Marcus Berley

Divorce is the center of my practice, and most of the people I see are men. My interest is professional and personal: my own divorce in 2017 was devastating and clarifying in equal measure, and it shaped what I understand about this kind of pain. I work with men considering a divorce, in the middle of one, and several years out still carrying what it did to them. Much of that work is co-parenting, grief that doesn't look like grief, and rebuilding a sense of who you are on the other side.

A lot of the men I see arrive at therapy without much practice at it, often because divorce made it unavoidable. They're competent people who have handled hard things by thinking them through, and are facing something that doesn't yield to that. I don't ask men to perform vulnerability or to talk in a register that isn't theirs. I'm direct, I give honest feedback, and I take seriously the binds men get into around anger, isolation, fatherhood, and what they believe they should handle alone.

My graduate training is in systems counseling, so I tend to look at a relationship as a pattern two people are making together rather than a problem one of them has. I work with couples and with individuals sorting out a relationship on their own. That includes deciding whether to stay, repairing after a rupture, co-parenting with someone you are no longer with, and untangling what you learned about closeness long before this partner.

IFS gives me a practical way to work with the parts of a person that are at war with each other — the part that wants out of the marriage and the part that is terrified of what leaving would cost, for instance. Rather than deciding which voice is the real one, we get curious about what each is protecting. I'm IFS-informed rather than certified, and I use it as one tool among several, not a script.

Psychodynamic work is where I look at what's underneath — the patterns you keep repeating, what you learned about closeness long before this relationship, and what gets stirred up in the room between us. I don't treat this as archaeology for its own sake. The point is to notice the pattern while it's happening and to have some choice about it, which is slower work than advice and tends to hold better.

I believe the therapeutic relationship itself is the engine of change, so I work to make ours a real one. That means I engage rather than nod along, I tell you what I see, and I'm willing to be told when I've got it wrong. What happens between us is usually a live sample of what happens elsewhere in your life, which makes it the most useful material in the room.