When working with an intimate relationship, I focus on systemic lenses to understand each partner's feelings, needs, trauma, challenges, values, and healing wishes. These frameworks include

In systems theory, change in any part (or party) of the system affects how energy moves through the system as a whole. People in relationship with each other tend to seek homoeostasis, or balance, that feels familiar and tolerable. 

· Attachment Theory
· Gottman Method 
· Gestalt Therapy

You are not alone.  Our closest adult relationships trigger wounds from childhood, where we first learned how relationships work and what our role(s) in them would be.  This early conditioning (also known as attachment) determines the baseline to which we regress when threatened with rejection, humiliation, or abandonment.  None of us got to choose our attachment experiences--and, with practice, we can choose to pause when triggered, reregulate our nervous systems, and act from our values instead of reacting from our conditioning.

Are you feeling disconnected and dissatisfied with an intimate relationship? Does it feel like you and your partner(s) are stuck in an endless cycle of  misunderstanding, mistake. & mistrust?

Sometimes the adjustments made by one or more members of the system to attain that homeostasis are unsustainable, leading to a breakdown over time. Humans are social animals and our relationships, especially intimate relationships, are so important to our safety and sense of self that we may (paradoxically) protect or preserve them in ways that are destructive to ourselves or others. This is where therapy can help identify ways that we are reacting against our interests & perpetuating cycles of suffering. 

Gestalt is an embodied and experiential therapy that emphasizes appreciating what is. This perspective anchors the therapeutic work in each partner's strengths and intrinsic goodness while encouraging curiosity about what else is there, including possible downside of that goodness.

For example, partners who are very open with each other may struggle to express themselves in kind and respectful ways. Or the opposite: partners who are very kind and respectful may be doing so at the expense of sharing what's really true and important to them. Gestalt emphasizes good contact through a healthy process (called the awareness and contact cycle). In working with relationships, my role involves helping partners understand where they get stuck in this dance. Blockages may include blind spots in awareness, emotional reactivity from the past coming into the present, ineffective communication, and resistances to contact. For example, the resistance of confluence involves an unspoken contract to go along to get along. As a result, partners make contact with each others' polite masks rather than their true selves. The problem with this is, eventually, people will stop being polite--and start being real.