Marriage and Couples Therapy in South Florida
You're both still here. That means something.
Private online marriage therapy for high-achieving couples in Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, Palm Beach, Miami, and across South Florida, working directly with a therapist who helped build the field, not a weekend-certified practitioner.
Trained by the founders of all three leading couples therapy methods, Gottman, EFT, and Schema, over three decades, including years of close work with the founders of EFT and Schema therapy. Honorary Lifetime Member, International Society of Schema Therapy.
For what willpower can't fix
You've managed it long enough.
You know that moment when you’re both in the kitchen, moving around each other like roommates who signed a lease they can’t break? Nobody’s yelling. Nobody’s crying. You’re just coexisting. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a voice whispers: is this it?
You’ve done the rational thing. Talked it out over wine that turned into an argument by the second glass. Given each other space that quietly became avoidance. Asked ChatGPT for relationship advice at 1 a.m. and got a pep talk that made you feel validated for about twenty minutes before the same pattern swallowed it whole.
Both of you are good at your jobs. You solve complex problems for a living. Why does this one keep winning? Because relationships don’t respond to logic the way spreadsheets and strategy decks do. The part of your brain running this show is older, deeper, and completely unimpressed by your LinkedIn profile.
You’re on this page because something in you knows that doing nothing has its own cost. And it compounds. If you’ve started looking for marriage and couples therapy in South Florida, that instinct is worth trusting.
What makes the work different
Four principles that shape every session.
These four principles shape how the work gets done, keeping therapy focused, accountable, and built around the reality of your life.
Beneath the symptoms
I look past surface-level anxiety, conflict, and burnout to address the deeper emotional and relational patterns driving them.
Real change, not just insight
Understanding yourself matters, but it’s not the goal. My work translates insight into lasting emotional and behavioral change.
Measured and accountable
I track progress with validated outcome measures, so you always know what’s working, and what needs to shift.
Built for demanding lives
Fully online and intentionally structured for executives, physicians, and professionals with serious schedules. Real depth, no disruption.
OUR APPROACH
Therapy built for the reality of life in South Florida
Loving at Your Best Marriage Therapy provides online couples and individual therapy for adults across South Florida, from Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton to Palm Beach, Miami, and Coral Gables. My work is grounded in evidence-based psychology and attuned to the emotional, relational, and everyday pressures couples carry.
Rather than focusing only on symptom relief or insight, therapy here targets the emotional and relational patterns that keep distress in place. The work is active and intentional, with ongoing attention to progress and meaningful change over time.
HOW I HELP
Support for the problems that keep repeating
EMOTIONAL PATTERNS
Anxiety that won't let up
The racing thoughts. The constant vigilance. The sense that something’s wrong even when nothing is.
RELATIONAL PATTERNS
Closeness that keeps breaking
The same conflicts. The same distance. The pattern you can see clearly but can’t seem to stop repeating.
SELF-WORTH PATTERNS
Success that doesn't land
You’ve built the life. The career. The things that were supposed to matter. And still something feels hollow or out of reach.
ABOUT
An experienced therapist who knows how to help change happen
Travis Atkinson didn’t just learn couples therapy from a textbook. He learned it from the people who wrote them.
Jeffrey Young, the creator of Schema Therapy, began training Travis in 1994. Travis went on to become a co-creator of Schema Therapy for Couples, and holds advanced certification as a Schema Therapist, Supervisor, and Trainer for both individuals and couples. He co-founded the International Society of Schema Therapy, which awarded him Honorary Lifetime Membership in 2020. Most therapists who list Schema Therapy on their website took a workshop. Travis helped build the field.
Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, began training Travis in 2006. He became a Certified EFT Therapist and Supervisor in 2010 and co-created the first EFT training video for gay and lesbian couples with her.
Travis became a Certified Gottman Method Couples Therapist in 2006, one of the earliest in the field, and has spent over 25 years applying that research to real couples in real trouble.
More than three decades of this work have given him something no certification alone provides: the ability to read a relationship in the first session, name what’s happening underneath the arguments, and build a plan that fits your specific dynamic instead of following someone else’s script. Travis founded Loving at Your Best Marriage Therapy, P.A. to offer a different kind of marriage and couples therapy in South Florida, one built on three decades of clinical depth, not a weekend certification.
YOUR THERAPIST
Travis Atkinson
LCSW, LICSW
Integrates Schema Therapy, EFT, and the Gottman Method to help adults and couples shift the patterns that keep distress in place.
Mentored by Jeffrey Young & Sue Johnson
Honorary Lifetime Member, ISST
Adults & couples · Online across Florida
The Loving at Your Best Plan
Three methods. One plan. The most comprehensive approach to marriage and couples therapy in South Florida.
Gottman Method: Spot what is killing your relationship
Right now, there are specific moments between you that are doing more damage than either of you realizes. A tone of voice. An eye roll you think goes unnoticed. The way one of you leaves the room mid-sentence. Gottman’s research predicts relationship outcomes with over 94% accuracy because these moments aren’t random. They’re patterns. Travis has spent over 25 years reading them in real couples. He’ll show you exactly where yours are, and then hand you the playbook for replacing every one of them.
Schema Therapy: Break the fight you keep having
You know the one. Different trigger every time, same explosion, same aftermath, same silent morning after. You’ve both started to believe this fight is who you are together. It’s not. It’s a pattern with roots older than your relationship, and it has a specific treatment. Travis co-created Schema Therapy for couples. That argument you’ve given up on resolving? It might be six sessions away from never happening again.
Emotionally Focused Therapy: Reach for each other again
Something shifted between you and neither of you can name when. Asking for closeness started feeling like begging. Showing vulnerability started feeling like losing. EFT reverses that. It rewires how you and your partner respond to each other so that reaching out feels safe again, not stupid. Travis built the first EFT program for same-sex couples with the late Dr. Sue Johnson, EFT’s founder. Seventy-five percent of distressed couples recover with this approach. Not cope. Recover.
Where your relationship is stuck matters. So does who you choose to help.
Every couple arrives with a different version of the same question: can this get better? The honest answer: it depends entirely on who you work with. Most couples don’t know this, but the therapist they’re trusting with their marriage probably has almost no formal training in couples therapy. Eighty percent of private practice therapists report treating couples, yet most training programs don’t require a single course in it. Roughly 90% never received specialized training in treating infidelity, the issue that brings more couples into therapy than almost any other.
“40% of couples report their therapist made statements that actively undermined their relationship, including suggesting divorce or calling a partner’s personality the problem.” Contemporary Family Therapy, 2024
The gap between trained and untrained couples therapists isn’t small. It’s the difference between a 73% recovery rate and a coin flip.
What the research says
Emotionally Focused Therapy: 73% of distressed couples recover. 90% improve significantly. 90% of gains maintained at follow-up.
Gottman Method: Over 94% accuracy identifying what is destroying a relationship, with outcome studies showing 80% improvement in relationship satisfaction after intervention.
Schema Therapy: Where EFT and Gottman reach their limits, Schema Therapy goes deeper. 69% of couple conflicts stem from deeper sensitivities that surface-level therapy misses. Schema Therapy was built for these. Travis co-created this approach.
Without evidence-based training? Half improve. Half of those relapse. Travis doesn’t pick one method and hope it fits. He integrates all three into the Loving at Your Best Plan because relationships break in more than one dimension, and no single approach captures the full picture.
Online couples therapy works. The research proves it.
A 2024 study of over 1,100 married clients confirmed that online couples therapy produces outcomes equal to in-person sessions. Online couples therapy is as effective as in-person (100%). Couples feel equally connected to their therapist online as in-person (100%). The Gottman Method is equally effective online as in-person (100%).
Results may vary. Sources: Johnson, Hunsley, Greenberg & Schindler (1999); Wiebe & Johnson (2016); Gottman & Silver (1999); Zahl-Olsen et al., Journal of Marital and Family Therapy (2024); Bradford, Johnson, Anderson et al., Psychotherapy Research (2024).
Neurodivergent Couples
When one partner is wired differently, the usual relationship advice often misses the real dynamic. Travis works with the specific patterns these relationships face.
Autism Spectrum and Your Relationship
The loneliness in a neurodiverse marriage rarely looks like conflict. It looks like reaching for connection and finding none, even when your partner is a good and committed person. The work focuses on translation between two different ways of experiencing closeness, so both partners feel understood. Read more
ADHD and Your Relationship
ADHD reshapes how attention, follow-through, and emotional regulation move through a relationship. Resentment builds when one partner becomes the manager of everything and the other feels constantly criticized. The work breaks that cycle and rebuilds a partnership of equals. Read more
OCPD in Relationships
Obsessive-compulsive personality patterns bring a need for control, rigidity, and high standards that can quietly erode intimacy. The work helps couples loosen the grip of those patterns and make room for flexibility, warmth, and genuine connection. Read more
Working with Travis
Couples sessions with Travis start at $450. We are out of network and provide superbills for reimbursement. After an initial assessment phase, couples who continue can reserve their work through preferred-client session plans. Travis takes on a limited number of couples to protect the depth and continuity of the work.
You don't need another six years to know what you already know.
Six years of the same argument. Six years of sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. Six years of telling yourself it’s not bad enough, that other couples have it worse, that you should be able to figure this out on your own.
Couples who begin therapy sooner and work with a therapist trained in evidence-based methods see dramatically better outcomes. Couples who wait, and who land with an untrained therapist, often leave believing their relationship was the problem. It wasn’t. The approach was.