Every relationship has ups and downs.
Disappointment and emotional disconnection are common in close relationships, especially in long-term partnerships and marriages. Couples therapy helps partners understand these moments and learn healthier ways to cope, repair, and reconnect.
If you’re feeling angry, resentful, powerless, afraid (of losing your partner or that you
made the wrong choice), or deeply isolated,
you’re not alone.
We all experience these feelings are common in long-term relationships, especially during periods of stress or change.
I specialize in couples therapy for relationships under significant stress, including high-conflict dynamics, infidelity, addiction, and long-standing breakdowns in trust and communication.
I work with couples who are dealing with severe relational strain—frequent escalation, loss of trust, emotional shutdown, or repeated crises that feel impossible to resolve on their own. My role is to help you understand what’s driving these patterns and to guide the process in a way that prioritizes safety, accountability, and forward movement. Many of the couples I work with are high-performing professionals—executives, founders, physicians, and leaders—who are capable and successful in most areas of life but find their relationship feels unmanageable or out of control.
A lot of couples therapy centers on technique—communication skills, structured dialogues, “use this phrase,” “pause at this moment.”
There’s nothing wrong with those tools, but they rarely hold when you’re overwhelmed, hurt, or bracing for the next blow. When your body goes into protection, no script is going to carry you. You don’t need a better sentence. You need to understand why telling the truth feels risky in the first place.That’s what I focus on.
Welcome
Hi, I’m Hanna Zipes Basel
I’m a clinical psychotherapist who specializes in relationships and couples therapy.
My work is grounded in Emotionally Focused Therapy and attachment-based care. It’s informed by how the nervous system reacts when connection feels uncertain, when old injuries get stirred up, or when closeness and danger feel tangled together. I help you understand what’s happening underneath the conflict, so you can shift the pattern at its core—not just reshape the argument. We slow things down and pay attention to what happens in your body when you feel dismissed, criticized, or alone. We look at how fear turns into anger, how longing disappears behind withdrawal, and how two people who care about each other end up in opposite corners. This isn’t about fixing each other. It’s about building something steadier, clearer, and more truthful—together.
What I Do
I work from an evidence-based model of couples therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT).
EFT is grounded in decades of research on adult attachment and the nervous system. It offers a structured, clinically proven way to understand why couples get stuck in painful patterns and how to change them. Rather than teaching surface-level communication skills, this work focuses on what drives reactions, shutdowns, and escalation—so partners can rebuild trust, emotional safety, and connection, even after serious ruptures.
