Increase understanding, facilitate repair, and build intimacy, because your relationship deserves it.
You’re having the same fight over and over. There’s been an affair, a betrayal, or a revelation that changed the relationship overnight. You feel more like roommates dealing with logistics and not lovers building connection. Sex has disappeared from the partnership. You’re struggling to shift into non-monogamy.
Or maybe nothing is dramatically “wrong,” but you know that the relationship is no longer serving you.
Couples(+) therapy at Sapient is a direct, structured, sex-positive space to understand what’s happening within you and between you, and determine your next best steps.
Call 510-947-8253Schedule a Discovery CallIt’s not just what you’re arguing about…
Money. Parenting. Technology. Family stuff. Sex, too much or not enough or just not right. You’re convinced the other one is the problem.
Those things matter. Most couples can spend years arguing about the content without understanding the process.
Therapy helps you find the dynamics, patterns, and root causes beneath the argument so that you can make lasting change.
Couples(+) therapy may be right for you if…
- You keep having the same conflict without resolving it.
- You feel lonely inside your own relationship.
- You’re recovering from infidelity, secrecy, or a rupture of trust.
- Sex has become infrequent, tense, obligatory, conflictual, or non-existent.
- You’re struggling with differences in desire (mismatched libido, desire discrepancy).
- Your relationship structure already includes consensual non-monogamy or polyamory, and you want a therapist who understands it, not someone who tolerates your choices while silently judging you.
- One or both of you are questioning what you want from the relationship.
- You’re facing marriage, divorce, parenthood, relocation, retirement, blended-family life, or another major transition.
- You’re wondering whether to stay together, or you need help figuring out how to make it work.
We are the therapists who talk about sex
Relationship problems and sexual problems rarely respect departmental boundaries, and we don’t pretend otherwise. And yet, most traditional therapy modalities don’t teach or talk about sex and sexuality.
We can speak directly and clearly about sexuality. We won’t shame you for your desires or use euphemisms when speaking about bodies. We are frank and informed about STIs, aging, sexuality, and sexual interests. We offer clinical understanding and compassionate conversation that can help you navigate desire, rejection, initiation, arousal, sexual scripts, fantasies, pornography, attraction, erectile difficulties, orgasm, mismatched interests, sexual identity, perimenopause and menopause, and the things you may have spent years carefully avoiding.
Christopher Frier Brown is an AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 20 years of clinical experience. He’s Gottman-trained, Urban Tantra-trained, and kink-informed.
We are not here to decide who’s right
Couples therapy can become a strange little courtroom where everyone arrives holding their evidence. But we’re not the judge, and that’s not where the real work lives.
Instead, we look at the relationship itself and what you’re co-creating. What happens between you. What happens inside each of you. What do you protect, and what do you pursue? What are you afraid would happen if you stopped doing what you’ve always done?
And underneath all of it: what kind of relationship are you really trying to build?
The goal was never conflict-free love, because that type of relationship doesn’t actually exist. The goal is to build a relationship capable of honesty, differentiation, negotiation, intimacy, and repair—over and over again.
Couples and others = Couples(+)
Sapient works with relationships that don’t always fit neatly into the two-person, heterosexual, permanently monogamous template, because most relationships never did. We just didn’t talk about it in polite company.
That includes married and unmarried partnerships, LGBTQ+ relationships, consensually non-monogamous relationships, polyamorous relationships, kinky dynamics, “monogamish” relationships, and other relationship configurations you may not have the language for yet.
We don’t assume monogamy is the problem; we don’t assume non-monogamy is the solution. We help you understand the relationship you have, and make more intentional, more honest decisions about the relationship you want to build together.
What therapy can help you do
Understand the pattern
See what keeps happening between you, and why.
Talk about the thing
Sex. Betrayal. Anger. Resentment. Money. Desire. Divorce. Opening up. Whatever has become nearly impossible to say out loud without it turning into a fight.
Repair what can be repaired
An apology is not the same thing as repair. We work toward rebuilding trust through understanding, accountability, and changed behavior, not just a well-timed sorry.
Negotiate differentiation
Healthy relationships aren’t built by eliminating differences. But we do need to build real, lived ways to hold the humans within it.
Make decisions with clarity
Sometimes the question isn’t “how do we stay together?” Sometimes it’s “should we?” That question is welcome in this room too.
Experienced therapy for complicated relationships
Couples(+) therapy is led by Christopher Frier Brown, LCSW-S, CST, an AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist with more than 20 years of clinical experience. His approach is warm and direct; he’s curious but not passive. He asks the hard questions that get to the core of the issue.
His work focuses particularly on the places where individual psychology meets intimate relationships: attachment, sex, betrayal, desire, trauma, relationship structure, rupture, repair, and the major transitions of adult life.
His work integrates relationship therapy, sex therapy, attachment-informed treatment, Gottman-informed approaches, and direct, unflinching conversations about the realities of adult relationships.
Therapy is available in person in the East Bay and by telehealth for clients located in California, Colorado, and Texas.
Call 510-947-8253Schedule a Discovery CallLocation and format
Where
In person in the East Bay, or by telehealth for clients in California, Colorado, and Texas.
Getting started
Schedule a discovery call: Tell us what’s happening, and we’ll talk about whether ongoing couples therapy, individual therapy, sex therapy, Sex Coaching, or a more concentrated intensive makes the most sense for where you are.
Your relationship problems don’t have to keep repeating.
Schedule a discovery call, and let’s talk about what happens next.
Call 510-947-8253Schedule a Discovery Call