Relationship

Everything I do is relational. All of it—.1:1, couples, groups, even my marriage and the way I parent. 

The individual who comes to me alone is in relationship with their patterns, their past, their own story. The team that brings me in is in relationship with itself, individually, collectively, and professionally. Relationship is the medium everything moves through.

What I mean by relationship intuitive is specific: I intuit the relational dynamic underneath what's being presented. The place where two things are in tension with each other; two people, two parts of the same person, a person and an experience they haven't finished having. That tension is always relational, and it's where the work we do together lives.

What relationship actually requires.

Most people come to relational work having already tried to think their way through it. They understand the dynamic. They can describe the pattern. They know, intellectually, what's happening.

And the understanding hasn't moved anything.

That's because the work needs to stop just being intellectual. With me, it becomes relational, which means it needs to be felt, witnessed, and moved in the presence of someone else. Understanding a pattern and shifting your relationship to it are two entirely different things. The first happens in your head. The second happens between people.

"It is by understanding someone modeling healthy, mature, intentional, insightful, conscious, authentic, honest relating to the other person — and now I'm practicing it with my daughter."

I learned this by living inside a relationship that showed me what healthy relating actually looks like in practice — not as a concept but as a daily reality. My marriage taught me more about this work than any training did. What it means to repair after conflict. What it means to stay curious about someone across years. What it means to keep choosing the same person not out of obligation but out of genuine desire.

"We love each other in all of the ways that allows us to keep working inside of our relationship together."

That model — conscious, honest, willing to do the hard thing when the hard thing is what's needed — is what I bring into every container. Not as a prescription for what relationship should look like, but as a lived understanding of what becomes possible when two people keep showing up for each other with genuine intention.

The dichotomy inside every relationship.

"I live inside of the dichotomy, I work with the contradictions."

Every relationship holds contradiction. You love someone and they infuriate you. You want to stay and you want to leave. You feel grateful and resentful simultaneously. You see someone clearly and you still don't understand them.

Most relational work tries to resolve these contradictions. I don't. I work with them—which means helping people develop the capacity to hold both things at once without needing one of them to win.

The yin and yang symbol that most people recognize without fully interrogating: inside the black half, a white circle. Inside the white half, a black circle. The point isn't that opposites balance each other out. The point is that each one contains the seed of the other. The contradiction isn't a problem to solve. It's the structure of the thing itself.

When I'm working with a couple who is holding contradictory emotions—one positive, one negative—about the same situation, I don't ask them to choose between the emotions or reconcile them. I help them walk the territory of both. Literally, sometimes. Moving through physical space that represents each side of the experience, noticing what's present where, finding what lives in the intersection.

"By the end of it we walked all the way up to their next threshold and there was a monument that was even a beautiful symbol of this next moment that they're at, and even if they stayed in the negative side of it for the entire moment, they were still moving forward. They were still making progress."

On confrontation and conflict.

I don't go into hard conversations expecting apologies. I go in expecting to speak for myself and to hear the other person speak for themselves, and to see what becomes possible in the space between those two things.

"What is your experience of this story? Because this was my experience. When these events happened, this is what I experienced in it."

That framing changes everything. It moves the conversation from competing verdicts about what happened to two people sharing their experience of the same events. The experiences don't need to match. They rarely do. What matters is whether both people can stay in the room long enough for something to shift.

The Gottman Institute's research on healthy couples found a ratio that I return to often: five positive interactions for every negative one in the context of conflict. In a very healthy relationship you're at more than that. The point isn't the number — it's the recognition that conflict doesn't happen in isolation. It happens inside the accumulated context of everything that's come before it. That context is either an asset or a liability depending on how the relationship has been tended.

"Five to one. Apparently in a state of conflict, you need the general time and space surrounding the conflict to have been about five positive interactions for every negative one that you've had."