DR ORNA Guralnik is an psychologist and psychoanalyst, who hosts Showtime’s hit show: Couples Therapy.
In the show, she helps couples unpack the issues in their relationship.
Some of the issues that she tackles on the show are amongst the newest and most complex problems facing couples today.
So who is the TV star and what is her own relationship like?
Orna is an Israeli-American psychologist and psychoanalyst.
She grew up in Tel Aviv (against the backdrop of the Yom Kippur War) and often found herself being the mediator for her parents when they argued.
The psychoanalyst told The New Yorker: “I was developing my analytic mind very early. I always joke that they were my first couple to be treated.”
Initially, Orna wanted to be an actress but a trip to therapy when she was 16 set her on the path of becoming a psychologist herself.
The future TV star moved to New York in 1990 to study clinical psychology at Yeshiva University, before completing her PHD at New York University.
Since graduating, she has researched the psychology behind couples’ relationships and has become one of the most knowledgeable psychologists in her field.
She revealed some of her working process to Variety magazine.
Orna said: “As a psychoanalyst, you want to really have the same distance from all the inner voices in the patient.”
“Otherwise, I try to really keep going back to a place of what we call neutrality.
Now, that’s not always possible, but that’s the North Star. That’s where I try to go to.”
The psychologist has presented Couples Therapy on Showtime (in the US) and the BBC (in the UK) since 2019.
Fans have likened her to Gillian Anderson’s Sex Education character Jean Milburn and Lorraine Bracco’s The Sopranos character Jennifer Melfi.
In the show, Orna meets troubled couples and helps them get to the bottom of the issues in their relationships.
Each episode features a new couple and tackles hard hitting issues, from the effects of racism in a relationship to polyamory.
Couples Therapy will return to screens in the UK at 10pm, on September 18, 2024.
UK fans can catch the show on BBC2.
Although it is Orna’s job to get into people’s private lives, she is very guarded when it comes to her own.
This is a very deliberate choice, as she feels patients and clients knowing too much about her could complicate their working relationship.
She told the New Yorker: “There’s so much that people gain from being able to not know about me, or from being able to imagine me as one way or another.”
“Am I a conservative straight person?
“Am I queer?
“The moment I start talking about myself, I’m robbing them of all that.”
Orna has revealed, though, that she has a son named Jasper and a daughter named Ruby.
She also has an adorable Alaskan Klee Kai called Nico.
