Relationships can feel like playing a game of complex chess that you just can’t win.

I work with many clients dealing with challenging friend, family, and/or romantic relationships:

• Friends: the most common issues I encounter are feeling unsatisfied with current friend groups; feeling lonely and isolated while having a difficult time making new friends; feeling inauthentic in friendships and like you have to be different from who you really are; having “toxic” friends but not knowing how to deal with the relationships; and experiencing a lot of anxiety or discomfort with friends while being unsure of why.

• Family: the list of potential family concerns is longer than you would probably want to read. I work with clients ranging from those with very specific family issues they want to deal with to clients that feel like their family is one gigantic embodiment of dysfunction.

• Romantic Relationships: I have seen many clients that want a romantic relationship but haven’t had one; clients who are in a toxic relationship and don’t know what to do; clients who keep falling into the same relationship pattern again and again and desperately want to make a change; clients who are in a healthy relationship and don’t want to “screw it up,” and clients navigating potential separation or divorce.

My Approach

Resolving relationship issues can be fast or slow depending on the issue. One of the tenets of how I approach working with relationship issues is that we can expect some of the same relationship struggles to show up in therapy. For example, if you are constantly accommodating with your romantic partner all the while sacrificing your own needs, we may find you start accommodating in therapy, too. The difference is, you and I can examine this pattern, explore its origins, think through how to make changes, and practice in the therapy relationship.

Another element of my approach is examining existing relationship “scripts” that form while growing up. For example, you may have a script that “it’s better to protect myself from being hurt than to open up.” If this was your script, we would want to look at where this developed, how it’s showing up in current relationships, and what to do about it. We all have different scripts and without understanding what they are, we usually repeat the same scripts on autopilot without ever realizing it. Once we understand your scripts, we can write new scripts together based on your present day life and reality.

In my experience, therapy works very well for dealing with relationship issues. We can discuss your specific relationship issues during a free phone consultation.