Maxwell Crystal, LICSW, MSW(He/Him/His)

Specialties

Couples counseling - Helping partners stop cycling through the same arguments and rebuild what brought them together. The work draws on the Gottman Method and attachment-based approaches to address communication breakdowns, broken trust, affairs and recovery, parenting conflict, sexual disconnection, and the slow drift that can settle into long relationships. The goal is not just fewer fights but a partnership that feels honest, connected, and worth showing up for.

Family issues - Working with families navigating real difficulty: a teenager who has stopped talking, parenting partners on different pages, addiction or mental illness in a family member, blended-family adjustment, or the unspoken rules and inherited roles that shape how each person is allowed to show up. The approach is systemic — paying attention to the patterns between people rather than locating the problem in any one of them.

Life transitions - Supporting adults through the disorienting middle of significant change: career shifts, the end of a relationship, becoming a parent, losing one, geographic moves, or the quieter kind of transition where you realize the life you've been building no longer fits. The work is less about managing the logistics of the change and more about making sense of who you are inside it.

Loss, grief, and bereavement - Bringing several years of hospice and bereavement coordination experience to grief work. Supporting clients through the death of a parent, partner, child, or close friend; anticipatory grief before an impending loss; and the more complicated forms of grief that don't get acknowledged — estrangement, miscarriage, the loss of a relationship that was never quite what you needed. Grief takes longer than people expect; the work is staying with it.

Relationship issues - Helping individuals understand the patterns that keep showing up in their dating and relational lives: the same kinds of partners, the same conflicts, the same place things tend to break down. The work often involves looking at how early relationships and family dynamics shaped what you learned to expect, and figuring out what it would mean to want and ask for something different.

Trauma - Working with the long-term relational and emotional impact of earlier experiences, including loss, family-of-origin difficulty, instability, and relationships that didn't feel safe. The approach is trauma-informed and relational rather than protocol-driven: we pay attention to how the past is showing up in your current life and relationships, and work with that material as it surfaces in the therapy and in what's happening for you now.