Relational Therapies
We use relational therapies to support clients working through family conflict, relationship stress, codependency, betrayal, and identity-related pain. These methods can be used in individual, couples, or family therapy to help create deeper understanding and more meaningful connection.
What is Relational Therapy?
Relational therapy focuses on the ways our relationships shape how we think, feel, and experience the world. It recognizes that emotional struggles don’t happen in a vacuum—they often grow out of patterns we learned in early relationships or the roles we were asked to play in families, partnerships, and systems. Whether we’re talking about attachment wounds, conflict with a partner, or feeling unseen in our identity, relational therapy helps us understand how connection—or disconnection—impacts our mental health.
We use relational therapies across individual, couples, and family work. These include Bowenian Family Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Structural Family Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the Gottman Method, and Cognitive Behavioral Couples Therapy (CBCT). Each of these approaches brings a different lens for understanding relationships: from shifting family roles and boundaries, to rewriting personal narratives, to learning tools for emotional attunement and communication. Our therapists adapt these methods to fit your specific needs, values, and relational dynamics.
These therapies are especially helpful for our clients who:
Our Relational Therapies
Bowenian Family Therapy
Bowenian Family Therapy focuses on how multigenerational family patterns and emotional roles shape the way people relate to themselves and others. It’s especially helpful for clients who feel stuck in cycles of conflict, enmeshment, avoidance, or emotional over-responsibility—often patterns that were set in motion long before they were born. Bowenian therapy encourages insight into the family system and supports clients in developing more emotional separation without cutting off connection. We use Bowenian concepts to help clients understand how dynamics like loyalty, guilt, or silence operate across generations. This is especially relevant for adoptees, queer clients, or clients from multiracial families who may be navigating identity questions inside systems where they’ve long felt like the "other." We don’t pathologize family relationships—but we do help clients find ways to interact more intentionally, protect their emotional boundaries, and redefine what connection can look like.
Narrative Therapy
Narrative Therapy helps clients examine and re-author the stories they’ve internalized about themselves, their relationships, and their place in the world. For many people—especially adoptees, LGBTQIA+ individuals, survivors of emotional abuse, or those in nontraditional families—these stories have been shaped by external forces that were never fully theirs. Narrative therapy separates people from their problems and invites them to choose which stories deserve power and which ones can be gently let go. We believe our clients are the authors of their own lives—not broken people needing to be fixed, but full, complex humans with stories that deserve to be explored on their own terms. Narrative work helps clients break free from inherited scripts, self-blame, or the idea that they have to be “the good adoptee,” “the strong partner,” or “the problem child” in their family.
Structural Family Therapy
Structural Family Therapy helps families clarify roles, boundaries, and power dynamics to support healthier interaction patterns. Rather than assigning blame to individuals, this approach looks at the structure of the family as a system—who holds emotional responsibility, who is overfunctioning or underfunctioning, and where the flow of care or communication might be blocked. This model is particularly useful when working with families navigating adoption, caregiving stress, trauma histories, or complex relational roles (such as multigenerational households or families built through fostering or third-party reproduction). We use structural insights to help families move from chaos to clarity by creating balance, emotional safety, and clearer expectations for how to support one another.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
EFT focuses on the emotional bond between people, especially in close relationships. It helps clients identify the underlying attachment needs and fears that drive reactive cycles like blame, withdrawal, or shutdown. Rather than focusing only on communication skills, EFT works to repair emotional safety so people can reach for each other vulnerably and be met with care. This work is essential for our clients recovering from relational trauma, betrayal, emotional neglect, or codependency. It’s also deeply affirming for queer, trans, polyamorous, or neurodivergent couples who have not always been reflected in mainstream relationship models. EFT gives language and structure to emotional needs—especially when clients have been taught to suppress them or fear they will be too much. We use EFT to help people build connection from a place of mutual responsiveness, not performance.
Gottman Method
The Gottman Method offers research-based tools for improving communication, managing conflict, and building emotional intimacy in romantic relationships. It teaches couples how to recognize and shift harmful interaction patterns, like criticism, defensiveness, or stonewalling, while increasing behaviors that strengthen connection. We adapt Gottman tools to fit couples from diverse identities, family systems, and relationship structures. We don’t assume every couple communicates the same way or values the same types of closeness. Instead, we use Gottman techniques alongside culturally responsive, trauma-informed care to support couples in building partnerships that are grounded in respect, authenticity, and emotional presence—even when trust has been shaken.
Cognitive Behavioral Couples Therapy (CBCT)
CBCT helps partners identify and shift the thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that create emotional disconnection. It brings structure to therapy by helping couples challenge unhelpful thinking, develop more balanced interpretations of each other’s actions, and learn practical ways to regulate emotions and solve problems together. CBCT is especially helpful for clients dealing with attachment anxiety, trauma triggers, OCD-related relationship stress, or high-conflict communication patterns. We use CBCT techniques not to "fix" couples, but to build insight and give them concrete ways to interact with more clarity, compassion, and shared responsibility. We often integrate CBCT with other relational modalities to ensure therapy remains emotionally attuned as well as skills-based.
Our Relational Therapists
