For couples on the brink of divorce.
DISCERNMENT COUNSELING IN MASSACHUSETTS
FOR COUPLES DECIDING WHAT TO DO ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THEIR MARRIAGE.
Some mornings you wake up certain that this marriage is over.
By dinner, you’re watching your spouse help your daughter with homework and thinking maybe you haven’t tried hard enough.
By the time you’re lying in bed that night, both of you on your phones in silence, you’re back to not knowing.
This cycle has been going on for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe longer than you want to admit.
You’ve probably run the math in your head a hundred times: How would your children take it? Who would keep the house? How would you explain this to your parents, your friends, the people at school pickup who think you have a solid marriage? What it would do to your sense of who you are?
And then there’s the question underneath all of those questions, the one that keeps you hesitating: What if you leave and it turns out the marriage could have been saved? Or, what if you stay and spend years trying to fix something that is already over?
You can’t make this decision from where you are right now. You have too much uncertainty and not enough clarity, and every person in your life who could help you think it through is either biased, under-informed, or both.
Your friends tell you what they would do, which has nothing to do with what you should do.
Your family either wants you to stay together or has already picked a side.
If you’re seeing an individual therapist, they’re working with your perspective alone, which means they can support you but they can’t help you see the marriage clearly.
You need someone who can sit in the room with both of you and help you figure out whether this marriage has a path forward.
A DECISION-MAKING PROCESS FOR COUPLES CONSIDERING DIVORCE.
Discernment counseling is not couples therapy. If one of you isn’t sure you want to stay married, couples therapy doesn’t have the right foundation to do its job, and that’s usually why it feels unproductive.
Discernment counseling exists to address the decision-making first.
It consists of 1-5 sessions, each two hours long. During our sessions, I’m focused on helping you determine whether this marriage has a future before you commit to a direction.
The process ends when you’ve reached a decision: commit to couples therapy with a skilled therapist, separate and divorce with a fuller understanding of what happened and why, or take more time before deciding.
I’m a certified discernment counselor through the Doherty Relationship Institute, and this work is the center of my practice. I came to it through years as a couples therapist. This means I can hear you and your spouse individually and give you informed feedback that an individual therapist can’t, because they’re only getting one side.
I also offer divorce mediation and individual therapy for the unfaithful partner, so if your situation goes beyond the decision itself, I can continue working with you through what comes next.
WHAT CHANGES AFTER DISCERNMENT COUNSELING.
You stop living in the question.
The cycling, the second-guessing, the spiral of “should I stay or should I go” gives way to a decision you made with your eyes open, not one you fell into by default or exhaustion.
You understand what went wrong and what you each contributed.
Most people walk in focused on what their spouse did or didn’t do. By the end, you have a much more honest picture of your own role in the dynamic, and that changes how you move forward regardless of which path you choose.
If you stay, the couples therapy that follows is fundamentally different.
You’re both walking in with genuine commitment, a shared understanding of what needs to change, and a specific agenda for the work. That’s a completely different starting point than half-hearted therapy where one of you is still wondering if you should be there at all.
If you leave, the divorce process is less hostile.
Couples who go through discernment counseling before separating tend to navigate custody, finances, and co-parenting with significantly less conflict, because they’ve already done the hard work of understanding what happened instead of dragging unexamined blame into negotiations. Your children benefit directly from that.
DISCERNMENT COUNSELING THROUGHOUT MASSACHUSETTS
I’m licensed in Massachusetts as an LICSW and work with couples throughout the state via secure, HIPAA-compliant video. You can do sessions from wherever you have privacy, on your schedule, without coordinating childcare or commuting to an office.
Areas served in Massachusetts
I work with couples across Massachusetts, including Greater Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Brookline, and Newton; MetroWest communities like Wellesley, Natick, Framingham, Needham, and Concord; the North Shore including Salem, Beverly, and Gloucester; the South Shore including Quincy, Braintree, Hingham, and Plymouth; Western Massachusetts including Springfield, Northampton, and Amherst; the Worcester area; and the Cape and Islands.
If you’re anywhere in Massachusetts, I can work with you.
GETTING STARTED IN DISCERNMENT COUNSELING AND WHAT TO EXPECT
FORMAT
Discernment counseling is between one and five sessions, each are two hours long, conducted online via HIPAA-compliant video. The process ends when you’ve reached a decision about the future of your marriage, which means not every couple needs all five sessions. The process can take longer than five sessions if there is ongoing infidelity.
01
GETTING Scheduled
Reach out through the contact page or self-schedule your first session here. If you have a question that isn’t answered here, email me and I’ll get back to you within 1-2 business days.
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BOTH PARTNERS PARTICIPATE
Discernment counseling requires both you and your spouse. If your spouse is unwilling to participate in any form of therapy, please reach out to me and we can discuss individual options that might help you find clarity on your own.
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INVESTMENT
Discernment counseling sessions are $1,000 for 2-hour sessions ($500/hour). Please note that I am not in-network with any insurance company and cannot bill insurance directly.
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Meet your DISCERNMENT COUNSELOR
I’M ALLYSON.
Certified discernment counselor & Gottman-trained therapist
I trained as a Gottman couples therapist and spent years working with couples dealing with infidelity, trust ruptures, and the kind of slow disconnection that builds up over time without either person fully noticing.
Discernment counseling became the center of my practice because it matched the work I kept being drawn to: sitting with two people in a genuinely hard moment and helping them figure out what comes next without rushing the answer.
Get started today.
I built my practice around one of the hardest moments in a marriage: the point where you don’t know if it can be saved, and you need someone who can sit with that uncertainty without pushing you in either direction. My job is to help you see your marriage clearly enough that you trust the decision you make, and to make sure you have the right support on the other side of it, whichever direction that is.
FAQs
COMMON QUESTIONS
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I’m currently licensed in Massachusetts, Oregon, Washington State, and Florida. If your spouse is in one of those states, we can meet.
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Yes. Talking to an attorney doesn’t mean you’ve made a final decision, it means you’re gathering information, and that’s a reasonable thing to do when you’re considering something this significant. Discernment counseling works best when neither partner has made a firm, irreversible decision to divorce. If you’re still weighing your options, even if legal conversations have started, discernment counseling can help you make that decision with more confidence.
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Most couples complete the process in 1-5 sessions, scheduled weekly, so the full process usually takes somewhere around one month. Some couples reach a decision after two sessions. Others need all five. There’s no pressure to rush, and you commit to one session at a time.
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Successful discernment counseling doesn’t require you to agree on the outcome. If one of you chooses to pursue divorce, that decision stands, because it only takes one person to end a marriage. If one of you wants to try couples therapy but the other isn’t ready, that’s essentially a status quo decision, and you may revisit it later.
The value of the process isn’t that you arrive at the same answer. It’s that you both understand the marriage more honestly than you did when you started, and whatever happens next comes from that understanding.