With Your Partner

Seeking outside help to support healthy habit development with your partner is a wonderful way to reinforce your commitment to growing together.

Often in our romantic relationships, the unlearning of past traumas and relationship struggles can be an internal process, but one we need to go through together. A relationship expert can help guide that journey as a supportive conversation for you and your partner.

With Your Friends

Our friendships are a critical support network for not only our celebrations, but also our woes. Ensuring that we are engaging in healthy and authentic ways is important.

Therapeutic guidance can help you to be a better friend, and to reinforce the boundaries in your existing friendships. Whether you are struggling or flourishing, investing energy into your friendships will ensure you can have more fulfilling friendships.

With Multiple Partners

When there are multiple dynamics at play in a relationship, it can be more complicated to balance the needs of everyone involved. It’s important to be sure everyone feels heard and supported, and there is no better way to work toward that certainty than working with a therapist experienced in multi-partner dynamics.

Regardless of the structure of your polyamorous relationships, we can help give you the tools for success.

With Yourself

The most important relationship in your life is the one you have with yourself, yet so many of us shy away from putting the effort into learning to love ourselves.

Taking the time and energy to work through your past experiences and responses with trained help in order to view those moments from a proactive lens can be powerful. You deserve therapeutic support for developing a relationship in which you find value and worth in all that you are.

KEY TRAITS FOR
RELATIONSHIP HEALTH

There are many types of valuable relationships in our lives that you may be looking for support in strengthening or improving. While those relationships will all have different needs and parameters, there are some things you should strive to find in every relationship.

Understanding your own needs and strengths is a powerful tool in putting value on the important facets of your relationships and the people within them- yourself included. Many of these traits feel like ideals when you’ve spent too long in relationships where your voice went unheard or you felt taken advantage of. But even if that’s been your past, it doesn’t have to be your future.

Use this quick guide to identify places you may need more therapeutic support- then let us help you reach for it. Together we can build the healthy, connected relationships you crave in every aspect of your life.

TRUST

Feeling confident that your partner will not violate or betray your sense of vulnerability or privacy is crucial- and ensuring it goes both ways is even more so. A healthy relationship starts with establishing deep trust, but breaking through the tendency to protect ourselves can be difficult.

EQUALITY

All parties in a relationship should feel valued, and on equal ground when it comes to establishing rules, limits and space within a relationship. Knowing your voice will be heard and effort will be matched is key in developing security in every relationship. Equality doesn’t mean equal in every exchange, but a balance that rights itself in an authentic and compassionate manner.

BOUNDARIES

While it may feel like a compassionate act of service to give others what they need (whether requested or implied), it can be a disservice to the self and lead to codependent behaviors. Evaluating and communicating limits is healthy. Boundaries are a way to keep yourself safe in your relationships, and to protect the integrity of your connections.

CONNECTION

There is no need for everyone to agree on everything within a relationship, but it is important to have places where you connect and see eye to eye. Whether that’s on how you express your passion and interests, or those things themselves, a reliable and consistent way to connect is a meaningful marker of relationship health.

RESPECT

Not just for those you are in a relationship with, but for yourself as well. Respecting limits, boundaries, and the values that make up the identity of each individual, as well as the spaces in which you come together, is crucial in creating a healthy environment.

COMMUNICATION

The ability to communicate is an imperative and rigid need in every relationship. Being able to express yourself without blame or assumption is a key component in establishing a foundation of trust that can be built upon. Communicating needs and wants- even in the midst of an argument- is imperative.

SUPPORT

Being able to offer active and passive support, as well as to vocalize your need for these things, is so valuable for relationship health. When you can ask for what you need, and be a part of the support network in your relationships, it makes it much easier and less stressful for everyone.

CONVICTION

Knowing what each party in a relationship stands for, needs and believes in is a powerful sentiment in developing a strong, healthy relationship. Conviction in who you are as an individual, who you are in your dynamic and how those things fit together can be difficult to navigate but powerful to cultivate.

How do I know if I’ll benefit from relationship therapy?

The short answer is: because everyone will.

The longer answer is that we spend so much time learning how to make others around us happy, how to acclimate and adjust our needs to suit others. What we do not learn, yet need to know, is how to find those needs and that contentment in ourselves. This can lead to destructive habits that worm their way into our relationship habits, setting us up to repeat the same habits and actions.

While learned dysfunction and trauma response may not feel severe or like overarching themes, spending time and energy on developing coping mechanisms is a valuable choice. Your personal relationship with yourself will always have a ripple effect of growing and improving the quality of every other relationship that carries weight in your world.

Can you help me persuade my partner(s) that therapy is right for us?

No, every person that comes in our doors needs to be there of their own free will. We can’t help persuade them, but we can support you in encouraging their involvement in your personal growth. In developing your relationship skills and personal growth, we can work together to create a supportive environment for everyone in the relationship.

Your partner’s autonomy is valuable and should always be respected, but having a conversation about your hopes for therapy can be valuable. There is no shame in therapy, but we understand that the stigma can be hard to overcome.

While we won’t condone forcing someone into a counseling relationship who isn’t interested in having one, there are resources we can provide to support the benefits of seeking support to grow together.

What if we can’t make it work? 

Then you can’t make it work. Not all relationships can be healthy ones, and that’s okay. What isn’t okay is creating or perpetuating a toxic environment to avoid failure. Going to therapy won’t make it less likely to work. It will offer you an extra supportive measure in exploring avenues that may help the relationship work. It may also drive home certainty about whether the relationship can continue or not. 

Avoiding knowledge doesn’t make it absent. What is inevitable will remain true, but getting the help you need will ensure that no matter what that truth means for your relationship, each party will have a chance to be heard and supported through every step of the journey.

Therapy can help the break-up process be less harmful and more restorative by helping couples create and execute a break-up plan with additional support and resources from the therapist.

Change scares me. Will this change things? 

Yes, if we do it right. The point of building healthy relationships is to keep what works and change what doesn’t. We aren’t continuing on in the same patterns we’ve held that brought us to this point. While every turn and aspect of a relationship offers an opportunity for growth and gratitude, it doesn’t mean every one of them should be kept. 

When you enter relationship counseling, you need to prepare yourselves to enter with a blank slate.

We don’t want to keep doing what we’ve been doing- not in every way, at least. Therapy will support keeping what works, and reimagining what doesn’t. Change can be difficult and scary, but it can also be the catalyst for beautiful transformation. Connect with and embrace what will change. We can support you through the fear.