Couples Therapy & Premarital Counseling in Utah — Including Mixed-Faith Relationships

Relationships do not fail because people stop caring. They struggle because the conversations that need to happen — about beliefs, expectations, money, family, identity — are the ones nobody quite knows how to have. Or because life changes faster than the relationship can keep up.

I work with couples who are trying to build something real: engaged couples who want to start marriage with a strong foundation, partners navigating a faith transition that one of them did not sign up for, and mixed-faith couples who love each other but are realizing that different beliefs create real, daily friction.

I have lived this. My own marriage went through a significant faith transition. I know what it is like to sit across from someone you love and realize that the shared language you built your life on has shifted beneath you. That experience shaped how I work — directly, honestly, and without pretending these conversations are easy.

Premarital Counseling: Building a Foundation Before the Cracks Form

Most couples who seek premarital counseling are not in crisis. They are smart people who recognize that a marriage is a structure — and that structures are easier to build strong than to repair after something breaks.

Premarital counseling is not about discovering whether you are compatible. By the time most couples arrive, they have already answered that question. It is about having the conversations that couples avoid until those conversations become problems — and having them in a space where they feel safe to be honest.

What Premarital Counseling Actually Covers

The topics that matter most are often the ones that feel too loaded to bring up on your own:

• Conflict and communication — not just "how do we fight less" but how do you repair after a fight, and what does each of you need when things get heated
• Money and finances — separate accounts or joint, debt, spending habits, financial stress and how it affects intimacy
• Family of origin — the patterns you learned growing up and how they show up in your relationship now, often without you realizing it
• Roles and expectations — who does what, what you each assumed the other assumed, and where the expectations do not line up
• Children — whether and when, how you will raise them, what values matter, what happens if one of you changes your mind
• Faith and religion — especially critical for mixed-faith or transitioning couples, but relevant for any couple where beliefs are part of life
• Intimacy and connection — physical, emotional, and what each partner needs to feel close
• Goals and identity — who do you each want to become, and how does the relationship support or strain that

These are not abstract exercises. They are the things that couples argue about for decades when they do not talk about them first.

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Mixed-Faith Couples: When Two People Believe Different Things

Utah is one of the most religiously homogeneous places in the country — which means when someone's relationship to the LDS church shifts, the effects ripple into nearly every part of a relationship. Holidays, family gatherings, how children are raised, how Sunday mornings look, what community means — all of it suddenly requires renegotiation.

Mixed-faith couples often describe a particular kind of loneliness. The partner who is leaving a faith feels like they cannot be fully honest about the process without threatening the relationship. The partner who is staying feels like they are losing not just the person's beliefs but a shared future they thought they had agreed on. Both people are grieving something, and neither one knows quite how to say it.

What Mixed-Faith Couples Actually Need

Most mixed-faith couples do not need to agree on theology. They need:

• A way to talk about it without the conversation escalating into an argument about who is right
• To understand what each partner is actually grieving — because it is often different things
• Agreements about how to handle the practical realities: church attendance, tithing, children's religious upbringing, extended family expectations
• A sense that the relationship can hold the difference — that love does not require identical beliefs
• Space for the partner in transition to continue processing without the relationship becoming a casualty of the process

This is work I do directly. Not as an outside observer — as someone who navigated it personally and now helps couples find a way through it that does not require either person to choose between their beliefs and their relationship.

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General Couples Therapy: When Strain Has Set In

Not every couple in my office is navigating a faith transition. Some couples are dealing with the ordinary but serious weight of:

• Communication that keeps breaking down the same way
• Distance that has grown slowly over time and is hard to name
• A major life transition — a move, a job loss, a health crisis, kids — that cracked the relationship in ways neither person expected
• One partner carrying resentment that the other does not know about
• Intimacy that has become transactional or disappeared
• Relationship OCD (ROCD): intrusive doubt about whether the relationship is right, the partner is right, or whether love means what you think it means

The common thread in most of these is not that people stopped trying. It is that they are trying in ways that do not quite reach each other. Therapy helps you understand what is actually happening beneath the surface — and gives you a structure for changing it.

What Couples Therapy Looks Like With Me

My approach is direct. I am not going to sit back and let a session turn into two people talking past each other for 50 minutes. I pay close attention to what is said, what is not said, and the patterns that keep repeating.

I draw primarily on systems theory — understanding each partner not just as an individual but as part of a system with its own patterns and dynamics — and on practical communication work that gives you tools you can actually use outside of the session.

I also bring in my background with OCD and anxiety when it is relevant. Relationship OCD in particular — the kind where intrusive doubt about the relationship itself becomes the problem — is something I am specifically trained to work with and have personal experience navigating.

Affordable Couples Therapy in Utah — Sliding Scale Available

Sessions are $100 per session. As a supervised intern, I am not able to bill insurance — but my rate is significantly lower than most licensed therapists in Utah. A sliding scale is available for couples who need it. Do not let cost stop you from reaching out.

Many couples find that working with a supervised intern at a lower rate means they can come consistently — and consistency is one of the strongest predictors of whether couples therapy actually works.

In-Person and Telehealth in Utah

I see couples in person at my office in Murray, Utah. Telehealth is also available for any couple throughout Utah — this is often easier to coordinate for two people with different schedules.

If you are not sure whether couples therapy, premarital counseling, or individual therapy makes more sense for your situation, the free 30-minute consultation is a good place to figure that out. No commitment, no pressure.