ONLINE THERAPY IN WASHINGTON STATE & California

Relationship Therapy For Boundaries & Attachment Issues

Work Toward Secure Attachment & Interdependence

Does this sound familiar?

Healthy Relationships Are Hard

Your career is going well. You’re financially secure. On the outside, you are thriving and everything you’ve been working hard for.

On the inside, you struggle with emotions like guilt, shame, anger, emptiness, and loneliness. Boundaries and communication are also difficult for you. You want others to read your mind and know what it is that you want and need.

Sometimes, you feel so overwhelmed you engage in unhelpful behaviors like avoidance, denial, distraction, and numbing yourself.

There is hope.

You can learn to live a whole and fulfilling life for yourself, and not others. By reconnecting with your emotions, body, values, and learning healthy boundaries and communication, you can have healthier relationships.

Common Types of People I Work With

Successful in career and school, though relationships are difficult
Externally focused (e.g. image, body, weight, awards, money)
Emotionally exhausted due to the internal work they do to please others and maintain the peace
Over functioners (constantly working, reading, exercising, distracting from the internal)
Highly anxious and worried about the “What ifs?”
Hyper vigilant (mistrustful, difficulty trusting others, difficultly feeling safe in their body)
Difficulty accepting and receiving love (sabotages or mistrusts people who are open and giving with their love)
Lives in scarcity, rather than abundance (thoughts tend to be negative/pessimistic/catastrophic)

Common Relationship issues

Codependency

You merge with others instantly. Their needs are your needs.
Moves quickly in relationships and puts others needs first before their own.
You seek constant validation from others and give to others without thinking of your needs.
You are often anxious, frazzled, and worried.

Disconnected From Your Body

You have trouble knowing what you’re feeling.
You often feel irritable or angry for no reason. Sometimes feel empty inside.
However, you think quite a bit. In fact, you are intelligent and adaptive. You value logic, pragmatism, order, and control.

Over Functioner

To avoid your emotions, you throw yourself into school and work. You excel and become very successful.
This comes at a cost. You work 50-70 hours a week and find it hard to slow down, rest, and relax. You become restless and begin the cycle of overworking, exhaustion, and burn out.

Self-Reliance

You find it hard to ask for help, so you just do everything yourself.
You want others to know what you want and read your mind.

Self Sabotage

Pushing others away when relationship gets more intimate.
Fear of intimacy.
Stays in unhealthy relationships for longer than necessary to avoid pain and suffering.

Lack of Self

Unsure who you really are
Unsure what you really need and want
Poor sense of Self (Self worth, Self esteem, Self love, Self acceptance)

Counterdependency:

You have strict and firm boundaries. You expect a lot from yourself and others.
It’s hard to receive from others people (e.g. gifts, love, affection).
You prefer being alone and relying on yourself because it’s hard to trust others.
Surface level relationships that rarely seem to deepen due to fear of intimacy, emotions, and vulnerability.
You are often fearful, anxious, and on edge.

Avoidance

You are terrified of conflicts and disagreements. You go away when things get overwhelming.
After a difficult conversation, you find yourself ruminating over and over.
You isolate yourself for prolonged periods of time. You need excessive amounts of space away from people.

Shame & Guilt

You feel like bad, unworthy, not enough, and inadequate.
You judge yourself more harshly than others and compare yourself.
Feeling like you don’t belong around others.
Rumination around what you can do better.

Fear of Emotions

Learned to internalize emotions.
Values space, distance, logic, structure, and problem solving.
Believes emotions are unnecessary and tends to minimize, deny, or pushes away emotions in favor of logic and thought.

Body Tension

You feel tense in your body all the time. You find it hard to relax and hold your breath often, without even realizing it.
When someone hugs you, they make a joke that you’re stiff like a board.

Relationship Therapy Can Help You

✔️ Understand your attachment styles

✔️ Work toward a healthy, secure attachment style

✔️ Challenge unhelpful thoughts when you are dysregulated/triggered with more helpful ways of thinking

✔️ Increase emotional intimacy and vocabulary: Learning the language of emotions

✔️ Learn how to communicate and ask for your needs, limits, and boundaries effectively

✔️ Re-parent yourself or treating yourself as you deserved to be treated by your ideal parent/caregiver: Re-learning skills, tools, managing emotions, having childhood experiences as an adult you never experienced as a child

✔️ Learn to trust in the therapeutic process and me as your therapist: Ultimately learning to trust others in your life outside of therapy as well

✔️ Recognize unhelpful thought patterns, relationship dynamics, and who you tend to be attracted to and disrupting this

✔️ Explore how relational conflicts and tensions are a natural part of relationships, and the importance of repairing ruptures/conflicts/tensions as important toward growth and change

✔️ Explore how internal defense mechanisms are often activated in order to protect yourself, which leads to even more disconnection

✔️ Name how moments of disconnection cause fear and vulnerability when they are not named

✔️ Establish and learn healthy boundaries

✔️ Understand your triggers and develop strategies to manage them and anticipate them

✔️ Practice Self compassion during moments of difficulty rather than relying solely on defensive tactics like intellectualization, compartmentalization, self-criticism, laughter, rumination, or minimizing

✔️ Slow down, pause, and reflect rather than rush, distract, and/or avoid

Feel More Secure & Confident Today

Relationships are the foundation of our lives.

Esther Perel states, “The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives”.

I am a Seattle based relationship and couples therapist specializing in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Relational Cultural Therapy (RCT).

Improve the quality of your relationships by learning healthy communication skills, ways to assert your boundaries, and stop sabotaging your relationships.

I will help you deepen your mutual understanding and foster a respectful and loving relationship with yourself and your partners (platonic and romantic).

You can feel more joy and peace.

You deserve to have a life where you feel at home not just in your head, but in your body and emotions. You deserve authentic connection and loving relationships with people you trust and care for.

Reach out today to schedule a consultation.