Relationships

Healthy relationships lay the foundation for a happy, meaningful life. Sense of belonging through relationships and search for community or family are incredibly powerful driving forces. Let us build your confidence in navigating relationships, from communication and social skills to complex dynamics affecting how you are seen by others and how you understand them in return. So many of us have some type of relational struggle–from choosing the wrong person to date, to putting our own needs last, to having trouble accurately reading others. Relationships are complex and exciting. Whether you want to explore and deepen your tolerance for intimacy and emotional availability or learn how to handle a difficult family member, we love working on your skill and ease in relationships.

For couples, we believe being a couples therapist involves specialized training. Most of our therapists have advanced specialty in couples work and have studied with national leaders in the latest, most effective approaches. As a whole, our couples work tends to be very experiential, attachment-oriented, and rooted in an understanding of the brain and arousal states (such as trauma). Some of the old-school approaches, such as communication training, are less effective because they focus on the more verbal, rational parts of the brain. These parts of the brain, and all the skills we learned when we were calm and collected, go offline when we are very emotional or upset in relationships—in moments where one or both partner is either too aroused (highly emotional) or not aroused enough (emotionally frozen or shut-down).

There is wonderful research that healthy committed relationships can serve as a profound source of healing and growth. On the flip side, unhealthy relationships can do damage. It is important to be proactive when it comes to one’s partnership. Couples therapy does not need to be a last-ditch effort. It can be a space of exploration, a time to get to know your partner more deeply, share a bonding experience, and develop a mutual vision of your life together.
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Whether your relationship is in crisis or you just have some things to work through that could be easier between you, we are here.

Are You:

• Worrying that you’re messing up your relationship?
• Noticing that your relationship brings up surprisingly strong feelings?
• Struggling with low self-esteem or feeling ‘not enough’?
• Coping with being overwhelmed by drinking or eating or zoning out online (insert any other escapism here)?
• Feeling that you’ve tried everything and are worried that nothing will work?

You might think that you just have to learn to communicate better or be less ‘this way‘ and more ‘that way‘. You convince yourself that you should be able to stay connected by sheer will and behavior change. That’s not how it works. The truth is that relationships can often trigger surprising and painful feelings. This is true for romantic relationships as well as relationships with our kids, our parents, our siblings, our friends, or our colleagues. This is especially true for those of us that had challenging family relationships in childhood. Relationships strike to the core of what we learned along the way about who we are, who we fear we are (or are not), and the way we feel about ourselves.

The secret to taking control of how we show up in relationships is to heal the root issues underlying the painful feelings coming up for you. This isn’t about learning skills or techniques – this is about healing from the inside out.

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
- C Jung