Couples Therapy

I will help you restore wellbeing, integrity, and vibrancy to your relationship.

Relationships show us our undeveloped edges like nothing else. Intimate partnership reveals the places we still falter and regress, despite all the work we may have done personally. I love couples work so much because it can act as a crucible for growth, if we say yes to the very humbling invitation to level up. This is true for every couple I’ve ever worked with, it’s true for my friends and my teachers, and it’s true for me. 

 I’m so passionate about couples work that I’ve completed multiple trainings through different modalities, and lean most heavily on the Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT, Level 1,2 & currently in 3). PACT primarily supports couples in making the developmental leap from insecure to secure functioning, which means moving from often relating to your partner as a threat or enemy into co-authoring a relationship with your partner that is mutually beneficial, on purpose, collaborative, and desirous for all involved parties in all the ways that matter. I have also studied in-depth for over a decade with a world renowned mediator, from whom I’ve learned so much about how to masterfully facilitate conflict resolution.  

Couples work tends to flow between cleaning up unhelpful or toxic patterns, increasing connection, healing past hurts or betrayals, and fortifying the structure of the relationship. We do all that work so that you can move into the future together with more skill, intimacy, and better aligned around vision.  This naturally leads to a sense of connection and strength as a couple, which informs your own personal flourishing as an individual.  In fact, strong relationships are correlated with longer life spans and overall wellbeing. Your relationship matters!

Here are common themes that show up often in my office:

 Unhealthy patterns with your partner

You feel like you have to manage them, or change who they are and how they live. Or, you feel excessively anxious or  dependent, like you can’t make a decision without their validation or approval. Or, you are often trying to appease them to just get them off your back. 

Or maybe you struggle with communication?

You watch yourselves fight dirty and know you are not showing up in integrity, all while feeling the pain of bringing out the worst in each other. Or, you get disappointed and hurt because you and your partner are often not on the same page and you don’t know how to get there. 

Perhaps, it’s not anger that is the issue; it’s distance that has occurred through time and a lack of engaged and meaningful connection, rather than explosions.

The good news is, our adult relationships can actually help us heal our earliest wounding when we work consciously and intentionally with the patterns, emotions, and triggers the relationship brings up.

In this way, couples work can be some of the deepest and most transformative, as it asks both partners to courageously face themselves, as well as take responsibility for how they show up with their partners.

* A note on couples work:

If it is your goal to try to stay together, I will do my best to support you in exploring that endeavor. Sometimes, however, it becomes clear over the course of our work together that it is not in either of your best interest to do so. In that case, I will support you in the dissolution of your partnership in a way that is kind, honest, and liberating. 

I have experience in working with various forms of relationships, including but not limited to: monogamous and ethically non-monogamous, hetero and non-heteronormative. I welcome all gender identities and sexual orientations. 

Read more about how I work here

Let me help you and your partner grow into a more adult, skillful, dynamic, and elegant relationship; contact me here.