INTENSIVE COUPLES THERAPY · CALIFORNIA
Rebuild your marriage in one transformative weekend.An intensive, private, immersive therapy getaway with a Gottman-trained therapist — designed for couples ready to do months of work in three focused days.
20+ years
clinical experience
Gottman-trained III
certified method
3 days
IS THIS THERAPY FOR YOU?
You may be ready for intensive therapy work if…
An intensive therapy weekend is designed for couples who are committed to doing real work together — quickly. It’s for people in crisis, at a crossroads, or simply tired of slow progress. If any of these sound familiar, we should talk.
Is your marriage currently in crisis mode?
Are you and your partner considering divorce but not sure if it is the right move?
Has there been an affair or crisis that needs to be address quickly?
Do you feel you and your spouse have lost connection and do not know how to reconnect?
WHAT TO EXPECT IN THIS THERAPY JOURNEY
Your weekend, hour by hour
Before we begin, you’ll complete the Gottman Relationship Checkup — a research-based assessment of 480 questions covering friendship, intimacy, conflict, values, trust, and more. Your weekend is built around what we learn.
- Introductory session to surface the core issues you're navigating
- Clarify what each of you hopes to accomplish by Sunday
- Private check-in: a chance to share what you may not have said aloud yet
- Identify the specific gridlock patterns we'll work on
- Full assessment and intervention plan designed around your goals
- Concrete, evidence-based exercises tailored to your concerns
- Targeted work on conflict, communication, intimacy, and trust
- Practical homework to integrate the day's insights
- The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work, applied to your relationship
- Build your shared roadmap for the months ahead
- Wrap-up session with personalized resources and next steps
- A clear plan you'll leave with — not just hope, but tools
MEET YOUR THERAPIST
Couples Therapist in California
Marina Edelman didn’t always plan on becoming a therapist — and that’s exactly what makes her one.
Before she ever sat across from a client in a therapy room, Marina was sitting across from executives in a boardroom. She began her career as a financial analyst for a Fortune 500 company, working in the kind of high-pressure, high-stakes environment where performance is everything and vulnerability is rarely an option. That world gave her something most clinicians simply don’t have: a firsthand understanding of what it feels like to carry professional stress, navigate complex power dynamics, and still be expected to show up fully every single day.
But Marina wanted to do more than analyze numbers. She wanted to help people.
Driven by a desire to create real, meaningful change in people’s lives, she made the pivotal decision to transition into psychology — earning her Master of Arts in Psychology from Phillips Graduate Institute in Los Angeles. In 2006, she opened her private practice in Westlake Village, California, and she has never looked back.
Nearly two decades later, Marina has built TrueMe® Counseling into a practice defined by the same qualities that have shaped her entire career: rigor, empathy, and a refusal to settle for surface-level solutions.
Marina specializes in couples therapy, affair recovery, and relationship repair, drawing on a carefully integrated set of evidence-based approaches:
- Gottman Method — Research-based tools for reducing conflict and building friendship and intimacy
- Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) — Healing attachment injuries and rebuilding emotional safety
- Attachment-Based Therapy — Understanding how early relational patterns shape adult love
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) — Identifying and shifting the thought patterns that fuel disconnection
- AEDP — Processing deep emotional wounds with compassion and precision
Her counseling is best suited for couples and individuals seeking structured, research-backed support for relationship repair, affair recovery, anxiety, communication challenges, and premarital or marriage counseling — in person or via telehealth across California.
THE INVESTMENT
One weekend. Months of change.
A meaningful investment in your relationship — and a fraction of what traditional weekly therapy costs over the same period.
Every weekend includes
- Full Gottman Relationship Checkup (480-question assessment)
- ~12 hours of dedicated therapy time
- Personalized intervention plan
- Evidence-based exercises and workbook
- Wrap-up session with clear next steps
- Complimentary pre-booking consultation
- Private space designed for focused work
- Take-home resources for ongoing progress
With Marina Edelman, LMFT
Certified Gottman Therapist
Work directly with Marina — a Gottman-trained LMFT with 20+ years of couples specialization.
$8,500
Or fill the form below and we’ll contact you!
FROM PAST CLIENTS
One weekend. Months of change.
A meaningful investment in your relationship — and a fraction of what traditional weekly therapy costs over the same period.
My wife and I sought Marina’s support to help us overcome a serious breach of trust in our marriage.
She helped us move through the anger and betrayal to rediscover that underneath it all there remained deep love and purpose in staying together.
Through his guidance we were able to clear the rubble that was blocking us from continuing together and find a clear path to rebuild trust.
Marina Edelman truly helped save my marriage in a surprisingly short amount of time.
She has an exceptional ability to get straight to the crux of the matter while making both people feel heard and understood. Her insight is sharp, direct, and incredibly effective. With her guidance, my husband and I are learning so much and growing together in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. I’m deeply grateful for her help and highly recommend her.
I cannot recommend Marina Edelman highly enough.
As the best marriage therapist I have ever worked with, she stands out due to her extensive training and experience, which far surpasses that of a typical therapist. Marina’s approach is refreshingly honest and straight to the point, which has been incredibly effective in our sessions. What truly sets Marina apart is her genuine care and dedication to her work. The more you work with her, the more evident it becomes how seriously she takes her role…
FAQs about Intensive Therapy Getaway:
What exactly is an intensive therapy getaway — and how is it different from regular couples therapy?
An intensive therapy getaway is a concentrated, immersive therapeutic experience that compresses months of traditional weekly sessions into a single dedicated weekend. Where conventional couples therapy offers one fifty-minute session per week — with days of distance between appointments during which old patterns can reassert themselves — an intensive removes those gaps entirely. You and your partner are fully present, fully focused, and fully supported for an extended period of time, allowing the therapeutic work to reach a depth and momentum that weekly sessions simply cannot replicate. At Marina Edelman, LMFT, the weekend is personally designed around your specific relationship — your history, your challenges, and what you are working toward — guided by a Gottman-trained therapist with over 20 years of clinical experience in couples work.
Is an intensive therapy getaway only for couples in crisis?
Not at all — though it is particularly powerful for couples who are. The intensive format is designed for any couple who wants to make meaningful progress quickly, whether that means navigating an acute crisis like infidelity or a sudden rupture in trust, addressing longstanding patterns that weekly therapy hasn’t been able to shift, or simply investing deeply in a relationship that matters and deserves more than fifty minutes a week. That said, the intensive weekend is most effective for couples where both partners are genuinely willing to engage — and it may not be the right fit if either partner is struggling with untreated mental illness, if there is ongoing violence between partners, or if one partner feels pressured into the process rather than choosing it freely.
What does the weekend actually look like — and how is it structured?
The weekend is structured to build progressively, moving from assessment and understanding through active intervention and toward integration and tools for the future. It begins on Friday evening with an introduction session to establish goals and individual sessions for each partner — a space for uncensored honesty about what each person is experiencing and hoping for. Saturday and Sunday run from 9:00am to 5:30pm, covering structured assessment, targeted exercises drawn from the Gottman Method, conflict management tools, and the Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work framework. Prior to the weekend, both partners complete the Gottman Relationship Checkup — a comprehensive, research-based assessment covering friendship, intimacy, conflict, values, trust, finances, parenting, and more — so that the weekend is informed by a detailed clinical picture of the relationship from the very first session.
How much does the intensive therapy getaway cost — and what is included?
The intensive weekend with a Certified Gottman Therapist is $8,500. These include the full structured weekend experience — the Friday evening sessions, the full-day Saturday and Sunday work, the pre-weekend Gottman Relationship Checkup assessment, personalized exercises and homework, and a wrap-up session with resources and a clear path forward. I encourage you to call for a consultation before booking — not because I want to talk you into it, but because I want to make sure it is genuinely the right fit for you and your partner before you invest in it.
What can we realistically expect to have accomplished by the end of the weekend?
By the end of the intensive weekend, most couples report a significantly clearer understanding of the patterns that have been driving their conflict — and why those patterns developed in the first place. They leave with concrete, evidence-based tools for managing conflict more effectively, communicating with greater honesty and less defensiveness, and rebuilding the emotional connection and intimacy that brought them together. They also leave with a personalized set of resources and a clear sense of what the next steps in their work together look like. The weekend is not a cure. It is a catalyst — one that creates the kind of momentum and clarity that can take months to build in conventional therapy. What couples do with that momentum after the weekend is, in my experience, what determines how lasting the change is.
TAKE THE FIRST STEP
Not sure if this is the right fit? Let's talk.Every working relationship begins with a complimentary consultation. It’s an opportunity to share what brings you in, ask questions, and decide together whether this is the right next step. No pressure, no commitment.