What is a Relationship Therapist?

The quality of your relationships is the best mirror of the quality of your mental health. As a relationship therapist, I’m focused on the quality of your relationship to yourself, parents, romantic partners, siblings, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. We’re working together to see what’s happening in those relationships, and what’s not happening in them. We’re working to see what’s happening inside of you when bids for closeness, intimacy, and openness arise. We’re working to see what happens when there’s a misattunement.

How are we doing this? By using our relationship in the therapy room as the central relationship to create change. Yes, we’ll use your relational experiences as guideposts to get very clear on what protective mechanisms developed as a natural response. And, critically, we’ll use the safe space of the relationship created between us to form new deep lasting change in relationships in the future.

Too often, therapists provide interpretations of what’s happening outside the therapy room. But research is showing us something else - that when therapists use themselves in the room to be with people in a relational way, which means offering up what it feels like for the therapist to be with the patient, what we’re feeling as we listen to them — that bringing ourselves in to the relationship, is what allows all of the messy protective mechanisms to get touched and show up, which is where the magic starts to happen. Rather than hiding these parts of ourselves to our therapist, a therapist ought to skillfully touch into these sensitive relational patterns. Only then can work with them and reorganize them. And the only way that happens is if we give them a new experience.

Every patient needs something different - some need a fierce protective figure when none was provided before, some need loving and containing holding that lets a patient know they are not too much, still others need a firm and steady presence that doesn’t fall apart. When you get that response over and over again, your nervous system starts to rewire and your relational patterns and attachment style begin to shift.

“We don’t get wounded in isolation, and we don’t heal in isolation.” Peter Levine, Trauma Therapist

How this is different than other therapy you’ve tried

As an experiential therapist, I will help you get to know yourself in a new and honest way. Instead of talking about what’s on your mind as society, workplace, and traditional talk therapy train us to do, we'll focus on staying with what’s happening in the moment. We’ll stay with what’s happening now instead of a description of what happened before. This way, we observe tendencies in real time with accuracy and respond to them with a corrective experience, so they can begin to shift.

By focusing on your moment-to-moment experience, we’ll help you work through feelings of anxiety and self-esteem and help you come to feel more at ease with yourself. We’ll work together to help you develop self-compassion and self-trust, the building blocks of internal security needed to build strong relationships with others. With kindness and care, I will work to help you unleash what you already have inside: the ability to move through this time of your life with strength, clarity, courage, and resilience.

Why This Approach Works

What do we mean when we say, ‘staying with the present experience,’ and how will that relieve my suffering?

This might sound like checking to see whats happening in the body, including physical sensation and feeling sensations. Or it may mean tuning into what the feelings and thoughts are coming up right now as you share, instead of referencing feelings/thoughts before the session. Or it may mean turning to the relationship right here between us. Rather than showing up as a blank slate, I’ll be sharing my authentic feelings of what it’s like to bear witness to your story, or by my asking you what it feels like to share with me. When we use information from the relational experience happening in therapy, we’re more likely to address relational issues that happen outside of therapy.

This therapy invites a level of intimacy, vulnerability, and connection that will feel palpably different to other therapy you may have tried. It’s also a big part of why it works - deep work yields deep results.

Ideal Clients

My therapeutic approach will be best suited for patients who have an experience of missing something, often unnameable, from a parent or caregiver. Even if we have resourced, loving parents, we may still have missed getting seen for who we truly. When this happens, we may start to hide, question, or shame ourselves. We may have a vague sense of confusion of who we are or where we are headed. Without even trying, we may have constructed a false self that work well enough for long enough - but now something is cracking.

Talking about what this was like will help, to an extent. But deeper level healing looks like getting the experience I missed, now, with a therapist. When we get this from an appropriate place, our understandable needs for validation get met and we start showing up in a more secure way with ourselves or others.

The goal is not to analyze what was missed, it’s to get the experience now, with me. Most of us still have child parts alive and well inside - and they deserve to get a level of attention, attunement, and responsiveness that our friends, family, partners, and coworkers are not able to fulfill. And what if they didn’t have to?

My Training

I am an experiential, somatic, and relational therapist, which means that I use techniques from various powerful therapeutic models to facilitate deep and lasting change. My primary therapeutic modality is Accelerated Experiential Psychodynamic Therapy (AEDP), an attachment and emotion-focused psychotherapy.

I also incorporate techniques from Hakomi Therapy, ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy), Internal Family Systems, and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) .