCSF's Hyperactivity, Attention, and Learning Problems (HALP) Clinic.   She believes it is important to keep up with the latest trends in clinical research into couple dynamics and, in recent years, has received depth training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) (certified Level 1 training) with Sue Johnson, PhD; Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP Immersion) with Diane Fosha, PhD; and the PACT Attachment model (Levels 1 and 2) with Stan Tatkin, PhD.