Relational Coaching
& Consulting
In addition to online courses, my coaching and consulting services support individuals, colleagues, or couples seeking principles and practices for relational change. This service is not therapy, but it is a set of tools from my interdisciplinary research that connects psychodynamic approaches with social theory. The most frequent response clients share with me as we work together is "Thank you for giving me language."
The Method
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My expertise is in helping people toward greater somatic awareness as part of coming to voice. The systems we exist within, from patriarchy to white supremacy to capitalism, affect our access to language and to connection with ourselves and others.
With a view of macro systems and family systems, I help clients listen with care to their own stories and those of others—linking early childhood stories to how we are impacted as adults by systems that fragment us from ourselves and one another. I also approach this work through the lens of neurodiversity, or how our brains and sensory processing have specific needs. When those sensory needs are unidentified, it makes it much harder to connect to our body and communicate amidst emotional stimuli, vulnerability, attachment styles, and different approaches to leadership.
I do not presume to be a "relationship expert"—but I do know that the toolkit I offer my clients, drawing from rigorous interdisciplinary feminist research, helps people locate truer words, re-find a sense of mindbody integration, and travel differently through their memories, their fears, their unspoken grief, and their desires. This holistic work also supports more holistic forms of social justice leadership.
5 Themes in the
Work Together
As a psychosocial theorist of change, my clients choose to work with me to receive individualized support for the key concepts I also teach in my classes. These themes include:
Experiencing somatic reconnection as a form of powerful knowledge, as we navigate systems shaped by inequalities, erasures, and power dynamics.
Investigating how sensory processing needs (which are often unmet and unnamed) are affecting our nervous systems, attachment patterns, and relationships.
Reflecting on positionality: I teach how men can learn a mindfulness-based feminism and how unequal distribution of "invisible" domestic, emotional, and reproductive labor effects relationships, especially for heterosexual partnerships. I help women unpack how they experience patriarchy and other intersecting systems. I help white folks (or those with proximity to white identity) unpack where their unexamined conditioning is blocking relational growth, accountability, and meaningful participation in challenging racial injustices.
Doing integration work: All of us of all genders, sexuality, race and class positions can re-find a more integrated sense of voice, suturing the parts of ourself we split off to conform and survive within systems marked by abuse of power. We will explore language to name these systems and their impacts on relationships—systems like histories of patriarchy, white supremacy, and mind-body disconnection, and how these systems effected our family and early childhood experiences of emotional and physical survival.
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Honoring grief work: Through honoring our grief from living inside systems designed to fragment us, we can then use grief to move us toward our creative power and more life-giving experiences of love.​​​​​​​​​​
Is this therapy? It it not therapy or medical advice! I am not a licensed therapist, though I have studied in the fields of psychodynamic research, relational psychoanalysis, and trauma theory for 20 years, and I have run programs teaching social theory to therapists.
What I have seen is that western therapeutic models lack language and rigorous intersectional awareness of how our life stories are shaped not only by early attachment and family of origin patterns, but also by the messages and material realities of race, class, gender, sexuality, capitalism, colonialisms, and ability/disability. Furthermore, most therapeutic models and trauma theory are not intersectional in their approach to identity, meaning they lack awareness of how our race is always gendered, or how our experience of vulnerability, shame, and desire are being impacted by large-scale systems.
While therapy can offer invaluable tools, some people recognize they need more tools for more access to language that brings together the lived experience with macro-level awareness. They also need models that give greater attention to the dynamic intersections of identity within themselves, and why it can be so hard to access language for the unnamed. It is in these deep gaps in the western mental health model that is where my research, consulting, and teaching can be of help. However, I will also strongly advise you to work with a therapist alongside our work, especially if developmental trauma is present
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