A couple sits across from me, and I can feel the exact weight they've brought into the room.
It's not anger exactly, though I've heard them fight so I know there has been plenty of that. What I'm noticing is something heavier. It feels like the exhaustion of people who have tried, repeatedly, and can no longer tell if they are fighting for their relationship or fighting to get out of it.
​
One of them says, "I don't even know what I want anymore."

She's talking about being in the relationship, and I hear that more than anything else.

It's an honest thing to say. It takes courage to say it out loud, especially to your partner, especially in front of a stranger.

Not knowing is not the same as not caring. It usually means you've been so busy surviving the dynamic between you that you've lost the thread back to yourself.
Relational Life Therapy is built for this.

Terry Real's RLT model doesn't assume that staying together is the goal. It assumes that clarity is. What I want is two people showing up fully, telling the truth without weapons. Then we can figure out what is actually possible between them. Sometimes what's possible is a transformed relationship. Sometimes it's a conscious uncoupling, done with care and dignity instead of carnage. Both require the same work.

What RLT gives couples on the edge is a container rigorous enough to hold the the actual question.

I've watched people arrive at my door certain they were done, and discover through the work that there was something they hadn't yet tried, some version of themselves they hadn't yet brought to the relationship. I've watched people arrive hoping to be convinced to stay, and discover instead that the kindest thing they could do for themselves and their partner was to leave well.

Neither of those outcomes can be rushed. And from where I sit, neither can be decided from the outside.

Somatics teaches us that body knows things the mind hasn't caught up to yet. A clenching in the chest when your partner reaches for you. The way you breathe differently in their absence. Numbness you've gotten so used to you stopped noticing it. RLT and somatics work with those signals, not just the story you've been telling about what's wrong.

In relationship therapy sessions, I give couples the same invitation again and again: put down the case you've been building against each other, just for now. I don't say this because the case isn't real, but because building it has already cost you years, and it hasn't resolved anything.

What would it mean to get curious instead? What would it mean to let your partner see what is actually happening inside you, not the defended version, not the one that has learned to wound before being wounded?

RLT cultivates what Terry Real calls the Wise Adult. Not a spiritually bypassed version of adulthood that never gets angry or afraid. The kind that can feel all of it and still choose how to respond.

Some couples do this work and recommit with a clarity and honesty they didn't know was possible when they walked in. Some couples do this work and part. They part having said the true things, having understood each other at a level the fighting never allowed. Their kids, if they have them, feel the difference.

If you are sitting with the question of whether to stay or go, you don't need someone to hand you the answer. You need a space honest enough, and rigorous enough, to let you find it yourself.

If you are ready for clarity, reach out and let's talk, honestly. I can help you find your way through, instead of staying stuck. 

Odd how envy can point the way to true desire.
Have you ever felt envious of someone for something they have or something they do, only to find out later that it is something you long for? Something you dream of being or doing, but you haven’t given yourself permission?
At 8, I love books more than anything.
In the tiny Ohio town, summer at my grandma’s house includes the freedom to wander.
With the porch door slapping at my heels, I run through backyards of roses and apple trees. Past rusting cars. Over the metal tang of railroad lines.
Hot asphalt sticks to my sandals as I skip through the church parking lot and fling myself into the town library’s cool, dim interior.
Here, I fall in love with queer feminist icon Nancy Drew, leaving the dull Hardy boys to collect dust on the shelf.
It is this library where words catch my heart and never let go.
I find a book called “Bittersweet.”
With the complexity of one word, the world of poetry cracks the cave door and bids me to enter.
Rummaging the shelves, I land on a disintegrating copy of James Whitcomb Riley’s “The Old Swimming Hole.” I check it out.
Sitting in my treehouse, I read his gentle poems until the pages crumble, smudged with Chips Ahoy dust.
Along with snacks, I feed myself new words and images. I devour bucolic descriptions of farming life.
Most importantly, I discover a new feeling: longing.
Back at school, I memorize the call number 811, the poetry shelf in the school library.
Here I print my name in chunky pencil letters on the library call slips of Rod McKuen and Robert Frost.
No one comments on the strangeness of a third-grade child immersed in slim volumes with vague pastel covers.
That year, several poems litter our language arts textbook.
While my classmates crack up at Shel Silverstein, I prefer the quiet humanity of Lucille Clifton and the deep play of e.e. cummings.
Poems pour out of my kid fingers onto the pages of my denim-covered Gnome Notebook.
Roused by Riley’s poetic descriptions of light, many of my poems contain references to the “golden hour of eternity.” Also, dolphins, snowflakes, and memory.
To anyone who asks what I want to be when I grow up, I say, “a poet.”
One day my dad tells me that poets are a dime a dozen.
I stop saying that.

Her LinkedIn profile headline reads one word: “Author.”
Book after book pours out of her. She writes for a few well-known blogs.
The writing is okay, but it doesn’t move me the way great writing does.
Let me say that this woman is perfectly lovely. In every encounter I’ve had with her, she has been nothing but respectful and supportive.
But I hate her.
It is years before I can name the real feeling: envy.
I am envious of her.
Why does she get to write books for a living?
Why does she get published and get to dedicate her career to writing?
I’m embarrassed to say how long it takes me to admit that I want what she has.
I want to be a writer.
In fact, it is what I have always wanted.
Even as I type those words, the doubt comes in.
Writers are a dime a dozen. Writers don’t make money. Writers blah blah blah….
This, my friend, is a question of permission.
Have you ever wanted something so badly but not been able to let yourself have it?
Is there a longing deep inside you that you have buried forever?
​You are in good company.
So how do we do it?
How do we allow ourselves to be our longing?
This is what I have been praying over, grieving for, and ritualizing the past two months.
Do I get to be a writer?
Do you get to ______?
When I tell my friend Jenny who’s known me since I was 15, I want to take a stab at writing, she says, “It’s always been writing.”
When my career coach gently asks, “What’s the worst that could happen if you try?” I burst into tears, terrified that I could live my whole life and not try.
Permission comes in drips and drops.
I don't have many answers about how, but I do know permission is a process.
Perhaps one day, my bio will read “Writer.” But until then, find me typing in the library.

In the 30-plus years since my tire-screeching departure after grabbing my diploma from the sweaty hands of my high school principal, Northeastern Ohio has changed only in that it is now even more conservative.
At 18, I drove away from oversized hair and stagnantly closed minds, determined to try my luck anywhere but the Midwest.
I have no place here in Ohio and never did.
I’m spending the week helping my 80-year-old mother, from whom I am mostly estranged, care for herself after knee replacement surgery.
It is 560 miles between my current mountain home to the burdened land where my ancestors have squatted for generations.
I’ve covered those miles by driving North in my rickety camper built the year I graduated from high school that I euphemistically call “vintage.
Every day I'm there, I leave my mom's farm and drive to town to gather supplies.
Each trip results in long stares and raised eyebrows from the Trump-loving locals.
I rarely feel unsafe as a visibly queer and trans person, but here I do.
The vitriol on the white Christian faces has driven more than one queer into the embrace of sin, AKA San Francisco.
It’s a long week.
As I ready myself to leave, I realize I don’t have to be home for another two days.
The time spreads out in front of me, golden and sweet.
I need this time to process the week with my mom.
I text a friend, “I can’t tell if I am completely okay or totally disassociated.” My friend texts back, “Maybe it’s both.”
A solo-road trip sounds excellent, winding slowly back down south.
I whisper my intention at the gas pump, “May today bring me exactly the magick I need.”
In the Southwest corner of present-day Ohio exists the Great Serpent Mound.
It is the largest effigy mound in North America at 1,348 feet in length, 25 feet in width, and three feet high, complete with seven curvatures and a triple spiral tail.
This holy mother was constructed approximately 2300 years ago by Native cultures whose names are reconstructions: the Fort Ancient Culture and later the Adena Culture.
Doing my homework, I learned that the snake surrounds an egg and was built on an ancient meteor impact site called an astrobleme.
This meteor impact occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago.
In the center of the structure, sedimentary strata have been uplifted several hundred feet, resembling the central uplifts of lunar craters.
I’m curious enough about the snake effigy to linger in Ohio.
I drive for hours, leaving the highway for the two-lane country roads replete with pick-up trucks and Dollar General.
Arriving at the mound, the park is closed for the night.
I’m too nervous about sneaking in.
I decide to wild camp in my rig and arrive at the mound first thing in the morning.
I scout a good location, up a dirt road, in the middle of an empty field near the serpent’s head.
Traveling in Scotland, I was enchanted by their “right to roam” law which strikes a balance between the right to access land and water and owning private property.
Basically, you can visit and camp on the land, swim in lakes and rivers, hike, and explore historic sites, even if they are on private property.
This is a good law.
Because, after all, how can one really “own” property?
Can you pick it up and take it with you?
No.
The land is here for all of us to live on.
We are made of it.
Perhaps my anarchist sensibility runs too deep, but the concept of private property as applied to land is a weird construct.
I’m tucked in for the night, and the late dusk softens the world.
I am aware that there are “right” ways to be in relationship with new and old places.
How one approaches a new place matters.
When first arriving in a place, it’s polite to make a land offering to the local spirits and guardians, thanking them for having you.
I decide to do this in the morning.
This was a mistake.
I crack a beer and am lounging in my camper when a car horn blares and won’t stop.
Decidedly jarring, I pull on pants and stagger into the unrelenting high beams of a car pointed directly at me.
A voice begins to yell at me, even before I can see it.
I know this is most likely not going to go well, but I think it is probably best to deal with it head-on.
I approach, and in a big truck is an irate older woman, screaming her head off at me.
Her words are barely decipherable.
She is so enraged.
I see an older man sitting in the passenger seat, and he looks confused.
I can hear “MY PROPERTY!” and “GET THE FUCK OUT!” “MY PROPERTY!”
I gather from those words she would politely like to ask me to gather my things and go.
I feel a bit scared but also taken aback.
This woman is so triggered, and I am clearly not a threat.
I say authentically, “I am so sorry. I will go.”
It wasn’t my intention to disrupt her evening, merely to find a place to rest.
How true my apology feels surprises me.
Nothing in me wants to fight with her; I am just sorry.
The truck waits as she guns the engine while I prepare to leave and do.
She follows me a mile down the road, flashing her lights and honking.
I drive slowly, trying to decide what to do next.
I realize that my reading glasses are lost in the back of the camper and that I have no cell reception anyway.
I’m going to have to navigate by feel.
I’ve already scoped the location near the mound, and know there is nowhere good to camp, so I head down a dirt road, then another, and another.
At each turn, I feel into it.
Which is the right way to go?
As a child, my mother had several impactful talks with me about my “conscience.”
These usually occurred after I had done something terrible: put the cat in the fridge to see what would happen or poured water all over the floor to make it slippery.
From what I could gather as a child, my conscience was something inside me that helped me “feel” what was the good thing to do and what would piss my mother off.
It’s not precisely my conscience that I’m using to decide my route, but it is a felt sense.
I follow my nose through the pitch-black night amidst curving winding roads.
It’s late by the time I pull into the ATV state recreation area, thinking this might be a good place to rest.
It’s private, and I hope no one will bother me here.
I lay down to rest, but my body won’t relax.
I’ve done many sketchy questionable things when I travel.
Still, I realize that the information I’m receiving from my body jives with what my brain knows.
I’m in rural Ohio, but I don’t know where.
No one knows where I am. I’m trans.
I’ve told my partner I’m safe for the night.
I have no cell reception. I have no glasses.
I’m hidden from view in an area well known by locals.
Probably it would be okay, but I shouldn’t risk it.
I’ve got to find another place to be.
Again, I hop out of the camper and reconnect the battery terminals so the thing will start. Yes, it’s that janky.
I start driving again.
I had a good activist friend in college who doled out this good anti-authoritarian advice: When you don't know which way to go, go left.
Left it was as I pulled out of the ATV park onto the darkened road.
Another 30 minutes of fields, curves, and occasional darkened farmhouses.
It’s so late, and my eyes are weary.
I start to pray out loud, to my ancestors, to the spirits of this land, to whoever is benevolently listening.
“I need some help, y’awl.”
Miles go by.
Many turns.
More prayers, “Like, a campground. That’s what I need. Can you please guide me towards a campground?”
Suddenly, a bright green blaze crosses the sky over yet another field.
An emerald blur from the right side of the field, down low to the left.
It’s burned low to the ground.
​
If it were light out, I would have tried to find where the meteor landed.
My attention is drawn in the direction it fell, and there it is: a sign, faded and worn, with an arrow and one word, "Camping."
The brakes squeal as I make the left turn too quickly.
More miles and miles of road.
Five.
Ten.
Fifteen.
I pass a cemetery.
Decide not to sleep there.
Again, I speak out loud, “Y’awl, I have faith, but I am starting to doubt this story will end well tonight. A campground? Please?”
And then there it is.
On my right, I see the dim outline of an RV. A gravel driveway.
I pull in.
Almost all of the spots are available.
Finally, I rest.
When I wake in the morning, the sun is golden.
The late spring green of the sacred world glows, and the breeze is warm.
I eat my yogurt and berries slowly, savoring the morning.
As I pull out, I blow a kiss to the ancestors, the guides, and the land.
Later that morning, as I wind and wind towards the direction I think is home, my heart cracks open.
Too tired last night to consider the miracle of the green flash, the morning brings contemplation.
I was guided.
That is clear.
But why was going to the Serpent Mound not the right thing?
I’m fighting with the lady from last night in my head.
She appeared like a middle-aged conservative white lady.
Probably Christian.
Why are conservative midwestern Christians so hypocritical?
Why is their god so desecrated?
What about love and acceptance, kindness to strangers, offering succor and respite to weary travelers?
Christian charity?
Ooh, I hate hypocrisy.
And why am I fighting with someone who is not even here?
Why was she so full of hate for me?
Because it did feel personal when she screamed, “Why did you ever think it would be okay for you to be here???”
What did she see?
Did she see a middle-aged person, like herself, who was unafraid to travel alone?
To take risks?
To read as queer and trans and other, amid a culture that kills its own if they are in the littlest way different?
What was the trauma that had her read me as a threat?
As I ponder, I soften.
I don’t know anything about her and her life, what dreams she may have had, or who she may have lost.
I have received a gift from her: be soft with strangers.
Be gentle, be loving.
I’m glad I said none of the ugly things I could have.
I appreciate the healing that has made my heart soft enough to be in a good way.
I can feel the land here, thrumming with life.
When the tears come, I start to understand something new about the pain of colonization.
I’m driving and crying, which is a favorite combo.
When the grief gets stronger, the words “I’m so sorry” are what pour, repeatedly, from within.
The same thing I said and meant to the lady from last night.
Except now I’m saying it to the land and the original inhabitants.
I am so, so sorry for what my ancestors did to you.
For what we continue to do.
From the marrow of my bones, I feel the wrongness.
My deep felt remorse was precisely the same as I had spoken the previous evening: I am so, so sorry.
At that exact moment, as I round a hairpin turn in the country glow of morning, I realize: I didn’t make an offering to that land where I squatted.
While part of what I met in that lady was a traumatized, raging, and entitled white lady, another layer was the rage of the untended great mother serpent.
The unacknowledged rape of the land.
The native tourism I had been about to participate in because I hadn’t checked in with my conscience and thought it would be cool.
Understood through that lens, the wrath I had experienced was deserved. In fact, it’s a gift.
Queerness offers you a unique sensitivity to the world.
Often painful, yet there are moments when you can be so grateful for the exquisite sensation of sensing your conscience.
I appreciate feeling the difference between what is right and what will piss your Mother off.
​​

Stop trying to be so good.
The world could give a fuck about your goodness.
Your realness is what's called for.
Your acknowledgment of all the capacity you have: to love, to hurt, to kill, to heal, to create.
Being good is about proving.
Proving that you are worthy to receive the resources you need to exist.
You are trying to be good when you worry about your carbon footprint.
When you recycle. When you send thank you notes, and when you turn off the water to brush your teeth.
You are trying to be good when you listen to someone you are not interested in listening to.
When you say yes because you think you should.
Trying to be good sneaks in all over the place.
Politeness.
Social grace.
Virtue signaling.
Ask, "How do I feel when I am trying to prove myself?"
If you are honest, you will realize that you don't know what it feels like because you are always doing it.
I've been proving myself for as long as I can remember.
Even as I stepped out of mainstream culture, I stepped into proving that I was punk enough. Feminist enough. Earthy enough.Queer enough. Activist enough. Woke enough.
I've been puking my guts out while trying not to make a mess.
Proving runs deep in us, amirite?
Proving is woven with capitalism.
It goes like this: If you are good enough already, with nothing to prove, what will motivate you to work beyond your true capacity?
Capitalism creates internalized slavery.
"Success" is another word for it. Success is you proving your worth to the world.
Let's burn down that word.
I was in a somatic coaching session when I realized how trying and being have gotten enmeshed for me.
My somatic coach suggested that I get to be here, and take up space, simply by merit of being alive.
That I don't have to earn my right to take a breath.
She said, "Stop trying and BE."
This idea, while it made sense on the surface, like DUH, didn't sink in.
I couldn't understand why she was telling me this. I KNEW this already.
But I am good, and a good student too.
Leaving her office that session, I said (with great earnestness), "Okay, so my homework is to Try and Be."
She grabbed my arm fiercely and growled through clenched teeth, "No. Just Be."
Imagine that there is a competition you are trying to win.
Like a science fair. Or a ring-the-bell-at-the-fair strength challenge.
And because you are awesome, the person is coming towards you with your coveted prize.
They want to hand it to you.
They are following you around as you keep working on finishing your project.
You keep trying to ring that bell you've already rung.
They are trying to get you to take your trophy, your gold star.
But you won't even turn towards them. You ignore their existence as you keep trying.
In your head, your mantra rings: "You've got this! Keep going!"
You won't arrive long enough to receive your accolade.
This is what it means to not arrive to receive.
Proving is excellent protection.
If I am always in the proving, I don't have to trust I will be cared for.
I don't have to trust that others can and will meet my needs.
It keeps me occupied, confident I've not yet arrived.
Proving says, "Don't slow; you'll falter, then stop."
And what if that was true? What if you stopped?
What if you rested, even without earning it?
(Because honey, you HAVE earned it with all the striving you've done during your life.)
When I turned 50, my partner secretly invited many of my loved ones to record 1-minute videos.
I watched loved one upon loved one say something along the line of, "Rest, sweetie. Take it easy. Enjoy."
When I watched these sweet tributes, I was confused, then frustrated.
Why were so many people telling me to rest? I had a world to save.
Two months later, I experienced my first clinical depression as my body and brain set a boundary for me.
I couldn't work and had to rest.
I watched my life fall apart in slow motion with an interested disinterest.
What would happen if I let it all go? If I just stopped all the proving and striving?
My practices fell away, one by one. Gym, dance, prayer. On it went.
When I was underwater, moving through molasses, the 'being good' muscle atrophied.
Unable to be polite, I would suddenly leave dinners and hangouts, often only able to eke out the words, "I'm done now," as I plodded off.
That time in the twisted kingdom felt magical in a different way.
The magic of honesty without pretense or striving.
So much success-orientation got stripped away.
So much proving burned off.
When I finally emerged, I was different.
Naked. Softer. More connected with myself.
I was less willing to push through, and unable to work like the devil anymore. Not that I wanted to.
Sustaining recovery from depression has meant learning a new way to exist inside myself.
I have had to learn to honor my capacity, moment to moment.
Not being good is my saving grace.
The word "success" is slowly being replaced with "arrive."
I'm learning, finally, to arrive so that I can receive.
Stop trying to be good.
​
Start arriving to receive.I'm not saying try to be bad. That's another kind of striving. (Although it can be more fun.)
Stop doing for a sec and soften into what's available right now.
Love, the world has sweetness for you if you'll allow it.
Your ancestors have blessings for you.
Your friends have more love to give.
Your community wants to celebrate you.
Stop being good. Stop striving. Start arriving.
Yes, dear one, the world really will fall apart if you stop proving and start arriving to receive.
You're not imagining it.
But maybe falling apart because we are all receiving goodness is just what this world needs.

“I love all the divine feminine energy here. It’s so important. They are trying to tear us apart, but we won’t be divided,” she leans in, her wispy voice, disrupting the conversation I had been having with my best friend, Theo Mae.
We are sitting on the lawn at The Chicks concert.
In the background, Cherry Bomb by the Runaways blares, projected onto multiple 25-foot screens.
We were enjoying our snacks, waiting for the band to take the stage, when this white waify purple-haired woman sat down on the grass between us.
At first, she was on her phone, invading our personal space, but she seemed harmless.
But then she started talking, all goddess this, womyn that, feminine feminine feminine.
Eye-gazing.
Lavender hair tossing.
Trying.
To.
CONNECT.
Theo Mae and I rolled our eyes at each other and shook our damn heads.
Both non-binary, we are no strangers to hearing how incredible our “feminine energy” is.
Let me be clear.
I love women.
I am down with how people want to describe their experiences.
Usually, I pick my battles about gender.
I often ignore comments like these.
After all, I will never see the person again.
But this lady wouldn’t drop it.
Amping up, she went on and on about the glorious feminine moon, the goddess energy of the crowd, the field of the feminine emanating from us all.
Finally, I had had enough.
I turned toward her and said, “I’m not trying to bust your groove, but you are talking to two non-binary, trans people. The language about the “divine feminine” you are using doesn’t work for me. It is alienating and off-putting. You are gonna need to stop with that if you want to hang out with us.”
Clear. Kind. Boundary.
In my head, I’m putting my money on her doubling down. It seems, for a brief moment, that she will stop.
I’m still bracing for it.
“Oh yes! I honor you so much!” she replies, chatting about the music for a minute.
Great, but my guard is up.
“But really, fighting the patriarchy takes ALL of us.”
Uh-oh.
And then.
“Okay, but you don’t understand. Your feminine energy is so beautiful! You are so powerful!”
And there it is, folks. The ole double-down.
Here’s what the Google has to say: “The phrase “double down” means to put forth the additional effort or risk in a situation or argument, even if you know the outcome will be a mistake or will be negative.”At this point, Theo Mae sees my disgust. They lean in, bless them, and bravely give purple hair Gender 101.
For five minutes of their precious life on Earth time, it’s all smash the gender binary, celebrate the glittering gender multiverse, and try to help this woman learn.
I admire Theo Mae’s fortitude.
Their educational interlude gives me time to think about what I want from this situation.

1. I want it to stop.
2. I want to have a good night.
3. I want to be kind.

Until.
This bitch puts her hand on my arm! “I just want you to know I honor everything about you, your….”
I knock her hand off my arm.
“Don’t touch me,” I growl.
I mean.
When was the last time someone tried to manage me physically?
Now I’m mad.
Is she tripping? She might be.
I still have care for this human, misguided as she is.
I say, “Look, I know you want to connect, but I’m here for the concert, not to educate you. I asked you to stop, and you didn’t. We are done here.”
She tells me that because she honors me, she is going to leave.
“If you really honor me, here’s what you can do. After the concert, go home and get on Google. Research gender identity. Research non-binary. That’s how you can honor me,” is how I reply.
This is reasonable, considering all the shitty and mean things I could have said.
Here’s her parting shot: “I’m sorry for all the people who hurt you and made you the way you are.”
She runs, I mean RUNS, off, forgetting her wallet in the process.
I look at it lying there, unwilling to do anything with it.
But Theo Mae is nicer than me and sprints after her to return it.
They return, laughing, “Now she’s gonna think trans people are so evil.”
And she likely will.
Bullshit like this happens all the time to my black friends, transfeminine peeps, fat folks, disabled friends, and all the other folks existing at the edges of what is considered ‘normal.’
But something about this episode made me question the doubling down thing.
Like, why double down?
Why did she believe her intention to be understood was much more important than the impact I expressed to her?
More important than the boundary I set?
This is a meme, right? The doubling down?
What did that lady think was gonna happen if she kept insisting on my feminine energy after I set a boundary, saying how she honored me without listening to me and kept nonconsensually touching me? (She did it again!)
Does anyone ever soften because you’ve convinced them you are right?
or…
Have you ever been convinced by someone’s intentions that the impact you feel doesn’t matter?
I think about embodied strategies a lot.
Strategies are attempts to meet needs.
You can ask, “What is this strategy trying to take care of?” especially when it seems nonsensical.
Doubling down is a strategy; my best guess is that it is trying to take care of belonging.
That lady wanted to belong with Theo and me, and for that to happen, she felt we had to understand her perspective.
It makes sense to me.
However, how she went about belonging didn’t work for us, and ultimately for her.
If she were my client, I would suggest implementing a new narrative and strategy for belonging.
Stop and listen when someone gives you feedback that something in your behavior isn’t working.Every week in my dance community, we read our community agreements. Here are the relevant bits:
“If you receive feedback from another dancer that they were uncomfortable with something, here’s what to do:

1. Stop.
2. Listen.
3. Reflect back to them what you’ve heard.
4. Ask questions to make sure you understand the impact they are sharing with you.
5. If you get stuck, seek a supporter.
6. If someone offers you feedback, they give you the gift of believing in your capacity to learn. Take the opportunity.”

Seriously.
It doesn’t seem that difficult to me.
Sure, it’s hard to hear you unwittingly impacted someone, but it was an accident, right?
So why not just listen, and say something like, “Oh so sorry! I hear that language doesn’t work for you, so I’ll stop.”
That would have been the coolest thing, and then she could have hung out with us all night.
What is the necessary work that gets us all to the place of being able to hear the impact we inadvertently caused without taking it as a personal affront we must defend against?
If I hurt you, I want to know about it, so I can make it right.
That starts with listening and making sure I understand the impact.
Hurt happens in all relationships.
Repair from harm deepens all relationships.Being the angry trans person isn’t my jam.
It’s no fun.
I often have so much spaciousness for people’s learning.
Case in point: Three weeks ago, I came out as NB to my 75-year-old silversmithing teacher.
It was the first time she met someone NB or encountered the concept.
I explained it to her, then she got excited and hugged me, saying, “Happy Binary! Happy Binary! I love you!”
I knew exactly what she meant.
Now we are having conversations, and I’ve given her permission to ask all her questions.
This feels good to me.
I love this work.
She is so excited to learn and to understand and confront the limits to her understanding.
When she makes a mistake, she readily admits it, “Oh shoot, I messed up your pronoun again!” and we move on.
It’s just not a big deal.
Last thought on this: I wanna double down sometimes too.
Being misunderstood sucks.
The thing is, I didn’t misunderstand the purple lady.
I didn’t think she had bad intentions.
Her intentions of connection were clear.
What else was clear is the learning she still has to do around gender, boundaries, and listening.
As do I, as do you.
Doubling down feels like “But…!” in my body.

• “But you don’t get what I’m saying!”
• “But I didn’t mean it like that!”
• “But if you really got it, you wouldn’t feel like that.”

I think the corrective here is to consider that the impact someone is sharing is the impact they experience.
You don’t know what that feels like to be them.
This week, I am practicing listening to the impact I catalyze in others without defensiveness or trying to convince them of my rightness or good intentions.
I’d be delighted if you’d join me in this practice.
Down with the double down, up with Connection!

One of the worst things I ever did to another human on purpose was to scrub the toilet with their toothbrush, then put it back in the toothbrush holder.
The recipient of this disgusting treatment was my then-husband.
What's worse is that he had a whole thing about toilet germs, which I knew about.
We were in a fight, and I was furious.
At the moment, it felt like the perfect retaliation.
I'm sure it does not surprise you in the least that relationship eventually ended.
We had so few tools to communicate with love, so we took out our pain on each other.
I'm embarrassed when I reflect on that less-than-shining example of how I handled conflict.
That was where I was then, but I wish I had had better skills to communicate my feelings and needs.
What happens to you when you get into a conflict with a friend or partner?
Do you ever do or say things you later regret?
If you are like many people, your body has a response.
You may go on autopilot and then later, like me with the toothbrush, wonder what caused you to behave that way.
When I met my current partner, I was determined to learn how to use conflict to fuel connection instead of break it.
I wanted this relationship to last, so I better learn how to fight better.
So I went to school for conflict resolution.
I read everything I could find about conflict theory.
I took classes like NVC to learn how to communicate my needs.
I studied somatics to understand the body's fight-and-flight responses and how to work with them.
And sure enough, I got better at conflict.
You probably already know that conflict can be painful, but did you know that it is also a force that can be generative?
It helps you out by pointing out what needs to be addressed.
Sometimes you conflict over something straightforward.
You forgot to pick up an important package you agreed to pick up, and your partner is pissed.
But I've learned in my study of conflict that most of it happens below the surface.
What we think we are fighting about is rarely what we're fighting about.
For example, suppose I fight with my partner about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
What we are really fighting about could be unmet needs for fairness, reciprocity, equality, etc.
Or it could be about something else entirely!
Old unresolved past issues, resentments, longings, or even a desire for connection.
All this stuff is under the surface, and we're fighting about the dishes. I bet that's happened to you.
When I get into conflict now, it happens in slow motion.
We move and speak at turtle speed.
I don't want to say or do something I regret later and have to apologize for.
So I go slow.
Probably less than half the crap that comes through my brain comes out of my mouth, which is a good thing because oooh-weee.
The impulse to retaliate has significantly lessened as I've learned to tell my partner what I feel and need.
Their toothbrush is safe with me!
I feel proud of how my partner and I show up in conflict.
There is respect between us.
Do we still get triggered?
Uh-yup!
Sure do, because human!
However, embodied practices have saved my butt countless times.
Instead of reacting out of my fight impulse, I take a pause.
I take a break.
I breathe.
All of this, hard as it is in the moment, saves me countless hours in therapy processing my fuck-ups.
Attending to my body during conflict is a gift I've learned to give myself.
Yes, good conflict skills are 100% learnable.
You don't have to be at the mercy of your conflict patterns for the rest of your life.
You can train to fight with respect and care.
Professional fighters train to build skill and grace.
Conflict skills are learnable, and I teach them, and you can learn them.

If you keep having the same fight with your partner, no matter how many talks you’ve had, you’re not broken. You’re stuck in a painful dynamic.

I practice Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy, which is transforming how I help couples stay connected even through the necessary growth moments in their relationships.

The great thing about learning and practicing relational skills is they benefit ALL of your relationships, for the rest of your life.

Pretty great self-investment, amiright?

Why You Keep Having the Same Fight​
​Repeating conflict cycles are the bane of most couples.For example,

• The more you get angry, the more they pull away.
• The more they pull away, the angrier you get.

Or:

• The more they get blamey, the more you withdraw.
• The more you withdraw, the blamier they get. ​

Relationship Life Therapy calls these cycles "The More, The More."The more, the more is a dance of our wounds colliding, on repeat. I bet you know what I'm talking about!
Many of us think, "If my partner would just act differently, I wouldn't feel (insert bad feeling.)"

We outsource the solution to them. But guess what?

They are thinking the same thing!

If YOU would just change, they wouldn't feel the bad way they feel, and there wouldn't be this stupid repeating conflict!
Or maybe you are an internalizer, and blame yourself.
If only you could keep it together, you wouldn't take your partner to this negative place.

It's common to feel hopeless, despairing and trapped when trapped in cycles of conflict.

My couples' clients often say things like, "Ugh, I can't believe we are here again."
Conventional relationship therapy often focuses on the problems instead of solutions. 

But what you focus on increases.
For example, if you want a more trusting relationship, do the practices that will increase trust rather than endlessly reinforcing where trust was broken.

When I work with couples, I give them the same choice again and again.

1. "We can spend our time in sessions processing the hard things that happened between you, if that is how you want to spend your time and money."
2. "Or, we can focus on practicing what you long for in your partnership."

It’s a paradigm shift.
​
So how do you get out of "The More, The More?"

1. Name the pattern when not activated. While only one of you needs to see it to have leverage, it is helpful if both of you share an understanding of the dynamic
2. Watch for it happening in the wild.
3. See if you can name it while it is happening. (This works really well for my competitive clients; they want to be the first one to see and name it.)
4. The act of naming it while it's happening is often a total gamechanger. The smallest of interruptions can get you back on the same team.
5. Seek support for changing dynamics, not just processing negative emotions. Find a couple's counselor who is willing to help you keep your eyes on the prize: a thriving relationship, not endless venting. We are going after true change!

​
I am currently accepting a small number of new relationship clients.​

Let’s map your unique pattern together and discover how to interrupt and bring back joy and connection → Book a free call

​I am in my kitchen, preparing dinner.
The reddish-orange of the tomato skin sheens against the worn wood of the cutting board, crouching on the counter.
The knife blade, serrated and glowing, flows from the black plastic handle my hand grips. Late afternoon sun nudges the window frame above the sink. The gas oven hisses as it preheats.
Cutting into the fruit’s flesh, the warm smell of the tomato tangs my nose. Diluted juice and seeds spill across the board.
Slice by slice, I complete the job. The consistent thickness of wedges in a row is satisfying.
All I am doing is cutting a tomato.
The miracle is that I am completely here and now. I am present.
It is a moment of quiet grace requiring no effort to wrangle my attention toward the task.
How long it had been since I was entirely present chopping a vegetable?
Usually, my mind is elsewhere. I’m thinking about whatever I’m annoyed with or when the endless backyard project will complete. Wondering what time my partner will be home. Thinking about what I have to do later in the evening.
So few moments am I present with what is in front of me.
Like some of you, I too wrote cringey goth poetry in high school. In a recent re-read, a line of wisdom from my 17-year-old self jumped out. “May I never cease to realize my alive.”
As enchanting as the tomato moment is, there is also terror.
Am I missing it? My life? The little time I have to be here, experiencing? Have I ceased to know my alive?
Coming into presence means admitting absence.
Why is being here, now so freaking hard?!
According to the gospel of me, a life well-lived rests on three foundations: presence, creativity, and connection.
Presence is most elusive.
Do you struggle to realize your aliveness, to know it while you have it?
I have a theory.
Presence requires feeling. All the everything. The joy. The horror. The suffering. The grief. The delight.
To feel is sometimes to feel too much.
So we turn it down.
Check out. Overwork. Worry. Ignore needs. Hold pee. Resist moving.
The little numbings, the slight turning-it-down-to-take-the-edge-off are justified.
I’m not giving myself shit for them, and neither should you.
But when I am away from myself, I start to feel shitty. I feel empty, lonely, grabby.
I bet you can relate.
The only medicine to absence is presence.
Directing your attention back to this moment, to this breath. To feelings and sensations happening right now.
The poet Byron said, “The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.”
I’d rather feel it all.
When my attention is here, and now, it’s better, even when it hurts.
I don’t want to miss it, my life.
I don’t want to regret not living and loving fully. So being present is what I practice.
Chopping vegetables. In beauty and in sadness. In joy and in pain.
All of it, now.

And the somatic practices that help restore safety, rebuild trust, and reopen connection

When a relationship reaches the breaking point, couples often arrive at therapy carrying something heavier than conflict: the collapse of the nervous system's sense of safety with each other. Communication tools and frameworks can only go so far when the body itself has shut down access to connection. Couples therapy crisis reconnection is not just a conversation problem or a skill deficit. It is a biology problem, a patterning problem, a wound carried in the body long before any argument began.

The ten barriers below are among the most common communication barriers that prevent couples from finding their way back to each other. Each one is paired with a somatic practice, body-based and grounded in how the nervous system actually works.

1. Is Physiological Flooding Shutting Down Your Ability to Talk?
When one or both partners become overwhelmed during conflict, the thinking brain effectively goes offline. Heart rate spikes, perception narrows, and anything said lands as threat rather than information. No amount of communication skill survives flooding, which is one of the most underrecognized therapy challenges for couples in crisis: the conversation keeps happening after the nervous system has already left the room.

Somatic practice: Agree in advance on a signal, a word or gesture, that means "I need twenty minutes." Make the pause non-negotiable and structured. During that window, each partner walks, breathes slowly, or does bilateral movement (anything that crosses the body's midline) to help the nervous system return to its window of tolerance before re-engaging.

2. Is Contempt Poisoning Even Your Neutral Exchanges?
Contempt, including eye rolls, dismissiveness, and a tone that communicates "you are beneath me," is one of the strongest predictors of relationship dissolution. It makes relationship repair in counseling extraordinarily difficult, because the message underneath contempt is not about any specific conflict. It is about worth.

Somatic practice: Before a difficult conversation, each partner takes two minutes to silently recall a moment of genuine appreciation for the other. Not forced gratitude, but a real memory. The body shifts its baseline state, and the face and voice follow into something softer before words begin.

3. When Your Partner Goes Silent, Are They Checked Out or Overwhelmed?
Stonewalling is one of the most misread communication barriers in couples work. Emotional disconnection often looks like a partner who has simply gone still: monosyllabic, expressionless, absent. Stonewalling is usually not indifference. It is a shutdown response, the nervous system's way of protecting itself from unbearable overwhelm. To the other partner, though, it reads as abandonment, which deepens the crisis rather than containing it.

Somatic practice: The stonewalling partner can learn to narrate what is happening physiologically rather than going silent: "I can feel myself shutting down. I want to stay with you. Can we slow down?" Even that small act of narration keeps a thread of connection alive and signals presence rather than disappearance.

4. Are You and Your Partner Caught in a Protest Cycle?
In emotionally disconnected couples, one partner often escalates, growing louder and more urgent, while the other withdraws further. Each response triggers the other in a loop. The pursuing partner reads withdrawal as evidence that nothing matters to their partner. The withdrawing partner reads pursuit as confirmation that they can never do anything right. Couples therapy crisis reconnection work often centers on interrupting this specific cycle before any deeper repair can happen.

Somatic practice: Interrupt the cycle with synchronized breathing. Sit facing each other and breathe together, inhaling for four counts and exhaling for four counts, for two minutes. Physical attunement can interrupt the autonomic mismatch driving the cycle, even briefly, and create enough co-regulation to make a next step possible.

5. Is Old Trauma Running the Conflict You're Having Right Now?
Many couples in crisis are not just fighting with each other. They are fighting through unresolved wounds from childhood, previous relationships, or earlier ruptures in the current partnership. A partner's raised voice may land not as irritation but as danger. Emotional disconnection in these moments is not about the argument at hand. It is about something much older, and one of the most significant therapy challenges for couples is learning to distinguish the two.

Somatic practice: Ground before engaging. Feet flat on the floor, weight felt in the seat, three slow exhales. Grounding does not resolve old wounds, but it can create enough space to remind the nervous system of the present moment and separate past threat from current reality.

6. Is Defensiveness Keeping Both of You Stuck on Trial?
When criticism lands and the defensive partner immediately deflects, minimizes, or attacks in return, no one can afford to be vulnerable. Relationship repair in counseling requires at least one partner to drop their shield long enough to be genuinely affected. Communication barriers compound when both partners feel perpetually on trial, because the posture of self-protection forecloses the very contact that repair requires.

Somatic practice: Practice receiving before responding. When something lands hard, place one hand on the chest and take a slow breath before speaking. The physical gesture activates the body's self-soothing capacity and creates a half-second interruption between stimulus and reaction, which is often exactly the space where a different choice becomes possible.

7. Has Goodwill Eroded to the Point Where Even Kind Gestures Feel Suspicious?
In healthy relationships, goodwill acts as a buffer, softening a partner's minor irritating behavior through an underlying felt sense of connection. In crisis couples, that buffer has eroded, and the loss of positive sentiment override means that neutral or even kind actions get read through a negative filter. Trust rebuilding under these conditions is slow, because the nervous system has learned to treat the partner's presence as a source of threat rather than safety.

Somatic practice: Build a daily micro-ritual of positive contact: a real hug (six seconds minimum activates oxytocin), a moment of genuine eye contact, a brief touch. Over time, the nervous system begins to re-associate the partner's presence with safety rather than threat, which is the biological precondition for trust rebuilding to take root.

8. Is Emotional Numbing Keeping One Partner Unreachable?
Some partners shut down not through stonewalling but through dissociation. They are present in body but have learned, often over years of unresolved conflict or emotional invalidation, not to feel. The emotional disconnection reads to the other partner as indifference, and trust rebuilding feels impossible when one partner seems to have no access to emotion at all.

Somatic practice: Begin with sensation rather than feeling. Ask: "What do you notice in your body right now?" Not "What do you feel?" but where, specifically: chest, throat, belly, jaw. Naming physical sensation builds a bridge back into emotional experience without demanding a performance the partner cannot yet access.

9. Are Your Repair Attempts Landing, or Are They Invisible?
Even healthy couples rupture. What distinguishes them is the ability to repair, and repair attempts require a vulnerability that couples in crisis often cannot access. A clumsy joke, a touch on the arm, a simple "I'm sorry things got so hard" can turn a conflict in a healthier relationship. In a crisis couple, those same gestures often go unrecognized, which is one of the subtler communication barriers in couples therapy: the attempt is made, but the other partner's nervous system, still on high alert, cannot receive it.

Somatic practice: Make repair attempts explicit and legible. Name them: "I want to try to come back toward you. Can I reach for your hand?" Verbal cuing removes the ambiguity that makes small gestures invisible and gives the other partner something clear to orient toward.

10. Are You Living Side by Side Without Actually Making Contact?
Some couples arrive in crisis not because they fight constantly but because they have stopped touching each other's inner worlds entirely. Emotional disconnection here is structural: each partner manages their own sphere, and the relationship has become a logistics arrangement. Communication barriers in this kind of crisis are less about conflict and more about the slow withdrawal of genuine curiosity and presence, which is its own form of relationship repair in counseling challenge because there is no obvious rupture to point to.

Somatic practice: Practice a weekly "State of the Union" check-in: ten minutes each, uninterrupted. One partner speaks, one witnesses. No advice, no rebuttal, no problem-solving. The witnessing partner keeps their body soft and attention full. Over time, felt presence rebuilds what scheduling and logistics cannot, because what most couples in crisis are actually starving for is the experience of being truly known.

A Note on Somatic Work and Couples Therapy Crisis Reconnection
The practices above are not techniques to deploy in the heat of conflict. They are capacities to build in steadier moments so they become available under stress. The body holds the record of relational injury, and it also holds the capacity for relational repair, but that capacity has to be cultivated before crisis, not conjured in the middle of one.

If you and your partner are navigating emotional disconnection and communication has broken down at the level of the nervous system, working with a somatic couples therapist trained in both relational and somatic approaches can help you move at the speed your bodies actually need.

When silence takes up residence between two people who used to know each other's bodies, it can be a major relational pain point. I'm not talking about the comfortable lack of sexual urgency of long familiarity. I mean the silence that fills the space where desire used to live and where touch used to be natural.

One of you reaches for physical connection, and the other tightens, or retreats, or simply goes somewhere else inside themselves. And both people feel despairing and hopeless, worrying about living inside a sexually dead marriage, or a sexless partnership. 

Talk therapy helps couples understand the absence of erotic connection. Somatic sex therapy helps them move through it.

What Somatic Sex Therapy Actually Is

The word somatic comes from the Greek soma, meaning living body. Somatic sex therapy is a body-centered approach to sexual and relational healing built on the premise that the body holds what the mind cannot always articulate. Trauma has an address in the musculature. Desire is a physiological event before it is ever a thought. Shame has a shape in the chest, a particular quality of breath, a way of making eye contact disappear.

Traditional talk therapy works from the top down, the idea is that if you  understand why sex isn't happening, you can change. Somatic approaches work from the bottom up, starting with sensation, breath, and physical presence and letting meaning emerge from what the body is already saying.

For couples, this distinction matters enormously. Most of the patterns that keep two people stuck are not primarily cognitive problems. The pursuer who crowds, the withdrawer who vanishes, the one who freezes when touched in a particular way: these are body responses. Nervous system patterns respond to nervous system-level interventions. Insight alone tends not to reach your sexual patterns and habits. 

Somatic sex therapy does not involve touch between therapist and client. A somatic sex therapist guides couples through exercises, breath practices, and body-awareness work that they do with each other, at home or in session. The work is always boundaried, always consent-based, and always paced to what each person can actually tolerate.

Why Couples End Up Here

The couples I work with in intensive settings rarely show up saying "I need somatic sex therapy." They show up saying things like:

• We haven't had sex in two years and I don't know how to talk about it.
• My partner wants more than I can give and I feel like I'm failing.
• Since the affair I can't let him touch me without wanting to leave my body.
• We love each other but something is gone and I don't know where it went.

What all of these share is the body's central involvement in the problem. Libido does not live in the thinking brain. Arousal, desire, the capacity to receive touch, the felt sense of safety with another person are physiological experiences first.

When a relationship fractures, the nervous system registers it. And when a nervous system has learned that intimacy means danger, or disappointment, or disappearance, it will protect accordingly, even when both partners consciously want things to be different.

Somatic sex therapy addresses that protection by earning its release rather than dismantling it.

What the Research Tells Us

The integration of body-based approaches into couples work is increasingly supported by clinical literature. A 2025 review in Somatic Psychotherapy Today found that somatic resonance, the process of attending to both partners' bodily states simultaneously, opens access to vulnerability and shared humanity that talk alone cannot reach. Research on emotionally focused couples therapy has shown that therapist attention to somatic cues significantly deepens the quality of emotional experiencing for both pursuers and withdrawers in the room.

What Couples Somatic Sex Therapy Looks Like in Practice

A somatic approach to couples intimacy tends to include several overlapping threads.

Breathwork and co-regulation. Partners practice synchronized breathing as a way of learning that two nervous systems can find rhythm together. Many couples have never intentionally done this. The effect is often immediate and surprising.

Body tracking and sensation language. Each partner learns to notice and name their physical experience in real time, moving from generalities like "I feel disconnected" toward specifics like "I notice my chest tightens and my eyes want to look away when you reach for me." Precision changes the conversation from blame to information.

Sensate focus exercises. Developed originally by Masters and Johnson, sensate focus invites couples to explore touch free of pressure or performance expectations. A somatic practitioner adapts this to include attunement to nervous system response, attending to where touch feels welcome, where it creates contraction, where the body holds its breath.

Somatic mirroring. Partners reflect each other's posture, gesture, and movement as a way of building the felt experience of being seen. Embodied attunement is a prerequisite for erotic connection, and mirroring practices rebuild that foundation.
Working with the window of tolerance. Every person has a range of activation within which they can stay present and engaged. Flood above that range and reactivity or shutdown follows; drop below it and numbness and absence take over.

Somatic work helps couples learn each other's windows and develop the capacity to stay inside them together, especially in moments of closeness.

Talking and Consent. Something particularly important in my work is helping couples learn to talk about sex, and embody consent skills. We practice these things in session, so when you are on your own, you are building on supported practice. 

The Common Presenting Issues

Couples seek somatic sex therapy for a range of specific concerns. Desire discrepancy is perhaps the most common: one partner wants more intimacy than the other, and the gap has become a source of shame, resentment, or grief on both sides. A somatic approach explores what desire actually feels like in each person's body, where it shows up, what inhibits it, and what conditions allow it to surface.

Sexual trauma is another significant thread. Trauma responses do not read an invitation to intimacy and determine it is now safe to stand down. The body that learned to brace, freeze, or flee will continue doing so until something changes at the somatic level. Skilled somatic sex therapists know how to titrate the pace so that healing happens without re-traumatization, and a trauma-informed framework is essential throughout.

Couples navigating infertility, postpartum changes, illness, or major life transition often find that their physical relationship carries the weight of everything they cannot control. The body becomes a place where grief, fear, and resentment accumulate. Somatic work creates a way to process that accumulation together rather than carrying it in silence.

Long-term couples who have drifted into parallel lives, devoted partners who have become strangers at night, often respond particularly well to body-based approaches. The issue in these relationships is usually not conflict or mistrust but a kind of embodied forgetting, and somatic practice offers a way back into each other.

What Somatic Sex Therapy Is Not

Somatic sex therapy is not a substitute for medical evaluation when physical symptoms are present. Vaginismus, painful intercourse, and erectile dysfunction all warrant evaluation by a physician or pelvic floor specialist alongside any therapeutic work.

It is also not a quick fix. The body learns slowly and teaches slowly. Couples who come to a three-day intensive often leave with more access to each other than they had in years, and the work continues after they leave the room.
Both partners are active in this process. The therapist creates the conditions and guides the work; the couple does it. Somatic sex therapy is not something that happens to you.

Finding the Right Somatic Practitioner

A somatic sex therapist should hold some type of credential as a mental health professional, whether psychologist, licensed counselor, licensed marriage and family therapist, or equivalent, alongside specific training in somatic approaches and sex therapy. Look for training through recognized bodies: AASECT certification indicates specific sex therapy training; Somatic Experiencing training through the SE Trauma Institute indicates grounding in the body-based trauma model. Relational Life Therapy training, which I hold alongside my somatic psychology doctorate, adds a relational framework I find essential in couples work. I am also a Certified Sexological Bodyworker, and have training in Strozzi Somatics and generative somatics. I am also trained in Somatic Experiencing, and have over 15 years working on topics of sexuality with individuals and couples. 
​
Ask a prospective therapist directly about their training, their approach to boundaries and consent in body-based work, and their experience with whatever is most central to your situation, whether that is trauma, desire discrepancy, long-term disconnection, or something else entirely.

A Note on Couples Intensives

For couples in acute crisis, or for those who have limited access to ongoing weekly therapy due to geography or scheduling, a couples intensive offers a concentrated container for this work. Rather than fifty minutes a week, an intensive creates an extended arc of three days in which couples can move through material that would take months to surface in weekly sessions.

The body-based component of intensive work is particularly powerful in this format. There is time to go slowly, to track sensation carefully, to let something complete itself rather than cutting it off at the hour mark. Many couples leave an intensive with a felt sense of each other they had stopped believing was available.

If you are a couple carrying a silence you cannot name, somatic sex therapy may be a place to begin. The body knows things the conversation has not yet reached. And sometimes, what a relationship needs most is permission to start there.

What does it mean if you feel contempt in your relationship?
(Read until the end to get your free resource.)

I recently heard the phrase "Normal Marital Hatred" in my RLT training.
When I heard this I thought, "Yep, I know that feeling."

I've written elsewhere about my two marriages, but in the story I'm going to tell you, I am 29. I've been married for four years. We have a small home we've built together. It is a shoes-off house.

There are two steps leading up to the front door of the house. My then-husband has a habit of leaving his shoes in the middle of the steps. So that I either have to move them, or step over them.

I arrive home first from work. And on this particular day, I've had it. My students were a pain in the butt, my lessons didn't work, and my boss was micro-managing. I just wanted to come home, have a nice dinner, and chill.
I'm entering the house, and as usual, his boots are in the way, but in my urgency to enter, I don't see them. I trip, and fall through the threshold.

A swoosh of rage rushes through me. Why can't he put his fucking shoes on the fucking shoe rack that is RIGHT NEXT TO THE DOOR???

Instead of responding as an adult, I react from my adaptive child. I pick up his boots and throw them into the snow-covered yard, in two different directions.

After, I'm standing in my kitchen fuming. What an inconsiderate asshole. He doesn't think of anyone else but himself. Selfish. Entitled.

What I didn't know at the time is that I was stewing in my Core Negative Image of my partner.

I remember thinking, 'Ah, this must be marriage then. You just hate your partner, and keep going.'

At the time, it seemed clear that this was just the trajectory of relationships. And truly, the married people I knew all seemed to hate their partners, even if just a little bit.

My then-husband came home puzzled and annoyed that I'd thrown his boots in the yard. He didn't stop leaving them on the steps. I didn't have the tools to explain what I needed (consideration) and what I was asking for (please put them on the shoe rack.)

And so the contempt trajectory continued, until it reached its obvious conclusion: divorce.

Fast forward 25 years.

My current partner and I were going through a challenging season.
When I started to feel contempt, my lips would turn down. I didn't want to look at him. I felt gross inside.

Something in me went "Uh oh. Oh no."

I recognized the feelings. I got quiet, and sought what was beneath that feeling.
What I found surprised me: deep yearning for mutual cherishing.

I yearned to cherish, and be cherished.

There was an ache, like something had gone missing from the place it had always been.

The goodwill and warm positive regard I had felt for years was just... gone. I felt grief, and deep concern.

This time, instead of accepting contempt as a normal phase of a relationship, I challenged myself: maybe this was a warning sign. Not something to wait out.

A huge problem with contempt and resentment is that you are the one holding them.

The poison is in you, slowly eroding the love and care you used to have. And to be honest, they are fairly come by. You don't start hating your person in a vacuum.
There is a backlog of unrepaired wounds. The triggers have gotten grooved.
They are too predictable, and you know too well the path the fight will take. But you are the one living with the unmetabolized pain. It's hurting you and your good life.

(I'm imagining standing on a pulpit preaching about the value of love and relationship) But there is a way back from contempt!

It starts with deciding you love yourself too much to live with it.

Surprised?

So now what?

Decisions, decisions.

• Is the relationship salvageable?
• Will you keep on keeping on, misery intact?
• Will you leave? And take your own bullshit with you, even as you escape theirs?​

When I felt contempt in my current marriage, I knew exactly where that road led.
So I got my ass into therapy with a Relational Life Therapist who could help me clean up what was on my side of the street. (I'm the one who hurls boots, remember?)

I have recovered my warm positive regard for my partner.

I do not feel contempt anymore.

I work regularly to replace my core negative image of my partner with a better version.

My marriage now feels like the marriage I want to be in.

Feeling contempt was the warning sign that made me take action instead of sitting passively and letting things unfold.

Here's the counterintuitive good news: if you hate them, it means you still care. There is still room to do the work.

My Relational Life Therapy teacher, Terry Real, says it's possible to live a contempt-free life. I believe him, because I'm living it.

If any of this landed for you, I made something specifically for you.
It's called The Contempt Audit: A self-assessment for when you're done pretending you don't hate your partner a little. Free PDF guide and audio recording, if you're sitting with feelings you haven't quite named.
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Grab your free guide

I love Valentine’s Day, and my partner thinks it’s completely pointless.
That difference easily turns into hurt feelings, unspoken expectations, and conflict.
Holidays like Valentine’s Day often expose an uncomfortable dynamic: one partner feels they are carrying more of the emotional labor of the relationship.

My story, when my partner didn’t show up on Feb 14 bedazzled with hearts and candy and romantic gestures, was that I care more about our relationship than they do.

As a couples therapist, I see this dynamic show up frequently.
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The core problem is the pursuer-distancer imbalance: one partner experiences relational inequity, or the perception of it.

Let's talk about the Relational Life Therapy (RLT) model of “The More, The More.”

The more you pursue, the more they avoid.

• Their avoidance increases your anxiety, which leads you to pursue more.​

Feel Familiar?

Pursuing and avoiding do not create relational safety, nor joy. Over time, the connection suffers.

Relational Joy is the point of relationships: the soothing ease, contentment, and delight you experience when you and your person have stepped out of the dance of pursuit and avoidance.

Many of my clients can understand this cognitively, but applying the corrective is more difficult.

What do you even do?

Here are two things to chew on, for the sake of your relational joy.
1. Attention
Attention is the currency of a relationship.

• Do you respond to my bids for affection?
• Do you hear my pain, or are you listening through your defensiveness?
• Can I soften how I share feedback to not push you away, but bring you closer instead?

Attention Action: Send or say one appreciative message today.​
2. Prioritization
I worked with a couple once, and when I asked one of the men, “What are your priorities?” he said, “My husband is my priority.”
His husband had been complaining about not feeling attended to, so I didn’t buy it.
“Prove it,” I asked, “Show me your calendar.”
His calendar was full of work meetings, friend activities, and family events.

Not one mention of his partner!

Here's the thing.

The primacy of the bond must be intentionally nourished, and it starts with your calendar.

Intentional time together, and attentional time together, where you are engaging with one another.

A date night that involves a movie may be nice and relaxing, but is it connective? Do you feel closer?

Prioritization Action: Schedule one protected hour together this week and focus on connection.

Not feeling connected
?Feeling like you care more than your partner?I am opening a limited number of Relationship Reset calls this month.

In this session, we identify your pursue-avoid pattern, map what keeps it stuck, and create the first concrete shifts you can start using immediately.

If your relationship matters to you, do not wait for the pattern to fix itself (it won't.)
​Book your call and begin shifting the pattern now.

At 15 years into my second marriage, I suddenly realized we were on the brink of divorce.
We still loved each other deeply, so this surprised me.
My first marriage was at the tender age of 25. Signed up for the traditional gender roles, monogamy package, factory-installed.
That marriage ended in a blaze of glory: hot, painful, violent. So much shame, blame, yelling, and aggression.
I thought that was how all marriages end.
So imagine my surprise that there had been none of those nasty ingredients in my current marriage.
Instead, it had been a quiet drift, a walled-off silence, a slow misattunement that lasted years.
Let me be clear: my current partner and I love and respect each other. A lot.
But our adaptive children were getting in the way of us actually connecting.
Once I started seeing it, I couldn't unsee it.
If you've ever been in a relationship for long enough, you probably know the moment your kid self starts to drive.
Your adaptive child is both wise AND destructive.
My teacher, Terry Real, says, "Adaptive then, maladaptive now."
Our adaptive children used strategies then that worked to help us survive, but now harm our love.I know you know what I'm talking about!
That moment you stop being a wise, present, and skillful adult, and start being, well, an asshole who is really just hurting and needing love, but acting out at the same time.
In my current marriage, we were both lonely, quiet, and hurting.
But because there is so much love, it was hard to notice that we were at the doorway threshold of ending.
I’m writing this today for those of you living lives of quiet desperation, where the rift is not loud and ugly, but you feel the deadening, the lifeforce draining out of your love.
In my first marriage, I have many clear moments of memory: standing in the kitchen and realizing that the misattunement I just experienced from my partner was a “little death.”
Even in that loud, explosive relationship, the ending did not come from one final blow. It came from a thousand tiny deaths.
And I can see now that the same thing was happening in my second marriage, just more quietly. Misattunements. Small withdrawals.
Losing strategies block connection.
A thousand tiny deaths.
In retrospect, I suppose that most relationships get to the verge at least once.
Being a couple's therapist didn't stop mine from going there.
“The true work begins now,” our current couples therapist tells us, "Now is when you can become adults in love."
Can we work to rein in our adaptive children, to prevent them and their losing strategies from running the show?
Can we learn to let our wise adults guide us, hold those wounded and acting-out little kids, and find our way into a boundaried, adult love?
I'm deep in the work of learning to be a Relational Rife Therapist, the work of Terry Real.
Terry teaches that there are five losing strategies our adaptive children use.These can be mapped onto the fight, flight, and fix responses.
They all have a child’s logic to make them make sense.
Five Losing Strategies:

1. Being Right​
   a) Arguing about whose view is more accurate
   b) Fuels self-righteous indignation
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2. Controlling Your Partner​
   a) Can be direct or indirect manipulation
   b) No one likes being controlled. It leads to retaliation and payback
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3. Unbridled Self-expression​
   a) Saying whatever is on your mind with no kindness or respect
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4. Retaliation​
   a) Offending from the victim position
   b) "I’ll make you feel what I feel!"​
   c) Can be overt or covert (passive-aggressive)
   ​
5. Withdrawal (AKA Stonewalling)​
   a) This is different from taking a responsible time-out or responsible distance taking
   b) Comes from resignation or retaliation.

When you read these, which is yours? We all have at least one.
My top pick is being right.
There is no shame in having a losing strategy, and it's good to know what you do when you get activated.
My RLT therapist says, “When you find yourself about to use one of your losing strategies, the best thing to do is the absolute opposite.”
So for me, the opposite of being right, justified as it may be to my adaptive child, is to allow myself to be wrong.
To not have certainty, to not believe the story I've made up in my head about my partner.
Sometimes you are not with the right person, and the relationship clearly needs to end so you are both free to become more fully who you are.
Sometimes, though, you are with the right person, but your adaptive children remain hypervigiliant and unconvinced. You question the relationship endlessly.
You whip out the losing strategies.
I'm so grateful that my partner and I are in RLT therapy and are learning to wrangle our adaptive children.
The flow that is present between us, Eros and love and excitement and curiosity, which had nearly dried up, is gushing again. It feels wonderful to fall back in love with a long-term partner and realize you never really stopped.
This isn't a sales pitch.
It's just me, in the trenches with you, reaching out from my very real relationship.
If you still love them, fight for it. There's a way back.

If you've been searching for a couples therapist and kept seeing the letters RLT without knowing what they mean, you're not alone. RLT stands for Relational Life Therapy, a model developed by family therapist Terry Real. It's one of the most direct, effective approaches to couples work I've encountered in over a decade of this practice,which is why I trained in it and why it's central to how I work.

Here's what you actually need to know.

What Relational Life Therapy is

RLT is a couples therapy model built on a simple, uncomfortable premise: most of us learned how to be in relationship from people who didn't know how to be in relationship. We absorbed patterns: withdrawal, grandiosity, control, people-pleasing, that made sense in our families of origin and wreak havoc in our adult partnerships.

Terry Real calls these adaptive child strategies. They kept you safe at eight. They're destroying your marriage at forty-two.

Relational Life Therapy doesn't spend months excavating your childhood. It names the pattern, traces it back far enough to make sense of it, and then asks you to do something different now, in the room, with your partner watching. It's confrontational in the best sense. Terry Real famously says he's an advocate for the relationship, not a neutral referee. If you're behaving badly, he'll tell you. So will I.

How Relational Life Therapy is different from other approaches

People often ask about Relational Life Therapy vs. Gottman, which is the other major evidence-based couples model. Both are rigorous and effective. The difference is largely in approach.

Gottman Relationship Therapy is systematic assessments, skill-building approach: a clear framework for understanding relationship dynamics. It's excellent for couples who want a structured process and are both relatively willing participants.

Relational Life Therapy is more direct and more willing to get uncomfortable fast. It doesn't wait for both partners to be equally ready. It works with whoever is in the room and doesn't pretend that all relational problems are symmetrical. Sometimes one person is causing more damage. RLT names that.

For couples on the brink. People who are past the point of wanting communication worksheets, RLT tends to move faster and cut deeper.

What the somatic piece adds

My practice combines RLT with somatic psychology, which means I'm paying attention to what's happening in the body, not just what's being said. When someone shuts down in a conversation, that shutdown lives in the nervous system before it ever reaches language. When someone escalates, the body is already gone — flooded, reactive, unreachable by any communication technique.

Somatic RLT works with that. We slow down. We notice what's happening physically. We find the part of you that can stay present even when it's hard, and we practice staying there. Over time that capacity builds. Conversations that used to blow up in three minutes start going differently.

Who Relational Life Therapy is for

RLT works best for couples who are done pretending things are fine and ready to look at what's actually happening. It's not a gentle process. It asks real things of both people.

It's particularly effective for couples where one or both partners grew up in households with significant dysfunction (addiction, emotional unavailability, abuse, chaos)and have been unconsciously replaying those dynamics ever since.

It's also effective for couples where therapy hasn't worked before. If you've sat with a therapist for two years and feel like you've talked about everything without anything actually shifting, the directness of RLT often breaks that logjam.

What working with me looks like

I'm a Relational Life Therapy practitioner and somatic coach based in San Francisco, working with couples online and in person. Most of my couples come to me in real crisis, not bickering about dishes, but sitting with a decision about whether to stay or go.

My job is to help you see clearly enough to make that decision well, and to give you the tools to actually change something if you choose to stay.
If you want to understand whether RLT couples therapy is right for you, the first step is a free 30-minute call.

Book your clarity call here.

This is one of the most honest questions a person can ask. And one of the hardest, because the answer requires you to look at two things simultaneously: the marriage as it actually is, and the marriage as it could actually become.

I'm not talking about the marriage in your fantasies or marriage at its worst. The realistic range of what's possible.

Most people asking this question are not asking for permission to leave. They're asking because they genuinely don't know. And that not-knowing is its own kind of suffering.

The Question Under the Question

"Is my marriage worth saving?" almost always contains a fear: that the answer is no, and that knowing that will require you to do something painful. Or that the answer is yes, and that knowing that will require you to do something equally painful, just different.

Both paths ask something of you. That's the actual situation.

What I've found in working with couples is that the people asking this question are rarely the ones who are truly done. The ones who are truly done have usually already stopped asking.

Signs There Is Still Something to Work With

• You still feel some version of care for your partner, even under the frustration and distance
• At least one of you can still access genuine goodwill, meaning you actually want good things for each other
• The disconnection feels chronic but not contemptuous
• You can remember, even distantly, what you loved about this person
• The conflict is loud but both people are still engaged
• Neither person has completely emotionally left

Signs That Are More Concerning

• Contempt, the sense that your partner is beneath you, or vice versa. This is one of the strongest predictors that a relationship is in serious trouble.
• One or both of you has stopped bringing things up because it doesn't seem worth it
• You feel more like roommates than partners, and neither of you seems to mind much
• There is abuse, whether physical, emotional, or coercive
• One partner has already fully detached and has no interest in examining their part

Why This Isn't a Question You Should Answer Alone

The problem with asking "is my marriage worth saving" by yourself is that you're trying to assess a system from inside the system. You're already activated, already attached to a particular outcome, already filtered through your own nervous system's version of events.

A skilled third party can sometimes see things that are invisible to both of you. What looks like incompatibility is often a pattern. What looks like a character flaw is often a trauma response. And sometimes what looks like hope is actually a fantasy that's been keeping both of you stuck.
You deserve an honest read, not a reassuring one.

What Clarity Actually Looks Like

In my experience, the couples who get real clarity, regardless of whether that clarity leads to repair or to an honest ending, are the ones who give themselves a genuine container to find out.

That usually means more than weekly therapy in a crisis. It means something intensive enough to actually move through the layers, to get to the real conversation, and to find out what's actually there.

If you're in that place of not-knowing, I work with couples in multi-day intensives designed to give you exactly that. Learn more about couples intensives here. 

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There is a particular kind of shock that comes when a partner says out loud the thing you may have both been feeling but never named.

Done. Over. I can't do this anymore.

If you're reading this in the aftermath of that moment, you're probably oscillating between devastation and a furious kind of problem-solving mode. You want to know if this is real. You want to know if there's anything left to save. You want to know what to do in the next five minutes.

Here is what I know from working with couples who've been exactly where you are right now.

"Done" Rarely Means What It Sounds Like

When someone says they're done, they are almost always communicating the depth of their pain, not necessarily a final decision. It is a signal that something has hit a wall. That the current way of doing things has become unbearable.

That doesn't mean you should minimize what was said. It deserves to be taken seriously. But it also doesn't mean the marriage is over in this moment. It means your partner has run out of a particular resource, usually hope that anything will actually change.

The statement "I'm done" is often the first honest thing that's been said in a long time.

The Worst Things You Can Do Right Now

When panic hits, most people do one of a few things, and most of them make it worse.

• Flooding your partner with promises of change. Grand declarations in the immediate aftermath of a crisis statement rarely land as reassuring. They land as desperation, and they've usually been made before.
• Shutting down completely and going silent. This confirms the fear that nothing will shift.
• Treating it as a negotiation and trying to argue your partner out of their feelings.
• Catastrophizing and making the conversation about your own fear rather than about what they actually said.

What to Do Instead

The most useful thing you can do in the immediate window after a partner says they're done is get genuinely curious rather than defensive.

Not: "What do you mean you're done? After everything I've done?"

But: "I hear you. Tell me more about what's brought you to this point."

This is much harder than it sounds. When we feel threatened, our nervous system goes into protection mode and curiosity becomes almost neurologically impossible. Which is exactly why this is the kind of conversation that often needs support to happen at all.

When to Get Help, and What Kind

If your partner has said they're done, weekly couples therapy may not move fast enough to address what's actually happening. By the time someone reaches that statement, the relationship is usually in a level of distress that requires more intensive support.

A couple's intensive is a multi-day immersive experience that creates enough time and space to actually work through the layers of what's accumulated. Instead of 50 minutes a week with days of limbo in between, you get concentrated support that can shift things structurally.

It won't fix everything. But it can tell you clearly what you're actually working with, and whether there's something worth fighting for.

One Thing Worth Knowing

The couples who make it through moments like this are not the ones who never got to the edge. They're the ones who were willing to look honestly at what brought them there.

If your partner saying "I'm done" is the thing that finally opens a real conversation, that is not nothing. That might be the beginning of something.

You can learn more about working with me in a couple's intensive format.


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There's a particular kind of 3am where you find yourself typing something into a search bar that you can't yet say out loud to another person.

Is my marriage over?

If you've landed here, you're probably not in a calm, reflective space. You're in the thick of it. The silence after another fight that went nowhere. The slow realization that you can't remember the last time you felt close. The quiet dread of a future you can't quite picture. Maybe something happened. Maybe nothing happened and that's somehow worse.

The fact that you're asking this question does not mean your marriage is over. It means something in your relationship has reached a threshold. That is worth paying attention to.

What "Is My Marriage Over?" Usually Really Means
In almost two decades of working with couples in crisis, I've sat with people who were convinced they were done and went on to build relationships they never thought possible. I've also sat with couples who stayed together long past the point where leaving would have been the kinder choice.

The question almost always contains several questions underneath it:

Am I allowed to want more than this? Sometimes we ask "is it over" when what we mean is: I've been settling, and I'm exhausted by it.

Is this fixable, or are we just in another cycle? Many couples in distress aren't fundamentally incompatible. They're stuck in relational patterns that repeat without resolution. That's a very different problem than being wrong for each other.

Do I still matter to my partner? Contempt, dismissal, emotional shutdown -- these erode the sense that we exist as a real person to our partner. When that happens, the marriage can feel over even when it isn't.

Am I the only one who feels this way? The loneliness of feeling unseen in a partnership is one of the most acute forms of isolation there is. You want to know: is this just me?

None of these questions mean your marriage is over. They mean you're in pain and you need more than you're currently getting.

Signs a Marriage Is in Crisis vs. Signs It's Truly Over
Not all relationship distress is the same. Here's what I notice distinguishes couples who can repair from those who can't:

Crisis, but repairable:

• Frequent conflict without resolution, but both people still care about the outcome
• Emotional withdrawal that started as protection, not contempt
• A specific rupture (affair, betrayal, major life transition) that has fractured trust but not destroyed care
• One or both partners feeling unseen, but willing to be seen differently
• Disconnection that feels chronic but hasn't calcified into disdain

Much harder to work with:

• Contempt, where one or both partners regularly experiences the other as beneath them
• Complete loss of positive regard, where you can no longer access genuine goodwill for your partner
• Abuse, whether physical, emotional, or coercive control
• One partner categorically unwilling to examine their part

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Even some of the harder situations have surprised me. But I won't tell you that everything is fixable. What I will tell you is that you deserve an honest assessment, not false hope.

Why Couples Therapy Alone Often Isn't Enough
Standard couples therapy, 50 minutes once a week, was designed for maintenance, not crisis intervention. If your relationship is in genuine distress, you may find that weekly sessions produce incremental movement when what you actually need is a structural shift.

This is why couples intensives exist. A multi-day immersive works differently than weekly sessions because it allows couples to move through a full cycle: rupture, exploration, repair, integration. You don't leave one session activated and then spend a week in limbo waiting to process it.

For couples asking "is my marriage over," the intensive format often provides something invaluable: clarity. Sometimes that clarity leads to recommitment with new tools. Sometimes it leads to a more conscious, less painful uncoupling. Both are real outcomes. Both are better than staying suspended in not-knowing.

What Somatic Couples Work Addresses That Talk Therapy Misses
Most relational pain isn't primarily cognitive. It lives in the body. The physiological state of threat, the way the nervous system reads a partner's tone of voice, the muscle memory of old fights -- none of this is touched by conversation alone.

Somatic couples work addresses the body's role in relational patterns. When one partner shuts down (often read as "not caring") or escalates (often read as "too much"), the other partner's nervous system responds in kind. The fight isn't really about what it's about. It's two nervous systems in a loop.

Learning to recognize and interrupt those loops in the body, before the words, is often what finally moves the needle for couples who have done years of talk therapy and feel stuck.

The Question Behind the Question

If you're sitting with "is my marriage over," what I'd actually want to ask you is this:

What would it mean to you if it wasn't?

Sometimes the deepest grief isn't about the marriage ending. It's about the marriage continuing to be what it's been. Those are different problems requiring different kinds of help.

You deserve support that can hold the full complexity of where you are. Not a quick reassurance that everything will be fine, and not a rush toward a conclusion.
If you're ready to find out what's actually possible, I work with couples in intensive formats, in-person and virtually. You can learn more about what that looks like here.

​Does Couples Intensive Therapy Work?
What the Research Shows
If you're considering a couples intensive -- three or more consecutive days of focused relationship work -- you may be wondering whether the format actually delivers. Weekly therapy is the norm. Intensives feel unconventional. And the investment, in time, money, and emotional exposure, is significant.

The research is consistent: for many couples, intensive formats produce faster and more durable results than weekly sessions alone. Here's what the evidence shows, what it doesn't show, and what that means for couples considering this format.

What is a couples therapy intensive?
A couples therapy intensive is an extended, immersive format of relationship work, typically two to five consecutive days of sessions with the same therapist or coach. Unlike weekly therapy, which breaks the work into 50-minute increments spread across months, an intensive removes that cycle entirely.
You stay in the work long enough for something real to happen.

Most intensives include a pre-intensive consultation, the intensive sessions themselves, and some form of follow-up support after the work ends. The total hours of contact in a three-day intensive typically equals four to six months of weekly therapy, compressed into a single sustained experience.

What does the research say about couples intensives?
The research base for intensive couples therapy is growing, and the results are consistently promising.

Faster pattern disruption. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy found that couples who participated in weekend intensives showed significant improvements in relationship satisfaction and communication after just two days of work, improvements that were comparable to those achieved after months of weekly sessions. The immersive format appeared to accelerate the disruption of entrenched negative patterns.

Strong retention of gains. One of the concerns about intensive formats is whether the gains hold. Research suggests they do. A study by Drs. William Shadish and Scott Baldwin, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found that the benefits of concentrated couples therapy were maintained at follow-up assessments, with no significant difference in long-term outcomes compared to weekly formats.

Higher engagement and emotional depth. Research on the therapeutic process in intensive formats suggests that couples reach deeper levels of emotional engagement more quickly than in weekly sessions. Without the week-long gap between sessions, during which daily life reassembles around old patterns, couples remain emotionally present and available for the work. This sustained presence appears to be a significant factor in the effectiveness of the intensive format.

Effectiveness for couples in crisis. Intensive formats show particular promise for couples in acute distress, those considering separation, recovering from infidelity, or dealing with long-standing unresolved conflict. A 2019 study in Family Process found that couples presenting with high levels of distress responded well to concentrated intervention, with meaningful improvements in relationship satisfaction and reduced likelihood of separation at six-month follow-up.

Why does the intensive format work?
The research findings point to several mechanisms that explain why intensives are effective.

The nervous system needs time. Real relational change is not just cognitive, it is physiological. The nervous system needs repeated, sustained experience to shift its baseline responses. In weekly therapy, the nervous system has seven days to rebuild its walls between sessions. In an intensive, the work accumulates. Patterns are interrupted, new responses are practiced, and the body has time to integrate what the mind is learning.

Insight needs integration. In weekly therapy, couples often have a breakthrough in session and then lose it by Tuesday. The gap between sessions is both a buffer and a barrier. Intensives give couples time not just to have the insight but to practice it, return to it, and feel it settle into something more permanent.

The container holds more. Difficult relational material, old wounds, unspoken truths, entrenched grievances, often requires a sustained container to emerge safely. A 50-minute session rarely provides enough time to open something difficult and close it well. An intensive creates the space for couples to go deeper than they typically can in a weekly format, with enough time remaining to integrate what surfaces.

Who benefits most from couples intensives?
The research and clinical experience both suggest that intensives are particularly well-suited for:

Couples in acute crisis. When a relationship has reached a breaking point, infidelity, a serious rupture, one partner considering leaving, the slow pace of weekly therapy can feel inadequate to the urgency of the situation. An intensive creates the conditions for the kind of rapid, deep work that crisis requires.

Couples with busy lives. For couples who struggle to protect weekly therapy time from the demands of work, children, and travel, an intensive offers a contained period of focused attention that doesn't require ongoing calendar management.

Couples who have tried weekly therapy without sufficient progress. Not because weekly therapy failed, but because the format may not have provided enough sustained time for the specific patterns this couple carries. Many couples find that the intensive format moves them further in three days than months of weekly sessions managed.

Couples geographically distant from specialized practitioners. An intensive makes it possible to work with a specific practitioner who may not be available locally, traveling to them for three focused days rather than committing to ongoing long-distance logistics.

What the research doesn't tell us
It's worth being honest about the limits of the evidence. The research base for couples intensives, while promising, is smaller than the evidence base for weekly formats like the Gottman Method or Emotionally Focused Therapy. Most studies have relatively small sample sizes, and the field would benefit from larger randomized controlled trials.

What the research does consistently support is that the intensive format is not inherently inferior to weekly therapy, and for many couples, particularly those in significant distress, it may be superior. The format appears to work through legitimate therapeutic mechanisms, not novelty or placebo effect.

What to look for in a couples intensive
Not all intensives are equal. The format itself is not magic. What matters is the quality of the practitioner, the rigor of the methodology, and the structure of the container.

When evaluating a couples intensive, consider:

The practitioner's training and methodology. What therapeutic model does the intensive use? Is the practitioner trained in an evidence-based approach to couples work? Do they have specific training in intensive formats, or are they simply extending their weekly practice into a longer format?

Pre and post-intensive support. A well-designed intensive includes a consultation before the work begins and meaningful follow-up after. The week after an intensive is often when couples most need support, as real life rushes back in and the work gets tested. Look for practitioners who build that support into the container.

Clear criteria for fit. Reputable intensive practitioners are honest about who the format is and isn't right for. Active domestic violence, an undisclosed ongoing affair, and untreated addiction that impairs presence are all contraindications for intensive couples work. A practitioner who accepts everyone without screening is not practicing responsibly.

A clear methodology for integration. The intensive itself is not the end of the work. Look for practitioners who help couples leave with concrete tools, a clear understanding of their patterns, and a plan for what comes next.

A note on the investment
Couples intensives are a significant financial investment, typically comparable to four to six months of weekly therapy. For many couples, that comparison reframes the decision: you are not paying more for less, you are paying a similar amount for a concentrated experience that may move you further, faster.

The average cost of divorce in the United States is over $15,000, with contested divorces running significantly higher. I raise this not to be glib, but because the couples I work with often tell me, after the fact, that the calculus looked different once they understood what was actually at stake.

Working with me
I offer three-day couples intensives integrating Relational Life Therapy (RLT) and somatic practice, for couples who want to move beyond the weekly therapy cycle and do the deep work in a sustained, contained format.

My intensives are designed for couples who are serious about change, willing to be honest, and ready to do more than talk about the problem.
If you're wondering whether this format might be right for your relationship, the best place to start is a conversation.

Book a Free Connection Call

What is Relational Life Therapy (RLT)?
Relational Life Therapy (RLT) is a direct, action-oriented approach to couples therapy and relationship coaching developed by author and therapist Terry Real. Unlike traditional therapy models that maintain strict neutrality, RLT takes an active stance: it names what is happening in a relationship, interrupts destructive patterns in real time, and holds both partners accountable to the relationship they say they want.

At its core, RLT is built on a simple but radical premise: most of us were not taught how to be in relationships. We learned from watching the people around us -- people who were also never taught. The patterns we absorbed,  the ways we pursue or withdraw, dominate or disappear, perform or collapse, are not character flaws. They are adaptations. And adaptations can be changed.

Who developed Relational Life Therapy?
RLT was developed by Terry Real, a family therapist and the author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You, and Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. Terry developed RLT over decades of clinical practice, drawing on his own experience of growing up in a family shaped by patriarchy, addiction, and relational disconnection.

Real's central insight is that most relationship problems are not communication problems. They are problems of adaptive child:  the survival strategies we developed in childhood that worked then and wreak havoc now. RLT is designed to surface those strategies, name them clearly, and give people the skills to respond differently.

How is RLT different from other couples therapy approaches?
Most couples therapy models, including the Gottman Method and Emotionally Focused Therapy, are relationally neutral. The therapist observes, reflects, and facilitates. They do not take sides. They do not tell you what to do.

RLT is different in three important ways:

RLT is direct.
An RLT practitioner will name what they see happening in the room. If one partner is being grandiose, contemptuous, or controlling, the therapist will say so, directly. If the other partner is collapsing, appeasing, or disappearing, that will be named too. The work requires honesty that many therapeutic models avoid.

RLT takes a stand for the relationship. RLT does not sit on the fence about whether a relationship is worth saving. When both partners are genuinely committed, the RLT practitioner is a full advocate for the relationship, not for either individual at the expense of the other, but for the connection itself.

RLT works with your adaptive child. RLT therapists pay particular attention to the younger, conditioned self that each partner brings into the room. Your adaptive child is the part that learned to survive by going big or going small, by controlling or by disappearing. Naming and working with that part is central to how RLT creates lasting change.

What does an RLT session look like?
An RLT session is active and often intense. The practitioner is not a passive observer. They may interrupt a destructive pattern mid-sentence. They may ask a partner to try a different response in real time. They may point out the gap between what someone is saying and what their body is doing.

Sessions typically involve:

• Assessment: understanding the relational dynamic, the history of the pattern, and where it comes from in each person
• Pattern interruption: naming and stopping destructive cycles as they happen in the room
• Skill building: giving both partners concrete tools for communication, repair, and reconnection
• Accountability: holding each person responsible for their impact, regardless of intent or history

RLT is not about processing feelings indefinitely. It is about changing behavior. Insight matters, but what matters more is what you do differently before the family party when the same trigger appears.

What issues does RLT address?
RLT is particularly effective for couples dealing with:

• Chronic conflict and recurring arguments that never fully resolve
• Emotional withdrawal, stonewalling, or shutdown
• Contempt, criticism, and the slow erosion of respect
• Infidelity and betrayal recovery
• Power imbalances in the relationship
• Loss of intimacy, connection, or erotic aliveness
• Communication breakdown that talk therapy hasn't shifted
• One or both partners are considering separation or divorce

RLT also works well for individuals who want to understand their relational patterns: how they show up in conflict, how they learned to relate to intimacy and power, and what it would take to do it differently.

What is the "adaptive child" in RLT?
The adaptive child is Terry Real's term for the conditioned self. Your AC is the part of us that learned, early in life, how to survive in our family of origin. Every child adapts to the emotional climate they grew up in. Some learn to make themselves small and agreeable. Others learn to be loud and dominant. Some oscillate between the two.

These adaptations were intelligent. They helped us survive childhood. The problem is that we carry them into adult relationships where they no longer serve us and often cause the exact harm we are trying to avoid.

In RLT, one of the central tasks is learning to recognize when the adaptive child has taken the wheel. When you find yourself reacting in ways that feel out of proportion, when you hear yourself saying things you later regret, when you feel a familiar helplessness or rage, that is often the adaptive child responding to a present moment as if it were the past.

The work is not to eliminate this part, but to develop enough awareness to respond from your adult self instead.

How does RLT incorporate somatics?
Traditional RLT is a talk-based model. In my practice, I integrate RLT with somatic coaching. Body-based awareness and practice that deepens the work considerably.

Your body holds the adaptive child's patterns long before your mind names them. The tightening in the chest before a difficult conversation. The collapse in the posture when someone raises their voice. The freeze that descends when conflict escalates. These are not just feelings,  they are physical states, and they can be worked with directly.

When RLT and somatics are combined, clients not only understand their patterns intellectually, they develop the capacity to feel when a pattern is activating and to make a different choice in the body before it becomes a destructive behavior.

This is where lasting change happens.

Is RLT right for me?
RLT is a good fit if:

• You and your partner are stuck in patterns that talk therapy hasn't shifted
• You want a practitioner who will be direct rather than endlessly neutral
• You are willing to look honestly at your own behavior, not just your partner's
• You want concrete skills, not just insight
• You are genuinely committed to the relationship, even if you are uncertain about its future

RLT is not the right fit if there is active domestic violence, an undisclosed ongoing affair, or untreated addiction that impairs presence. These situations require different support before relational work is possible.

How do I find an RLT therapist or coach?
Terry Real trains practitioners through the Relational Life Institute.
​Certified RLT practitioners have completed intensive training in Real's methodology and are committed to the direct, accountable approach RLT requires.

I am a somatic coach and RLT practitioner based in San Francisco, working with couples and individuals online and in person. My work integrates RLT with body-based somatic practice for clients who want to go deeper than talk alone.
If you are curious whether RLT might help your relationship, the best place to start is a conversation.
Book a Free Connection Call

During my time in India, I noticed how many Indian and South Asian families are rich in connection, responsibility, and loyalty.

At the same time, emotional expression is often limited or discouraged.

Conflict is avoided, pain is minimized, and feelings are managed quietly.

What appears to be harmony on the surface often hides too much silence.

Silence in Indian families isn’t accidental. It’s learned early and passed down through generations.

How Emotional Silence Starts

Kids quickly figure out what’s safe to show.

Tears get met with parents who say things like, “Be strong.”

I've watched parents tell their angry child that the kid is being disrespectful. 

Vulnerability and sharing of feelings is seen as drama, and not the good Bollywood kind.

Even joy, pride, or affection can be muted so no one seems arrogant, needy, or attention-seeking.

Over time, many Indians internalize a simple rule: keep feelings to yourself unless they protect the family’s stability or reputation.

Parents usually don’t teach this on purpose. They’re passing down the survival strategies they learned themselves.

Historical and Cultural Roots

Emotional suppression in South Asian communities comes from real pressures: colonization, displacement, caste violence, economic instability, migration, and survival-focused living.

In those conditions, holding feelings in often made sense.

Showing distress didn’t always bring support. Staying in control felt safer.

Collective values reinforced it.

Protecting elders from discomfort, avoiding public exposure of family issues, and maintaining social reputation—these mattered more than individual emotional needs.

Endurance was valued over self-expression. 

The Cost in Adult Relationships

Unfortunately, feelings don’t just disappear when suppressed. They come out sideways. In couples, this often looks like:

• Avoiding hard conversations until resentment builds
• Emotional distance even when partners care deeply
• Sudden outbursts after long silence
• Anxiety, exhaustion, or tension with no clear cause
• Throwing yourself into work or achievement to dodge vulnerability

Many couples blame their “communication skills,” but the real issue is emotional permission.

If neither partner learned to safely feel and express emotions, both stay guarded.

Redefining Strength

Strength is usually seen as control, endurance, and keeping going no matter what.

Relational strength is different. It’s emotional literacy: naming feelings, tolerating discomfort, speaking honestly without collapsing or attacking.

I wouldn't suggest you to be emotionally exposed with everyone.

You do need to recognize what’s happening inside you and communicate it clearly when it matters to your partner.

Saying “I feel hurt,” “I feel afraid,” or “I need support” isn’t a personality trait. It’s a skill most people were never taught.

Why Culture-Aware Support Matters

Couples work works better when the cultural context is understood.

As a Western-trained couples therapist, I will never completely understand your experience of being in an Indian family and marriage. 

There will be things I miss.

And, there are other things I can see more clearly from outside the system.

For example, how emotional suppression in Indian and South Asian families isn’t just an individual issue. It’s tied to intergenerational expectations, migration stress, hierarchy, and collective identity. Ignoring that makes people feel misunderstood and guarded.

Working with someone who understands these dynamics allows couples to explore honesty without feeling that their values, traditions, or loyalty to family are under attack.

Moving From Silence to Connection
Change doesn’t start with dramatic disclosure. It starts with small steps:

• Noticing your feelings before reacting
• Letting discomfort sit instead of shutting it down
• Naming one emotion instead of none
• Showing your partner uncertainty, not just certainty

Many people were taught how to succeed, provide, and endure. Few were taught how to feel together. Emotional openness isn’t a rejection of cultural strength. It’s an expansion of it.

Take Action

Breaking this cycle of emotional suppression is possible.

Bring your partner to therapy—for your own well-being, for the health of your relationship, and for your children.

Learning to feel and express together creates a home where honesty, connection, and trust can thrive.

Relationships can unravel slowly. One moment you’re deeply connected, and the next you’re strangers on opposite shores. When love feels out of reach, and communication is strained, many couples find their way to somatic coaching—a body-based path back to connection, presence, and trust.

At Pavini Moray Somatic Coaching, we specialize in supporting couples through relationship ruptures, using somatic therapy to heal not just the mind, but the nervous system, attachment wounds, and embodied patterns. Whether you’re dealing with communication breakdowns, intimacy challenges, or the impact of trauma, somatic couples work offers a powerful, transformative approach.

What is Somatic Coaching?
Somatic coaching is a body-centered modality that invites awareness to sensations, movement, posture, and breath—not just words or ideas. Unlike traditional talk therapy, which often stays in the realm of cognition, somatic therapy works with the whole body as a source of insight, regulation, and repair.
Emotions, memories, and patterns don’t just live in the brain—they live in our shoulders, bellies, jaws, and breath. Our bodies remember. Somatic coaching helps you listen.

Why Couples Turn to Somatic Therapy

Most couples know the frustration of repeating the same fight or shutting down entirely.
Under stress, the body reacts—tight chest, racing heart, clenched fists. These reactions often drive disconnection, even when love is present.
In our sessions, you and your partner will learn to:

• Track the body’s cues during conflict
• Practice nervous system regulation together
• Identify patterns of reactivity and shutdown
• Cultivate touch and movement as sources of repair
• Explore relational dynamics through embodied awareness

Instead of rehashing the past, we focus on how you're showing up now—and how you can shift.

Tools We Use in Somatic Couples Work

We use a range of practices rooted in somatic psychotherapy, attachment repair, and trauma-informed care. These include:
Body Scans

Slow, guided awareness through different parts of the body helps each partner tune into their inner state—what’s tight, what’s numb, what’s alive. Over time, body scans reveal your nervous system’s map of safety and threat.
Grounding & Resour
cing
From feeling your feet on the floor to tracking breath or sensation, grounding helps couples stay present when emotions run high. Resourcing involves identifying what brings a sense of safety or support in the body—essential for navigating difficult conversations.

Embodied Relational Exercises
Through safe touch, mirroring, breathwork, and movement, partners explore patterns of approach, avoidance, intimacy, and boundary. These practices restore trust, deepen presence, and build emotional resilience.

When Trauma Lives in the Relationship
Many couples arrive with unspoken pain: betrayal, illness, loss, disconnection after children, or generational trauma. These experiences leave imprints not only in memory, but in muscle and fascia. Somatic therapy offers couples a way to work with trauma rather than around it.

Rather than pathologize your reactions, we get curious: What is your body trying to protect? What story does your nervous system believe? What happens when your partner responds from a grounded place?

A Real-Life Example
Take Talia and Rowan, who came to coaching after nearly giving up. Their fights had a familiar rhythm: Talia would get sharp and accusatory, while Rowan would retreat. In their first session, we noticed that Talia's jaw clenched every time she felt dismissed, and Rowan's shoulders collapsed when tension rose.

With body-based practices, they learned to notice these cues. Talia practiced softening her breath before speaking. Rowan learned to ground his feet and stay with the discomfort of conflict. They moved from spirals of blame and retreat to small, consistent moments of repair. Over time, they rediscovered a kind of trust they hadn’t felt in years.

The Impact of Somatic Couples Coaching
Couples who engage in somatic work often report:

• Improved emotional regulation
• Decreased reactivity and shutdown
• Renewed physical intimacy and trust
• Clearer communication through body awareness
• A deeper sense of safety—both alone and together

This work is especially impactful for queer, trans, and non-traditional relationships, where systemic stressors and identity-based trauma may play a role in disconnection. Our practice welcomes all bodies, all constellations of love.

Begin Your Journey Toward Connection
If you're ready to move beyond conflict loops, silence, or surface-level communication, Pavini Moray Somatic Coaching offers a path. Rooted in years of experience, queer liberation values, and trauma-informed care, our couples coaching blends real-time tools with deep embodiment.
Here’s how to start:

1. Schedule a free connection call. We’ll explore your needs and see if we’re a fit.
2. Engage in somatic coaching sessions—online or in-person in the San Francisco Bay Area.
3. Rebuild your relationship from the inside out.

You still love each other. Let’s help your nervous systems love each other too.