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Trauma-Informed Couples Counseling
Online trauma-informed couples therapy is available to partners located throughout California, including LGBTQIA+, polyamorous, and other diverse relationships.
I support clients in building the tools for relational resilience together, while deepening understanding and connection. Perhaps you feel like echoes of the past are impacting present connection, you and your partner are “going to war with ghosts”, or you feel as though your current relationship isn’t meeting your needs for safety in vulnerability and intimacy. Let’s face those feelings together, and work to understand where your history is coming alive in your current dynamic. We'll process that history, then work to understand what we need to build a relational foundation in a new, secure place with a toolbox for attunement and connection.
Often, our first step is to give voice to your painful experiences so they can live and be held outside of the confines of your body and mind, and we can meet the associated pain with compassion and care. We will feel into what it’s like for traumatic history or old wounds to be held with acute awareness, attunement, and a deep understanding of its impacts to each partner’s current lens. Within the therapeutic container, we will also build skills and tools for reflective communication, collaborative negotiation, and mindful co-regulation, to begin building the foundation and the structure that can uphold a relationship that meets the entirety of your needs.
Whether you are navigating family planning or fertility challenges together, grief or loss, a partner’s medical diagnosis or you’re loving one another through a partner’s experience of PTSD, we can build a connection that withstands stressors, and hone a toolbox with tools for intimate connection, restoration and repair.
Couples loving each other through the experience of PTSD
Perhaps you feel like echoes of the past are impacting present connection, or as though you’re going to war with ghosts. Or, maybe you feel like your nervous systems speak a different language. The goal isn’t for you to no longer “trigger” each other, or for you both to always be regulated in each other’s presence. The goal is to know how to hold one another’s trauma responses, and to build tools for loving one another through the activation. Your trauma does not have to be healed in order for your relationship to be healthy. In fact, healthy relationship is often how we heal. In trauma-informed and IFS influenced couples therapy, we can learn skills and practices for co-regulation, re-orienting the nervous system, and attunement to what’s present even when we’re upset. We can learn how to remind one another that in this relationship, we’re living a different story, and in this relationship we know how to walk one another back home to safety and secure connection.
Couples impacted by chronic illness
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Sometimes, when one partner has a chronic illness and the other partner has stepped into a caregiving role, the partner with chronic illness starts to feel like a problem to be solved instead of a person to be loved. Sometimes, the person caregiving begins to feel one dimensional in their relationship, as though that role is all they are embodying. Maybe you’ve both gotten great at tackling the illness as the “problem” you are both facing together, but you’ve lost the intimacy that once existed outside of that experience. In this space, we learn how to return to a place of partnership and intimate connection, outside of the experience of treating an illness or navigating a medical issue. Here, you don’t have to over-explain the impacts complex chronic illness has on day to day life. I speak that language. Together, let’s make sure that it’s not the only thing you’re experiencing in your connection.​
LGBTQIA+ Relationship Navigation and Family Planning
Perhaps you are a lesbian couple, and you’re facing the complexities of fertility and family planning. Maybe you’re in a queer relationship where one partner is embarking on gender identity exploration, and together you’re navigating big change. Or, you’re in a partnership where one partner is questioning their sexuality. What we don’t often talk about when it comes to couples therapy is that in LGBTQIA+ partnership, we’re often navigating historic trauma and acute grief together that doesn’t always show up in heteronormative relationship. There’s the political and sociocultural stressors we’re facing, the heartbreak of rejection by family of origin, stress and grief of family building challenges, sociocultural or religious trauma that can echo through your dynamic, or attachment wounding that can pop up when we’re moving through the process of exploring relationship structure, sexuality and/or identity. This is an affirming space for LGBTQ+ relationship therapy where all of this (and more) is welcomed, where we can use tools and build skills for navigating this together, all while being held, seen and understood in your experience, your wants and your needs.
In this trauma-informed and attachment theory focused space, I offer an opportunity for partners to collaborate on building an open relationship structure that meets each partner’s needs for safety, security and fulfilling connection. Whether you are considering a polyamorous partnership, a non-monogamous relationship dynamic, or you are both considering opening up to explore sexuality together, we can utilize new skills and practices for building a strong relational foundation and maintaining a relationship structure that can hold all of it. We can identify historic attachment wounding that may play a role in your needs for reassurance and security, and work to understand when your nervous system is expressing that need. We’ll then develop tools for co-regulation that bring you back to the present moment, as well as the truth of the safety and continuity of your connection.
Attachment-informed Alternative Relationship Structuring
