Relationship counseling offers a space to better understand the patterns that shape how you and your love one relate, protect, communicate, and reconnect. Drawing from Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy (PACT), attachment theory, Compassionate Communication (NVC/MCD), somatic awareness, and experiential practice, we will explore habits of conflict escalation, identify underlying relational dynamics, build skills for self-regulation and co-regulation, and support a more secure and compassionate connection. This approach is active, engaged, and collaborative, with attention to the body, nervous system, communication patterns, and the deeper longings beneath conflict.

Relationship Counseling

All relationship structures and orientations are welcome, including couples, poly-structured relationships, adult family members, friends, and other meaningful relationships seeking support, mediation, or repair.

Get Really Good at Conflict

  • Learn to communicate effectively, utilizing the skills of mindfulness, Compassionate Communication, and Secure Functioning.

  • Understand what is behind the conflict; including past wounds or underlying values, needs, and longings.

  • Practice self-regulation and co-regulation

  • Engage with relationship challenges as a path to healing and growth.

Secure Functioning

• Practice behaving in secure, pro-relationship ways even when old attachment patterns are activated, choosing protection of the relationship, repair, and collaboration over threat-based reactions.

• Strengthen your ability to rely on each other, utilizing your precious energy and resources for a relationship that contributes to your life, rather than depleting.

• Create clear agreements and visions. Define purpose and effective action.

• Practice engaging your choice-full self rather than your reactive self.

Foundations of My Approach

PACT

Psychobiological Approaches to Couples Therapy

Psychological Approaches to Couples Therapy (PACT) teaches couples to be successful and skillful partners to one another through the principles of secure functioning. Secure functioning means that two adult individuals come together as full-functioning, autonomous agents, sharing power and authority to create an interdependent relationship, fully conditional, based on shared purpose, shared vision, and shared principles. Developed by Dr. Stan Tatkin, author of Wired for Love, PACT is a fusion of attachment theory, developmental neuroscience, and arousal regulation.

PACT has been proven to be effective in helping couples:
- Recover from betrayal and infidelity
- Reconnect after some period of disconnection or stonewalling
- Enliven a boring, routine, or flat relationship
- Navigate conflict quickly and confidently, increase connection after conflict
- Improve sex life, play, and ability to not take ourselves too seriously
- Negotiating lifestyle difference, desire discrepancy
- Parenting challenges
- Dealbreakers: big decisions like kids, location, finances

MCDT

Mindful Compassionate Dialogue Therapy

& Non-violent Communication

Mindful Compassionate Dialogue Therapy (MCDT) supports a shift in relational consciousness: from protection, scarcity, blame, and self-abandonment toward shared power, collaboration, mutual care, and choice. Rooted in mindfulness, somatic awareness, Hakomi Somatic Psychotherapy, and Nonviolent Communication (NVC), MCD helps clients slow down reactivity and listen beneath conflict to the feelings, needs, values, and longings that are asking for attention.

Through this work, clients develop practical skills for self-empathy, emotional regulation, boundary-setting, clear requests, compassionate listening, repair, and honest communication. MCD can be especially supportive for recurring conflict, resentment, defensiveness, co-dependency, people-pleasing, disconnection, communication breakdowns, and the desire to relate with more clarity, care, and collaboration.