Dr. Duval has over thirty years of experience helping people understand and change painful relationship patterns — across romantic partnerships, families, and professional life. Working psychodynamically, she helps people who feel chronically misunderstood create healthier pathways and trace recurring difficulties back to their root causes.
When relationships never seem to work out
A long history of relationships that never quite work is heartbreaking and one of the best reasons to seek therapy. Underneath it often lies an early experience of broken connection: an early adoption trauma; a parent lost in childhood; an emotionally unavailable caregiver. None of it your fault, though it rarely feels that way.
When attachment is disrupted early, we tend toward one of two protective strategies. Some people avoid the anxiety of closeness altogether by isolating. Others do the opposite — diving in and loading every relationship with all their hopes and expectations, but also their fears and dread. That intensity can overwhelm others, who then pull back and set boundaries, which only confirms the original fear: I will always be abandoned. I will never be loved.
Helping someone see this pattern clearly — not as a personal failing, but as something anchored in a deep and entirely human need for connection — is the work Dr. Duval feels most compelled to offer, and the work she is most experienced in.
Working with patterns in real time
Sometimes naming a pattern isn't enough to change it. Sometimes it has to be lived through — and one of the most powerful places that happens is within the therapy itself.
When Dr. Duval has to move an appointment, charge for a missed session, or simply wears an unclear expression, a person primed for abandonment may read it as proof she doesn't care. They might think about ending therapy abruptly, or become angry, or turn excessively polite. When those reactions echo the same patterns playing out in life beyond the room, they become the best possible channel to work with directly, in real time, with real emotion. And in that moment there's a chance to offer something new: counter-evidence to the self-defeating, self-critical conclusions a person has long drawn about how relationships work.
Creating New Pathways
If you find yourself in the same painful relationship patterns again and again, feeling chronically misunderstood or watching closeness slip away no matter how hard you try, this is the heart of what Dr. Duval offers. The work is well-suited to people willing to look honestly at their own part in those patterns, not to assign blame, but to finally change them.
Couples and families: More than keeping score
Couples therapy can easily slide into "he said / she said" with each partner keeping score and looking to the therapist to rule on who's right, who's less neglectful, less controlling, less loyal. Dr. Duval's work moves in a different direction.
Effective couples and family therapy builds on the foundation of individual work: understanding how the past — in the couple's own history and in each partner's family of origin — is shaping, consciously and unconsciously, how they react to each other now. A new child arriving, a job change that forces a move, a message from an ex that stirs jealousy, a mismatch in desire for intimacy — each presents the danger of misreading the other and feeling less loved and respected than you are.
What a psychodynamic approach offers a couple or family is a path through those moments, not a verdict, but a way of navigating the challenges that threaten closeness, and of strengthening the bond rather than eroding it.