6 Ways to Find the Right Person to Work on Your Marriage With

This is the practical checklist, written for anyone anywhere rather than for this city. If you want the version with Miami in it, the local considerations and the red flags that should make you walk, that is how to choose who you do this work with in Miami.

Six things, in the order I would check them. I will tell you where I fit and where I do not, and you should discount my opinion accordingly, but the mechanics below are the same regardless of who you end up hiring.

1. Find a specialist, not a generalist

This is the highest value filter and almost nobody applies it.

It is genuinely hard to find someone who has dedicated their practice to this one thing. Plenty of licensed practices add marriage work to a long list of conditions they treat. But marriage is not a diagnosable disorder. Being of service to two individuals and to the thing between them at the same time is a specific skill set, and it does not arrive automatically with a general credential.

Marital problems come out of communication, sexual function, stress, culture, money, and whether two people share values and goals. Most of them are three dimensional in a way that a single presenting complaint is not. Someone who does this every day recognizes the shape in the first hour. Someone who does it occasionally is working it out with you in real time on your money.

2. Decide between a coach and a licensed professional

These are different products and you should choose deliberately rather than by whoever appeared first in the search.

A licensed clinician is trained to take a detailed history and to dig into your past to understand how it is shaping your present. That is real work and there are situations where it is the only correct route: abuse, an active addiction, an untreated mental health condition, or a history that is still actively running one of your lives. I refer those out and I do it on the first call.

A coach works the other direction. What do the two of you actually want in this marriage. What is the purpose of being married at all. What would you like to experience together, and what is stopping you from even discussing it. Coaching also does not treat people as broken. It treats them as developing, which changes what happens in the room more than it sounds like it would.

Here is one example of the difference. Nearly every couple arrives saying they have a communication problem. It is almost never communication. It is listening. They are both talking, or one is waiting politely with a response already loaded, and nobody in the room is taking anything in. That reframe is a coaching move, and it changes the work in about 10 minutes. I go through the full comparison, including where coaching is the weaker option, in coaching and the clinical path.

3. Ask how many sessions before you commit

Nobody asks this and it is the number that actually determines whether you finish.

Some clinical models are designed to run long. Emotionally focused work in the Sue Johnson tradition is well regarded and is commonly described as needing somewhere from 8 to 20 or more weekly sessions to do its job. That is not a criticism, it is a design. But be honest about what it means: that is weekly travel, weekly money, and in most houses a babysitter, all three lined up on the same evening for months. A lot of couples quit that at session five and conclude the work failed, when what failed was the logistics.

What I built runs deliberately short. EC3, which stands for Connect, Correct and Create, is designed as three sessions across about 30 days. You start with a 90 minute session to get reconnected and get everything on the table, then two follow ups to check what actually changed, deepen it, and hold both of you to what you said. Many couples finish there. Some go longer, by decision rather than by default.

Neither shape is superior in the abstract. Being surprised by the shape in month three is what costs people the outcome.

4. Location, and whether the room matters

Meeting face to face in a neutral place matters more than people expect, because a neutral room is what makes two people willing to be open in front of each other. Your kitchen has history in it. A third space does not.

But be realistic about geography. If the number of sessions is high, the drive is not a detail, it is the deciding variable. A room 40 minutes away in traffic becomes a reason to reschedule, and rescheduling is how this work quietly dies. Pick something near home or near work, or do it by video and stop pretending the commute is free.

Video is not the lesser option and I want to be clear about that. I run sessions by video in all 50 states and DC, and for some couples it is better, because they are in their own space and nobody had to explain to a sitter where they were going. My room is in Kendall, and what an actual session looks like is on couple coaching in Miami.

5. How you pay, and what it puts on your record

This one is worth understanding before you choose on price.

Most insurance does not cover work on a marriage, for the reason above: a marriage is not a diagnosable condition. So a licensed clinician who bills insurance generally has to attach a diagnosis to one of you, commonly anxiety or depression, in order to get paid. That diagnosis then lives on a permanent medical record. Records can be requested later, in circumstances you cannot predict from where you are sitting today, including a custody matter.

I am not telling you to avoid the clinical route. If you need it, you need it, and a diagnosis that is accurate is not a scandal. I am telling you that almost nobody is informed of that trade at the point of booking, and you deserve to make it knowingly.

Paying directly is harder up front and cleaner afterward. It keeps the record private, and it does something else I see in the room: two people who paid for the hour out of their own money show up ready to use it. I do not take insurance.

6. Read what other people actually said

When someone does this work well, their clients are usually happy to say so publicly. When nobody will, after years of practice, that is worth noticing.

Look off the practice's own website. Anyone can write a paragraph about themselves. Go find the Google business listing and whatever professional directories they are on and read what people who were actually in the room said. You are not looking for a perfect score, and you should be more suspicious of a perfect score than of a mixed one. You are looking for whether real people, with names, were willing to go on the record.

The other thing to read for is specificity. A review that says he was great tells you nothing. A review that says he told us in the first session that we were arguing about the dishwasher and fighting about something else entirely tells you exactly what the room is like.

The one nobody tells you

Here is the criterion I actually use when friends ask, and it outperforms most of the list above.

Pick the person you would be least embarrassed to be honest in front of. Not the most credentialed, not the closest, not the cheapest. The one where you could imagine saying the humiliating true sentence out loud. Because that sentence is the entire job. If you spend six sessions managing your image in front of someone impressive, you have bought nothing.

You will get a read on that in the first free conversation, and every practice worth booking offers one. Mine is 25 minutes and it is for first timers. Use it to find out whether they told you one true thing you did not already know, and whether they were willing to say this might not be for you. Once you have chosen, the thing that actually decides the outcome is what you do between sessions, which I wrote up in how to make couples coaching work.

Talk it through

If you want to run me through that whole list, that is exactly what the free call is for. Book a free 25 minute call. It costs nothing, it is for first timers, and if what you describe belongs with a licensed professional I will tell you on that call and tell you what to look for instead.

Questions couples ask