What is the difference between reacting and responding? Although the two words have similarities, they are quite different. Knowing the difference can really help you feel empowered and better connect with those around you.

Deciding when to trust is hard, and finding the balance between when to or not to extend trust is essential to protecting your well-being, safety, and ability to fully thrive in your relationships.

Recovery takes effort and intentionality. With the right tools, support, and dedication in place, you can provide yourself with the safety net that is needed to find stability.

Infidelity within a relationship causes a ripple effect that impacts multiple facets of the betrayed partner's life and lived experiences. It impacts our mind, body, and spirit. This multi-layered betrayal results in a type of trauma that is referred to as betrayal trauma.

Dysregulation occurs in varying levels of intensity and for many different reasons. When you can track and map your nervous system, you become more able to intervene with your own body and emotions.

If you have ever wondered why you can sometimes have one or two drinks and other times your drinking seems out of control, you may be considered what’s termed a gray-area drinker.

The trauma of betrayal is earth-shattering, penetrating nearly every corner of life. Although the journey to betrayal trauma recovery is long and painful, many betrayed partners walk through these 5 steps, and with the support of their therapeutic team, overcome debilitating pain and reconnect with an even stronger self.

Within your relationship, did the impact of your words or actions not match your intention? This happens all too often. Luckily, there are tools to use with your partner that are helpful no matter what the situation was that caused harm.

Do you find yourself wondering if your relationship is worth saving? Or do you feel emotionally flooded by your partner's ambivalence? This is not an easy place for either partner to find themselves. Learning about where we are in the dynamic and taking steps to get connected to ourselves first will support us in making a grounded decision.

Sobriety is about avoiding harmful coping strategies, while recovery is about healing so you don’t need them. In recovery, we don’t just avoid our medicators (ex: porn, sex, shopping, etc…). We heal our relationship with them. We discover the antidote to addiction: connection. We identify the underlying emotional and psychological needs we were attempting to meet, and we learn to get our needs met in new, healthy ways that feel good to us and to others.

Re-entering the world of dating can be “intimidating.” However, it also has the potential to be really exciting. If you have experienced the butterflies that come with connecting to someone special, you know what I mean. But sometimes this excitement can take over into something bigger - fantasy. So, how do we enter into the world of dating without falling into fear or fantasy?

Resentment poisons our relationship with self, others, and the world at large. But what is resentment really? The formula I’ve come up with for resentment includes anger, blame, and secrecy over time. Let’s discuss some ways that we can combat resentment, freeing up our energy, our heart, and our relationships.

When feeling distant, some people reach out for intimacy to get reassurance from their partner. For others, having sex to reconnect feels too intimate and vulnerable, especially if they are already feeling disconnected in their relationship. The theory of Emotionally Focused Therapy can help us make sense of these reactions, and the cycles we get stuck in when it comes to sex with our partner.

Enmeshment is the blurring of boundaries that separate your thoughts, feelings, and responsibilities from someone else’s. Imagine you are standing in a hula hoop with your partner. If they move, your space is affected. Now apply this idea to a real life situation - maybe your partner has had a bad day and now, because you are enmeshed, you take ownership for their bad mood. Thankfully, you can move into healthy differentiation by setting clear emotional boundaries in your relationship. In doing so, both parties' separate thoughts, feelings, and responsibilities are honored.

If trauma is left unhealed, unprocessed, and even ignored, the pain finds a way to manifest. In fact, our trauma wounding has the potential to become re-enacted through patterns of addiction, including sex addiction and process addiction. Fortunately, there is hope for healing.

It can be difficult to make sense of our bodies and their reactions. The way we feel does not always align with how we think we should feel, and we oftentimes we end up stuck in discomfort. This is not an uncommon experience. Thankfully, we can make sense of these reactions through Polyvagal Theory, and work our way back towards a restful state.

Do you feel “crazy” or “needy” for wanting to be closer to a friend with whom you already have a strong foundation? Or, do you feel frustrated due to another’s “unreasonably high” expectations on you and your time? Luckily, attachment theory can provide some insight into your relational needs.

There are two theories that set themselves apart when it comes to couples therapy: The Gottman Method and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). This is not just our opinion - the effectiveness of both methods has been demonstrated through extensive research.

Betrayal trauma immensely impacts how we view sex and intimacy. Something that was supposed to bring healthy vulnerability now feels completely different. So, how do you heal? The key is to first rebuild emotional intimacy with your partner.

If you have been betrayed, the thought of forgiving your betrayer may seem undesirable and even impossible. So, why would you consider forgiveness at all and where do you start?