Relational Life Therapy
Become Who You Want
To Be In Love.
Move beyond old survival strategies and learn the skills of healthy relationships.
In-Person in Santa Monica & Online Across California
Your relationship isn't being run by love.
It's being run by the automatic.
Most couples don't struggle because they don't love each other.
They struggle because when conflict, disappointment, fear, or hurt show up, old survival strategies take over.
You need to be right.
You control.
You speak without restraint.
You retaliate.
You withdraw.
Not because you're a bad partner.
Because these patterns once helped you survive.
Relational Life Therapy helps you recognize the automatic — and teaches you what to do instead.
Is RLT Right For You?
RLT may help if you...
Keep having the same fight despite your best intentions.
Carry a negative image of your partner and find yourself focusing more on what's wrong than what's right.
Feel stuck between resentment and accommodation and don't know how to find your way back to each other.
Struggle to set boundaries without guilt, fear, or conflict.
Lose yourself in the relationship or feel increasingly disconnected from your partner.
Want more honesty, accountability, intimacy, and respect in your relationship.
Are tired of surface-level advice and band-aid solutions and want deeper, lasting change.
Why Love Alone Isn't Enough.
You don't need another argument about who's right.
You need help understanding why the same fight keeps happening.
Relational Life Therapy is built on a simple idea:
What gets in the way of love is usually not a lack of love.
It's the survival strategies we developed to protect ourselves from hurt.
When we feel scared, disappointed, ashamed, overwhelmed, or disconnected, we often fall back on those strategies automatically.
We criticize.
Withdraw.
Control.
Accommodate.
Defend.
The problem is that what once helped us survive can eventually get in the way of the connection we long for.
You can't fix what you won't face.
Relational Life Therapy helps you recognize the patterns that keep you stuck, understand where they came from, and choose a different way forward.
Through compassionate accountability, relational skill-building, and deep healing work, you'll learn how to move from self-protection to connection—from me versus you to us.
And when a part of you resists those changes, we don't simply teach more skills.
We turn toward the younger part that learned those strategies in the first place.
Because lasting change happens when we awaken to our patterns, heal the wounds beneath them, and practice new ways of relating.
What we’ll work on
With RLT, you and your partner can …
Recognize your automatic patterns so you can respond intentionally instead of react automatically.
Move from complaint to request and ask for what you need without criticism or blame.
Set healthy boundaries without guilt, resentment, or losing yourself.
Replace losing strategies with healthier ways of creating connection.
Strengthen self-esteem so you can show up as a full and equal partner.
Repair after conflict instead of staying stuck in resentment or distance.
Respond generously and become the partner you want to be.
Create deeper intimacy through honesty, accountability, appreciation, and generosity.
The Therapeutic Arc of RLT
01. Waking Up (Joining Through the Truth)
RLT begins with truth.
Using loving confrontation, we'll identify the losing strategies and automatic patterns that keep you stuck. Rather than remaining neutral, we take the side of the relationship itself—challenging the behaviors that create distance, resentment, and disconnection.
Because we cannot change what we refuse to see.
02. Healing Underlying Wounds
Many of the patterns that create problems in adult relationships were learned long ago.
Together, we'll work with both the Wounded Child and the Adaptive Child—the brilliant survival strategies that once protected you but may now interfere with intimacy, connection, and love.
The goal is not to get rid of these adaptations.
The goal is to understand them, heal them, and free you from being run by them.
03. Growing Up (Cultivating Relational Skills)
Insight alone doesn't create change.
In this phase, you'll learn and practice the skills of relational living, including healthy self-esteem, effective boundaries, accountability, emotional regulation, repair, generosity, and intimacy.
Your relationships become the crucible in which you heal, grow, and thrive. Through moment-to-moment choices, you'll learn how to replace automatic reactions with conscious responses that create deeper connection, respect, and love.
LOVE DEMANDS DEMOCRACY
Relational empowerment is one of the ideas I appreciate most about Relational Life Therapy.
Many of us learn that relationships require a choice: either give up our needs to keep the peace or fight to get what we want. Relational empowerment offers a different path.
It means learning how to stay connected to yourself while remaining connected to the person you love.
Healthy relationships are built on mutual respect, accountability, and equality. They require us to speak honestly, set healthy boundaries, listen with openness, and take responsibility for our impact on one another.
As Terry Real teaches, healthy relationships require both partners to grow. Sometimes that means softening defensiveness and letting go of control. Other times, it means finding the courage to speak up, take up space, and ask for what we need.
"There is no voice without relationship and no relationship without voice."
— Carol GilliganRLT helps you become the kind of partner you want to be.
As equals.More relational.
The relationship you want is built
between equals.
Questions?
FAQs
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Relational Life Therapy (RLT) is one of the primary approaches I use in my work with couples.
Developed by Terry Real, RLT combines deep emotional healing with practical relationship skills. It helps partners move beyond blame, defensiveness, and repetitive conflict by strengthening self-awareness, accountability, healthy boundaries, communication, and intimacy.
What I appreciate most about RLT is that it doesn't focus only on understanding why problems exist. It also helps couples learn what to do differently. Together, we explore the patterns that keep you stuck while building the skills needed to create a healthier, more connected relationship.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is helping you build a relationship that feels safer, stronger, and more fulfilling.
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I am trained in both Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Relational Life Therapy (RLT), and I often integrate elements of both approaches in my work with couples.
EFT helps couples understand the emotional and attachment needs that drive conflict. It focuses on creating safety, strengthening emotional bonds, and helping partners feel more connected to one another.
RLT also explores the deeper emotions beneath conflict, but places greater emphasis on accountability, healthy boundaries, relational skills, and practical change. It tends to be a more active and direct approach, helping partners not only understand their patterns but also learn how to change them.
In my experience, both approaches offer something valuable. EFT helps couples access and share vulnerable emotions. RLT helps couples translate those insights into healthier ways of relating to one another.
Rather than choosing one over the other, I draw from both models to meet the unique needs of each couple.
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Relational empowerment is one of the core ideas in Relational Life Therapy.
Many of us learn that relationships require either giving up our needs to keep the peace or fighting to get what we want. Relational empowerment offers a different path.
It means learning how to stay connected to yourself while remaining connected to the person you love.
In practice, that may look like speaking honestly, setting healthy boundaries, asking for what you need, receiving feedback without becoming defensive, and repairing conflict when it happens.
Rather than focusing on power over one another, relational empowerment helps partners build relationships based on mutual respect, accountability, and equality.
Healthy relationships are not built on domination or accommodation. They are built between equals.
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Not in the way most people imagine.
My role is not to decide who is right and who is wrong. My role is to help us understand what is happening between you and identify the patterns that are creating pain, disconnection, resentment, or conflict.
At times, that may mean challenging defensiveness, avoidance, criticism, or other behaviors that are hurting the relationship. At other times, it may mean helping a partner find their voice, strengthen their boundaries, or speak more honestly about what they need.
Rather than taking sides with one partner, I advocate for the health of the relationship itself.
The goal is not to determine a winner. The goal is to help both partners create a relationship that feels healthier, safer, and more connected.
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Yes.
One of the things I appreciate about Relational Life Therapy is that it encourages therapists to practice the same skills we help our clients develop—accountability, healthy boundaries, repair, self-reflection, and honest communication.
As Terry Real often says, we are not teaching from perfection. We are teaching from practice.
I don't believe anyone masters relationships once and for all. We are all works in progress. While my role is different from yours, I am committed to doing my own relational work and continuing to grow in the same areas I help my clients explore.
For me, that ongoing practice is part of what allows me to sit with couples authentically, compassionately, and without judgment.
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Yes.
One of the strengths of Relational Life Therapy is that it combines emotional healing with practical relationship skills. Couples learn how to set healthy boundaries, make effective requests, repair conflict, communicate more honestly, and maintain a strong sense of self while staying connected to one another.
What I appreciate about RLT is that it recognizes that most people already know many of these skills in theory. The challenge is accessing them when we feel hurt, overwhelmed, defensive, ashamed, or emotionally triggered.
That's why our work is not just about learning new skills. It's also about recognizing the adaptive strategies that take over when we're activated and learning how to respond differently in those moments.
By learning new ways of responding, couples can begin to replace old survival patterns with healthier and more effective ways of relating.