You keep arriving at
the same fight.The fight is not the problem.
What Brings Couples Here
The argument changes.
The pattern underneath it doesn’t.
The same fight, returning
Conflict cycles · Escalation
The topic rotates — money, in-laws, parenting, sex, work. The shape of the argument does not. One partner escalates; the other withdraws. Or both escalate. Either way, nobody feels heard, nobody lands the repair, and both of you are exhausted by something that keeps arriving anyway.
Functional. Distant.
Emotional distance · Parallel lives
The logistics run well. The children are cared for. Both of you deliver at work. But the relationship underneath the system has grown thin — and at some point you noticed the distance between you had become the loudest thing in the house. You are more like co-managers than partners, and you are not sure when it happened.
What you brought in before you met
Intergenerational patterns · Backstory
The way one of you responds to conflict. The way the other shuts down. The triggers that seem disproportionate to the moment. These often have roots long before this relationship began — in what someone learned in their family of origin about anger, need, silence, loyalty. It got handed to them before they had language for it. And it showed up, intact, in this relationship.
The pressure that lives outside the room
Family systems · Cultural expectation
Whose family gets the holidays. Whose parents are moving closer. The expectation that you will be a certain kind of couple inside your community, your family, your parents’ idea of what a good marriage looks like. For immigrant couples, this is rarely background noise. It is often the argument itself, just wearing a different name.
The turning point that cracked something open
Life transitions · Rupture
A fertility journey. A loss. A parent’s illness. A relocation. A career that imploded or took off. Life transitions do not cause relational problems — they reveal what was already present. The couple managing fine before the event often finds the event has made managing impossible.
Trust that broke — and hasn’t rebuilt
Repair · Betrayal · Recovery
An affair, discovered or disclosed. A financial deception. A betrayal that was not sexual but was complete. Or an accumulation of smaller ruptures that have made the foundation uncertain. Trust is not rebuilt by deciding to trust again. It requires specific, structured work. That work is available here.
The Team
The people you’d
be working with.
Moitreyee Chowdhury
Couples · Individual · Family · Trauma
Moitreyee founded Leela because the practices available to South Asian and immigrant couples in the Bay Area kept asking people to explain themselves first. Her couples work is integrative — CBT, DBT, Family Systems, trauma-focused — but the work always starts from what each person brought in before they met. She trained in fine arts in Delhi, worked in stage design and puppetry in Germany, and has practiced in California for over two decades. A published poet. Sessions in English, Hindi, and Bengali.
Therapist Name
Couples · Individual · Multicultural Families
Bio to be added. This clinician works with couples and individuals, with particular attention to East Asian and immigrant families navigating relational stress. Trauma-informed. Available in English and [language TBD].
Therapist Name
Couples · Young Adults · Life Transitions
Bio to be added. This clinician works with couples and young adults, with a focus on life transitions and the particular pressures of growing up between two cultures. CBT and DBT. Supervised by Moitreyee Chowdhury, LMFT #121934. Available in English and [language TBD].
“You shouldn’t have to spend the first month of therapy explaining who your family is.”
Every couple has a history.
Yours started before you met.
The argument a couple keeps having is rarely about what it looks like on the surface. It’s shaped by what each person was taught, before this relationship, about what anger means, what silence means, what needing something means. Those lessons came from somewhere. The families they grew up in. The country they came from, or their parents came from. The thing nobody said aloud but everyone understood.
We’ve worked with enough South Asian, East Asian, and immigrant couples in the Bay Area to know this without being told. The context is already here when you arrive. You don’t have to earn the right to be understood first.
South Asian Couples
The weight of a marriage that is never only between two people
For South Asian couples — whether the relationship was arranged, love-based, or family-approved — the marriage often exists inside an extended family system that has its own expectations and definitions of what a good couple looks like. The tension between duty and desire, between what the family needs and what the partnership needs, is rarely named directly. It arrives sideways, as conflict.
East Asian Couples
When silence is a communication style, not an absence of feeling
For Chinese American, Korean American, Japanese American, and other East Asian couples, silence in conflict is often not withdrawal. It is what you learned when you grew up in a house where keeping the peace was the rule. Face matters. Shame is real. Saying the hard thing out loud can feel like a betrayal of something larger than just this conversation. The distance that builds over years of not saying it is just as real.
Immigrant Couples
What immigration does to a partnership that nobody warns you about
One partner’s career takes off. The other’s stalls. The person who was the anchor at home is now dependent in a new country. Extended family support is a flight away. Financial stress and isolation arrive together. Immigration does not create relational problems — it strips away the conditions that kept them invisible.
High-Achieving Bay Area Couples
The couple that works perfectly — and hasn’t really talked in years
Two demanding careers. Children in everything. The calendar runs. Nobody is fighting. But somewhere in the last few years the two of you stopped actually talking, and you’re not sure exactly when it happened. Everything is fine. You just don’t feel close anymore. That’s worth paying attention to before it becomes something harder to come back from.
We’re less interested in what’s wrong with you as a couple than in what you were each handed before you had any say in the matter. That’s usually where the work actually is.
How We Work
We start with the history,
not the presenting problem.
Where We Start
The history both people brought in
Before looking at how a couple fights, we want to know what each person learned about conflict, need, and closeness long before this relationship began. What happened in their family growing up. What the move to this country cost them. What they’ve never said out loud because there wasn’t language for it. That context isn’t separate from the couples work. It usually is the couples work.
Family Systems
The families in the room
Every couple carries two families of origin into the relationship — their rules about conflict, silence, money, loyalty, emotional expression. Family Systems work makes those invisible structures visible. For immigrant and multicultural couples, the extended family is often still actively present in the partnership, with opinions about the marriage itself. The work names what each partner was handed before they chose anything. From there, both people get to decide what stays.
CBT & DBT Skills
Skills for the moment before it goes wrong
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps identify the assumptions each partner makes about what the other’s behavior means — the interpretations that turn small moments into big fights. Dialectical Behavior Therapy builds practical skills for when emotion narrows the window for clear thinking. For partners who grew up in households where staying calm under pressure was survival, not choice, these tools do something specific: they make it possible to stay in a hard conversation instead of leaving it.
EMDR
When the trigger is bigger than the moment
Some reactions in conflict are not really about what just happened. They are stored responses to things that happened much earlier — criticism from a parent, humiliation that was never resolved, emotional abandonment that the nervous system never finished processing. EMDR is available when a partner’s reaction is consistently larger or more fixed than the situation in front of them warrants. Moitreyee Chowdhury is EMDR trained. It can be woven into couples work or offered as separate individual sessions running alongside.
Trauma-Informed Couples Work
What trauma does inside a relationship
Trauma doesn’t stay in the past. It shows up in how a person responds when their partner’s tone shifts, when a door closes too hard, when silence falls during a disagreement. For couples where one or both partners carry trauma — from childhood, from immigration, from earlier relationships, from loss — couples therapy at Leela Mental Health holds that history as part of the work, not separate from it. Moitreyee Chowdhury is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #121934) and Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC #9238) with over two decades of clinical experience in California. Individual trauma work can run alongside couples sessions when needed.
Who Comes to Leela
Couples who come here
are usually in one of three places.
The distance has been growing for a while
Before crisis, while there is still room to move
Something broke. You are still here.
Why Leela
Why couples come here
instead of somewhere else.
You won’t spend the first month explaining yourself
Most practices say they’re culturally informed. What that usually means in practice is that you spend the first several sessions teaching your therapist about your family, your background, the specific weight of what you’re carrying. We’ve worked with South Asian, East Asian, and immigrant couples in the Bay Area long enough that we already know a lot of that. You come in and we get to work. If you’re looking for couples therapy in Palo Alto and you’ve put off going because you didn’t want to start from zero, that’s specifically why this practice exists.
The method follows the couple — not a preset framework
Some couples need skills work — specific tools for de-escalation and repair. Some need Family Systems work to see what’s been running the partnership underneath the conflict. Some need trauma-focused processing to understand why a particular moment lands the way it does. The approach follows the couple, not a preset agenda. And when individual work is needed alongside couples sessions — one partner working through something older, or needing their own space — that can run with the same practice without anyone starting over somewhere else.
We work in English, Hindi, and Bengali
For couples who think in more than one language, or where one partner is more comfortable speaking in Hindi or Bengali, the option to use those languages in session is real and available. Not symbolic. If that matters to you, tell us when you reach out.
What people ask before reaching out.
We keep having the same fight over and over. Is that fixable?
Does couples therapy actually work, or does it just give us a space to argue more productively?
We are a South Asian couple. Will we have to explain our family context from scratch?
What does couples therapy actually look like at Leela?
My partner is reluctant to come. Can I start alone?
Does Leela Mental Health work with East Asian and immigrant couples specifically?
We function well together — we just don't feel close anymore. Is that enough?
Does insurance cover couples therapy at Leela Mental Health?
Do you offer couples therapy by telehealth across California?
Good Faith Estimate: If you are paying out of pocket or not using insurance, you have the right to a written Good Faith Estimate before your first session. Read the full notice ➞
Something in this has been
waiting for a room where
it can be said plainly.
When you are ready, this is where to begin.
We respond within 48 hours.
Related services
Individual Therapy
For one partner working through their own patterns before or alongside couples work.
Family Therapy
For the extended family system — parents, adult children, and the relationships between generations.
Trauma & EMDR
For relational triggers that are larger than the present moment — stored responses that require specific processing.
South Asian Therapy
The practice built for South Asian, East Asian, and multicultural clients navigating the full weight of where they came from.