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How To Know If Couples Counseling Will Be “Worth It” Choosing to begin couples counseling can feel like a weighty decision—because it is. We all arrive where we are through unique [...]

What Couples Therapy Isn’t: Debunking 5 Common Myths I’m in couples counseling myself, because my relationship is so important to me and because both my partner and I value continuing to [...]

Making Meaning: A Toolbox for Confronting Sustained External Decoherence The world is ending. There was a mass shooting in my hometown. There was terrible flooding that shattered my understanding [...]

Self Care, Community Care: Grounding, Meaning-Making, and Moving Through Parenting in this world is tragic.  So many of us are in a state of daily fight or flight, witnessing or experiencing [...]

Self-Actualizing Through Relationship What do you think of when you imagine a self-actualizing, healthy, empowered self? I often find that our culture champions the idea of an individual who [...]

A Fellow Traveler: My Philosophy and Approach as a Couples Therapist It can be overwhelming to choose to see a therapist or counselor. There is much to consider and all the questions that come [...]

The First, Most Difficult Step: Making a Clean Complaint When working with couples, I often find that they are more than capable of understanding all the terms and concepts that I use in my [...]

The Art of Dissenting “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” This quote, attributed [...]

Relational Evasion and Emotional Opacity When I engage with families and couples as a therapist, I always emphasize the importance of emotional honesty and I’ve become accustomed to a few [...]

PART III: The Ingredients of APOLOGY Throughout my life, I’ve come to value and cherish the sheer diversity and richness of individuals—I would say that there is nothing more amazing and [...]

PART II: The Ingredients of VALIDATION As I have continued to work with human relationships—both as a couples therapist and in my personal life—the importance of our differences, all the rich, [...]

PART I: The Ingredients of RUPTURE + REPAIR Relationships make the world go round. Honestly, they do! I have dedicated my life to working in the human realm, and I’ve found that relationships are [...]

A silver lining of “the great pause”? We can connect at a distance. The past year plus of zoom life has a silver lining: It taught us that it’s at least somewhat possible to connect at a [...]

Why simply “being vulnerable” is not the only goal. We’ve heard much about “vulnerability” and ‘authenticity” in the past few years. And,on the path of personal growth and development need to [...]

Skillful feedback helps parenting partners unite.  In 2012, I wrote an article called How to Give Skillful Feedback for a popular online journal. Now, parenting in the 2021 post-pandemic world, I [...]