Relationships & Divorce

Relationships are beautiful gifts, but they require meaningful work and care to maintain. When they’re not working well, the result can lead to significant internal suffering for all involved.

When you can’t figure out exactly what’s wrong in a relationship or you’re unsure or unclear about how to move forward in a productive way, relationship counseling can help. Navigating healthy relationship success, or even ending a relationship in a healthy way, is a worthwhile investment of time and energy. You gain understanding in order to create confidence and accountability for your role in the relationship and its future.

Therapy for Relationships

In the therapeutic process, we begin with an understanding that your relationship with yourself is the precursor to your relationship with anyone else. Before we can understand or change the ways we interact with others, we must start with an understanding of ourselves.

I will help you access increased self-awareness to better understand the ways in which you uniquely experience relationships with others. This experience extends not just to how you perceive it, but the awareness of the patterns and roles you play in the relationship as well. These roles may both help and hurt the relationship dynamic, yourself, and the other(s). This recognition will help you answer the ultimate relationship question:

How can I leave or repair negative patterns and create new ones that will lead to healthy, thriving, life-giving relationships?

Recognizing patterns is the work of getting below the symptomatic experience. The “he said, she said” is what we feel, but the “why” he said, she said is what we explore. This is where true transformation is found.

Part of the goal is gaining the ability to see other perspectives. We’ll practice this using the phrases, ”My perspective, your perspective, our shared perspective” to become better equipped at empathy and compassion.

A therapist can facilitate a therapeutic process in which all parties are leading with their strengths, and are seen and heard.

Of course, practicing healthy communication is also a significant factor in relationship counseling. It’s vital to communicate your own needs, but also to respect your partners’ needs—it must be a both/and scenario, not an either/or. The first step to healthy communication is a combination of self awareness, grounding, and listening with openness.

Processing Divorce

Divorce engages all the modalities (trauma, grief and loss, self esteem, anger, coping etc.). Navigating the many emotions that come with relationships and divorce can be confusing and overwhelming.

Endings can prompt feelings of emptiness and loss. While it’s important to let yourself feel all your feelings, you also need a healthy distance between yourself and your emotions. You need the ability to engage both your emotional and logical self, to observe your emotions without becoming flooded by them.I can help by supporting your ability to end the relationship in a healthy, less traumatic way.I can support your experience of the duality of loss and void, AND entertain the new and possible.