The Five Relationships

Understanding how the past is shaping the present.

Our past is always with us. Every relationship, loss, success, disappointment, and turning point leaves its mark, shaping the expectations we carry into the present. Many of these patterns, especially traumatic ones, operate quietly, outside our awareness, influencing how we see ourselves, respond to stress, navigate relationships, approach work, and imagine our future.

Healing begins by bringing these patterns into awareness—not to dwell in the past, but to understand how it continues to shape life today. Rather than viewing anxiety, depression, conflict, perfectionism, or emotional overwhelm as isolated problems, we explore them as meaningful expressions of your history meeting your present life.

As we begin to understand these patterns, new possibilities emerge. Healing often involves grieving what wasn’t possible in the past, recognizing the wisdom in the ways you adapted, integrating traumatic experiences into your life story, and gradually creating enough freedom to respond to the present with greater choice, flexibility, and self-compassion.

Things We Might Explore

• trauma and post-traumatic stress
• childhood emotional neglect or abuse
• attachment trauma and early relationship patterns
• grief, loss, and unresolved mourning
• shame and self-criticism
• perfectionism, people-pleasing, and survival strategies
• anxiety, hypervigilance, and nervous system responses
• emotional numbness, disconnection, or dissociation
• repeating painful relationship patterns
• difficult family relationships
• developmental trauma and complex trauma
• understanding how the past continues to shape the present

Ways We Might Work Together

Because every person’s story is unique, therapy is tailored to your history, strengths, and goals. Depending on what would be most helpful, we may draw from EMDR, Flash Technique, Internal Family Systems (IFS), somatic psychotherapy, attachment-based therapy, psychodynamic therapy, experiential and Gestalt therapy, mindfulness, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and other approaches.

Building an internal foundation.

Our relationship with ourselves shapes how we experience almost everything else. It includes our ability to notice what is happening inside us, understand our emotions, regulate ourselves when life becomes difficult, know what matters to us, and make decisions we can stand behind.

This is more than self-knowledge. It is developing the emotional capacity, self-awareness, discernment, and resilience that allow us to rely on ourselves. We learn to listen to our intuition while remaining curious about it, to distinguish fear from information, and to make choices without needing to know with certainty how they will turn out.

The goal isn’t to trust that you will always make the right decision. It is to trust both your own wisdom and your ability to meet what happens next. Over time, that creates a different kind of confidence: not certainty about life, but confidence in your capacity to live it.

Things We Might Explore

• emotional awareness and emotional literacy
• self-regulation and nervous system awareness
• intuition and discernment
• self-trust and resilience
• identity and authenticity
• values, meaning, and priorities
• self-compassion
• decision-making and uncertainty
• knowing and communicating what you want
• energy, rest, and sustainable ways of living
• creativity and curiosity
• developing greater confidence in your ability to navigate change

Ways We Might Work Together

This work often involves slowing down enough to pay attention to your internal experience and becoming curious about what you find there. We may use experiential and Gestalt therapy, somatic psychotherapy, mindfulness, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), attachment-based approaches, psychodynamic therapy, CBT, creative interventions, and other approaches that help build awareness, flexibility, and self-trust.

Learning how to be in relationship.

We are profoundly relational. Friends, partners, family, colleagues, neighbors, communities, and even brief encounters with other people shape our experience of being alive.

Good relationships aren’t relationships without disagreement, disappointment, or conflict. They depend on our ability to know what we are experiencing, understand what we want and need, communicate it clearly, stay regulated enough to remain curious about another person’s experience, and repair things when they go wrong.

They also require us to let other people be separate from us. We work on noticing assumptions and projections, taking responsibility for our own emotions, giving up attempts to control other people’s responses, and developing boundaries—not as walls, but as the conditions that allow relationships to remain healthy and sustainable.

Boundaries are what I need in order to be happy to see you.

Things We Might Explore

• attachment and expectations in relationships
• intimacy and vulnerability
• friendship, family, romantic, workplace, and community relationships
• communication skills
• conflict and repair
• emotional regulation during difficult conversations
• boundaries
• knowing what you want and asking for it
• projection and assumptions about other people
• responsibility versus control
• reciprocity and mutual care
• loneliness, belonging, and community

Ways We Might Work Together

Relationships give us an opportunity not only to understand patterns but to practice something different. We may explore what happens internally when you are in relationship, practice difficult conversations, experiment with boundaries, work directly with conflict, or use the therapeutic relationship itself to understand patterns as they happen. Our therapists may draw from attachment theory, experiential and Gestalt therapy, family systems, psychodynamic approaches, IFS-informed work, mindfulness, ACT, CBT, and other relational approaches.

Understanding the conditions in which we live.

None of us exists outside of culture, history, economics, or systems of power. Race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, immigration status, access to resources, and the institutions and communities we live within shape our opportunities, our stress, our safety, and the choices available to us.

Therapy can do real harm when every source of suffering is located inside the individual. Sometimes anxiety comes from our history. Sometimes we are anxious because the situation we are living in isn’t safe. What looks like a personal problem may also be a family problem, a workplace problem, an economic problem, or a political problem.

Our work is informed by liberation psychology, multicultural psychology, and intersectional feminism. We look at both personal agency and social reality: what is ours to understand, heal, or change; what was never ours to carry; where we can find support and collective strength; and where changing our circumstances—or the systems themselves—may be part of building a healthier life.

Things We Might Explore

• race, racism, and racial identity
• gender and systems of gendered power
• sexuality and LGBTQ+ experience
• class, poverty, and economic insecurity
• disability and ableism
• immigration, migration, and belonging
• cultural and family expectations
• workplace power and institutional dynamics
• access to resources and opportunity
• privilege, responsibility, and solidarity
• political and social stress
• activism, community, and collective action
• distinguishing personal problems from systemic ones

Ways We Might Work Together

This work begins by taking the circumstances of your life seriously. Rather than automatically asking how you need to change, we may also ask what needs to change around you. We draw from liberation psychology, feminist and intersectional approaches, multicultural therapy, narrative therapy, systems thinking, trauma-informed care, ACT, and other approaches that help us understand the relationship between personal experience, power, culture, community, and change.

Making room for meaning, connection, and being alive.

We are part of something larger than ourselves. Our relationship with nature, place, creativity, spirituality, beauty, mortality, and meaning can have a profound effect on how it feels to inhabit our lives.

For some people, this includes religion, spiritual practice, or a sense of soul. For others it is found in the ocean, making art, growing food, caring for animals, music, travel, ritual, science, or simply experiencing moments when the world becomes larger than our immediate concerns.

Therapy doesn’t need to define what any of this means for you. It can make room to explore it.

A rich life needs more than psychological health. We need pleasure, curiosity, meaning, connection, wonder, and things that make us genuinely glad to be alive. Part of our work can be discovering what those things are for you and helping you make more room for them.

Things We Might Explore

• meaning and purpose
• spirituality, religion, and spiritual practice
• connection with nature and place
• creativity and artistic expression
• pleasure, play, and curiosity
• awe and wonder
• mortality and existential questions
• grief and our relationship with impermanence
• ritual and tradition
• belonging to something larger than ourselves
• what makes you feel most alive

Ways We Might Work Together

There is no particular spiritual or philosophical belief you need to bring to this work. We may use mindfulness, experiential therapy, existential therapy, creative practices, somatic awareness, nature-based reflection, Buddhist psychology, meaning-making, ritual, or simply conversation. The point isn’t to give you a worldview. It’s to make room for questions about meaning, connection, and what makes a life worth inhabiting.