Three approaches, one through-line
Hanne-Berit draws on three interconnected frameworks, each chosen for what it does best. What holds them together is a single conviction: that the patterns we develop early in life — about safety, closeness, and how much we deserve — are the patterns we bring into our closest adult relationships.
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Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
The heart of her couples work. EFT focuses on the emotional cycles couples get locked into — the pursuer and the withdrawer, the criticizer and the stonewaller — and on what’s underneath them. What looks like a fight about logistics is almost always something older and deeper. EFT makes those underlying patterns visible, and once visible, workable.
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The Gottman Method
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Psychodynamic Foundation
Running beneath both is a psychodynamic understanding: that what we learned early — about love, safety, and how close we’re allowed to let people get — shapes how we behave in our most intimate relationships. Not because we’re broken, but because we adapted. The goal is making those adaptations conscious, so they stop running on autopilot.
The patterns we carry
All of us develop attachment strategies early in life — ways of relating to the people we depended on. Those strategies don’t disappear when we grow up. They travel with us into our adult relationships, and they shape both how we seek closeness and how we defend against it.
Understanding your attachment isn’t about labelling yourself. It’s about being able to see your own patterns clearly enough to ask: is this what I actually intended? Is this who I want to be with the person I love?
Anxious Attachment
If you have an anxious attachment style, you may find yourself working very hard for reassurance — sometimes in ways that push the very connection you’re reaching for. You may limit yourself, sabotage good things, or not feel you deserve what you want. These behaviours make complete sense given where they came from. They can also be changed, once they’re visible.
Avoidant Attachment
If you have an avoidant style, you may find yourself pulling away when things get close — coming across as aloof, self-sufficient, perhaps even arrogant at times. But underneath that distance is often something older: a fear that became so buried it forgot it was fear. Closeness triggers something uncomfortable, and withdrawal became the answer. That pattern, too, can be understood and shifted.
It's like being in a theatre — you're watching what's on stage rather than being on it. The story is still there, but it's not inside you. It's not sitting on your chest. It doesn't stop you from being who you can be.
What brings couples here
People arrive for very different reasons. What they share is usually some version of this: something that worked, or once felt alive, has stopped working — and they can’t quite find their way back on their own.
Infidelity
Some couples come in the wake of a breach of trust, trying to understand what happened and whether there’s a path forward. This is painful, and slow. But it is not always the end.
Communication
Most couples who say they have communication problems really mean they’ve stopped listening to each other. Not listening with their own agenda ready — actually hearing what the other person is saying and feeling. That’s a skill, and it can be learned.
Growing apart
Parallel lives, loss of connection, a vague sense that something has shifted but no clear name for it. Sometimes people don’t know why they’re there — only that something feels missing.
Young children
One of the most common patterns Hanne-Berit sees: couples with young children who have quietly put the relationship at the bottom of the list. With careers, childcare, and household demands filling every hour, time together gets deprioritized — often from a genuine sense of obligation to the kids. But the relationship needs tending too. Connection doesn’t maintain itself.
I'm on your side
Hanne-Berit’s default position is clear: she comes into sessions looking for what’s still alive between two people, even when it’s hard to see. The vast majority of couples she works with have more to work with than they realize. Her job is helping them find it.
Occasionally she reaches a different conclusion. The Gottman research identifies four patterns that tend to be most damaging — what he calls the Four Horsemen. Three of them are workable. One is the signal she watches most closely.
Criticism
Attacking character rather than behaviour. Common, and something that can be interrupted and redirected.
Defensiveness
Meeting complaints with counter-complaints. Difficult, but a pattern that yields to awareness and practice.
Stonewalling
Emotional withdrawal from interaction. Often a self-protective response — one that can be worked through.
Contempt
The desire to demean, not just to defend. When contempt is pervasive — when it saturates the room — it’s the pattern hardest to repair. Hanne-Berit will name this honestly.
Working across cultures
A significant part of Hanne-Berit’s practice is with expat and international couples — and this isn’t incidental. She has lived it herself, having left Denmark to live first in the United States and later in Vienna. She knows what it means to build a life somewhere you didn’t grow up.
Denmark, she’ll say plainly, isn’t the easiest country to enter socially. Danish social life tends to be organized around relationships that go back decades. The warmth that exists is often already spoken for. For the non-Danish partner, this means navigating a new country without a ready-made support system — far from family, far from the cultural ease of home. For the Danish partner, it often means carrying the weight of being guide, translator, and anchor all at once.
Running beneath all of it, she finds the same thread: belonging. The need to belong — to feel part of something, to be known somewhere — is, in her view, the most fundamental human need. When it goes unmet, almost everything else becomes harder.
It's much harder to come here than it is to come to the US. Denmark — we're not very good with foreigners. We have our clicks from when we were in first grade, and it's sort of like a feeling that we don't really need other people. I have a really good understanding of what that is. And that takes how I am with every person who walks in.
In session
Hanne-Berit begins by asking something simple: what would be different if this worked? Not a diagnosis — your own sense of what you’re here for. A better way of choosing partners. The courage to go after what you actually want. A repaired relationship with someone you love. Those goals shape everything that follows.
01
A space to say the difficult things
Couples sessions provide something hard to find at home: structure. A place where both people can speak about difficult things in an ordered way — without the conversation derailing before anything useful gets said. That containment is itself therapeutic.
02
Understanding what you do — and why
Most couples who say they have communication problems really mean they’ve stopped listening to each other. Not listening with their own agenda ready — actually hearing what the other person is saying and feeling. That’s a skill, and it can be learned.
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Different ways of responding
Parallel lives, loss of connection, a vague sense that something has shifted but no clear name for it. Sometimes people don’t know why they’re there — only that something feels missing.
