In person in Wichita & online across Kansas
Therapy for Painful Relationships
When relationships get complicated…
…It starts to bleed over into other things too. You’re thinking about it while driving, while working and while lying awake in bed at night. Your social media somehow guesses and starts offering you advice videos. You feel generally more irritable and the crying jags are catching you off guard.
When the relationships that matter the most start hurting, your brain goes into overtime trying to solve the problem. But sometimes, no matter how hard you work to fix it, it’s still messy.
I help individual adults facing challenges in family or in romantic relationships, so that it doesn’t stay as difficult as it feels today.
You can find your way again!
Difficult Family Relationships
Does something on this list sound familiar?
You’re agonizing whether to go no-contact with someone or grieving because someone else has cut off relationship
You feel torn between wanting family closeness and feeling suffocated by the reality, and the word boundaries is popping up a lot
You sense a growing generational divide around eldercare, raising children or diverging young adults
Family relationships can be the best humans have to offer each other and they can also be a source of disorienting pain and confusion.
But what if you could shift the dynamic?
You don’t have to keep living in the same gridlock, repeating multi-generational patterns, or waiting for other people to change: you can change some of the story now.
Together we can look at what’s happening, identify places where a change could make a difference, figure out how you want to balance conflicting needs and take care of yourself by mending painful experiences so you can feel peace with how you’re moving forward in complex family relationships.
Complicated Romantic Relationships
When your relationship first began, it felt hopeful and new, like this was going to be your happy ever after.
Now, though…
Maybe if you ignore it, it will get better? Maybe if you beg/plead/argue, it will be fixed? Maybe if you set boundaries, it won’t happen again? Maybe if you fix yourself, pursue intimacy, or apologize again, that will bring back the good times?
Words like codependent, bossy, people-pleaser, narcissist, clingy, checked-out, lazy, paranoid, cheater, or crazy may be popping up in your social media feed these days. You may wonder how you keep picking people who are bad for you, or you may distrust the intuition that landed you in this relationship. You may be desperate to figure out if this is just the normal kind of hard in a relationship, or something bigger. You may be facing big fears around restoring trust, or you may just be overwhelmed by not feeling heard or helped around the house. You may wish you could go to couples therapy but your partner won’t agree.
Whatever the struggle looks like for you right now, you don’t have to carry it alone. I provide individual therapy for adult men and women who need support while navigating or healing from a painful romantic relationship. Relationships are a place we feel broken, but relationships are also the place we heal - and therapy can be where the healing begins.
Treatment for Painful Relationships
Prior to becoming a therapist, I spent a decade serving survivors of relational trauma as an advocate, helping them find clarity and healing. The work I do in the therapy room now with people who are struggling with painful relationships is similar: finding clarity and reducing the symptoms you’re carrying from this experience! As part of healing, we’ll focus on both your brain and your body: what’s happening in your swirling thoughts and the way your heart races and your throat feels tight. Attending to both brain and body is a big part of figuring out how to move forward in difficult relationships.
Some of the treatments I turn to most often for painful relationships are:
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) can be particularly useful for where trauma has intersected with your relationships. If your history includes assault, violence, threats, betrayal or other trauma, EMDR can help release where those experiences are stuck and impacting you today.
Somatic therapy also focuses on the brain+body experience. Human are good at talking themselves into all kinds of things, but as they say: “the body keeps the score”! Your body holds subtle wisdom and tremendous healing capacity so we’ll bring both the intuition of your body and of your brain into the room together. Bringing the body into therapy is a critical part of healing.
Mindfulness can help you step back from thoughts that want to spiral, slow your breath and reconnect your brain and body toward wholeness. From this more centered place, you can step forward in wisdom.