Aaron Platt

How I got here

I came into this work through two doors at once. The first was sociology, at Berkeley, where I spent years studying how programmers juggle love and work: how a person's job turns into a personality, and what that personality costs the people who live with them. The second was clinical: a counseling degree, and an 18-month internship at a psychotherapy center in Philadelphia, one of the places where the older, slower kind of therapy was still taught properly. Both were really about the same thing, seen from two angles: the walls a person builds around themselves, and what those walls are protecting.

The tradition I trained in is worth explaining, because almost nobody works this way anymore. The short version: defenses start out as things a person does and end up as who they are. Your personality itself becomes the armor. This tradition pays less attention to what you say than to how you've arranged yourself to say it, and to what all that arranging is guarding. Point that at couples, and it goes one level below the "communicate better" approaches, past the words and even the feelings, down to the self each partner has built, and the harsh conclusion each one has quietly reached.

Years of sitting with couples this way eventually boiled down into an approach of my own, written out in full on this site: The Unforgiven Self. The one-sentence version: you can't be furious at your partner for who they are until you stop being at war with who you are. Everything I do in a session is that sentence, worked out in practice.

My life

I'm married, with two kids. My own marriage is cross-cultural in the ways that count, two family cultures, two rulebooks in one kitchen, and I've made most of the mistakes this site describes, which is a big part of why I can spot them fast in other people.

What I believe

Five sentences, and the rest is just detail. You are who you are, and right now you couldn't be otherwise, or you would be. What you can't stand in your partner usually points at something in you. Their behavior isn't the scorecard on you that it feels like. Accusing someone slowly makes it come true. And the first job of a marriage is to stop demanding that either of you be someone else, ahead of any project to fix your partner.

Credentials, briefly

Master's in counseling, La Salle University. Master's in sociology, UC Berkeley. An 18-month clinical internship in psychotherapy in Philadelphia. Work before this in the corporate, nonprofit, and academic worlds. And my own therapy, for decades, because I don't think anyone should take people further than they've gone themselves.

With US clients I work as a coach, not a therapist: I don't diagnose or treat mental health conditions, and when licensed care is what someone needs, I say so and help them find it. The full, no-fog version of that is on coaching vs therapy.

The practice, in the numbers that matter

One coach, with no associates and no intake team. Sessions are 60 minutes, the full set is twelve of them, it's $200 a session, and the same person who read your first note is the one in every session after it. The practice stays small on purpose.