About Allyson

I came to this work through both professional training and personal experience with what it means when a marriage reaches a crossroads. My own divorce changed how I understood relationships, and it changed what I wanted to do with my career.

Early on in my career, I was working as an individual therapist, sitting across from people who were trying to figure out what to do about their marriage. I could feel how limited my perspective was because I was only getting one side of the story. I could support them, but I couldn’t help them see the full picture of what was happening in their relationship. That professional limitation confirmed what my personal experience had already made clear: I needed to be doing different work.

So, I completed advanced training through the Gottman Institute, one of the world’s most widely respected research program on what makes marriages last. I also became a certified discernment counselor through The Doherty Relationship Institute, specifically to help couples who aren’t sure whether to stay together and work on their marriage or separate.

I spent years working with couples dealing with infidelity, trust ruptures, and the slow disconnection that builds up over time without either person fully noticing.

The more I worked with couples in crisis, the more clearly I could see the gaps:

• People were trying to make the biggest decision of their lives in individual therapy, with only their own perspective to work from, and even the best individual therapist can only work with what’s in the room.

• The partner who had the affair could find a therapist who would be supportive, but not one with a clinical framework for understanding how the affair happened and what actually needed to change.

• And when couples decided to divorce, I walked them through that gut-wrenching decision, but then had to hand them off to a stranger for the hardest part.

So, I built my practice around those gaps. Today, Bridgetown Clinical is focused entirely on people navigating the hardest chapter of their marriage, wherever they are in it: trying to decide what comes next, working through what already happened, or finding a way to end it with as much respect and clarity as possible.