Why I Do This Work

I know what it feels like to be in a marriage that isn’t working and not understand why.

My first marriage ended not because either of us was a bad person. We weren’t. We were two decent people who simply didn’t know how to be married. How to really listen, effectively communicate, honestly forgive, fully repair, and most importantly, how to row in the same direction.

I think about it like two people in a boat, each holding an oar, each trying to get to the other side. Without synchronization, without a shared rhythm, the boat doesn’t move forward. It drifts sideways. It circles back. Occasionally, almost accidentally, it moves forward. But mostly it goes nowhere, and both people exhaust themselves wondering why.

That was us. And that is most couples I work with today.
Not bad people. Not incompatible people.
Just two people who never learned how to row together.

What That Ending Taught Me

When that marriage ended I felt like a failure. I couldn’t understand why two people who genuinely cared about each other couldn’t figure it out. So I did what I always do when something doesn’t make sense. I researched. I soul-searched. I read everything I could find. I examined my own role with more honesty than was comfortable.

I also tried traditional therapy during that marriage. And while I understand its value, what I experienced felt like a weekly rehash of grievances. It was more akin to a careful cataloging of everything that had gone wrong, with very little direction toward what could go right. We stayed stuck in the past, relitigating the same hurts, waiting for the other person to finally change. There was almost no homework. And almost no forward motion.

Life has taught me, usually the hard way, that it is impossible to create a bright future while clinging to the past. Grievances have their place. Understanding what happened and why matters enormously. But there is a significant difference between understanding a hurt and using it as a weapon. Between processing what went wrong and camping there indefinitely.

The past is a placeholder for lessons.
We are not supposed to dwell there.

Somewhere in that season of research and soul-searching, something shifted. I started to understand things I wished I had known before. And people started noticing. Friends would call. Colleagues would ask if I had a few minutes. Friends of friends I’d never met would reach out because someone had told them I seemed to understand something about marriage that was hard to find elsewhere.

I started teaching small relationship and communication classes out of my home. The feedback was consistent and humbling: this helped me see things I couldn’t see before.

So I directly, quietly, and sincerely, asked God, the universe, whatever was listening: am I supposed to be doing something more with this?

Every single time I asked, within twenty-four hours, I got an answer. A random call from a friend of a friend asking for a book recommendation. A colleague stopping me in the hallway to ask how to stop arguing with their spouse. Confirmations that were too consistent and too specific to be coincidence.

I paid attention.

June 2, 2010

Then came the health scare.

Doctors thought I had a brain tumor. The week of not knowing was the kind that rearranges your priorities without asking permission. Everything looks different when you’re waiting for news like that.

On June 2, 2010, I found out I didn’t have a brain tumor.

And I decided, that day, with that specific kind of clarity that only a close call can produce, that I was done waiting for the right moment to do the work I was meant to do. I stopped simply teaching classes and started working with people individually. One couple at a time. One conversation at a time.

I have never looked back.

What I Bring to This Work

My background is not what you might expect.

My degree is in cultural geography. It’s the study of how people, patterns, and places interact. How religion, language, migration, and culture shape the way human beings see the world and each other. It taught me to look for patterns, to see systems, and to understand that the way one person sees a situation is almost never the only valid way to see it.

I also studied psychology in college, and in my twenties became a certified hypnotherapist. I learned early that the mind and body are in constant conversation, and that how we breathe, think, and process emotion shapes everything about how we show up in our relationships.

I spent twenty-five years teaching college. I loved it and I have the heart of a teacher. This means I am less interested in being right than in being useful. And more committed to helping people understand something than to impressing them with what I know.

And I have been married. Twice. The first time taught me what not to do and why. The second time, with a wonderful man who happens to be a therapist, has taught me every day what it looks like when two people genuinely choose each other and keep choosing.

I bring all of it to this work.

What I Actually Believe

I believe most troubled marriages can be saved. Not all, but most.

I believe it because I have seen it too many times to believe otherwise. Couples who arrived at my door certain their marriage was over, some already having filed for divorce, have left having built something stronger and more honest than anything they’d experienced before. That is not wishful thinking. That is a pattern I have witnessed repeatedly across fifteen years of working with struggling couples.

I also believe that the way you work on a marriage matters as much as whether you work on it.

My approach is solution-focused, collaborative, and goal-oriented. We are not here to build a case against your partner. We are not here to assign blame or relitigate every grievance from the last decade. We are here to understand, specifically, to understand the unmet needs underneath the conflict, because that is where the real work lives. A slight, a betrayal, a recurring argument, these are not just events. They are meanings.

And understanding the meaning your partner has made of something is more healing than continuing to use that something against them.

We humans are meaning-makers. What we decide something means shapes everything about how we respond to it. That meaning is almost always worth examining.

I also believe this: the past is the placeholder for lessons. You are not supposed to dwell there. Your future is the magnet that draws you toward greater things. And the present, the right now, this moment is your only point of power.

– Reflect on the past.
– Dream about the future.
– Use the present to take action to create your best life together.

That is not a motivational poster. That is a clinical orientation. The couples who move forward are the ones who stop waiting for their partner to finally become who they need them to be, and start building, together, in the present, something worth moving toward.

I believe that different does not equal wrong. And that two people can approach the same situation from completely different directions and both be valid. I believe that the filter every couple needs is not what do I want but what is best for us. And that those answers, when people are willing to think beyond the immediate and toward the long term, are often more aligned than they realize.

And I believe, deeply, from experience, that it is better to have a tough conversation than a tough situation.

That belief is the foundation of everything I do.

Who I Work With

I work with couples who are struggling and not sure what comes next. Couples who have tried other approaches and still feel stuck. Couples where one person is ready to leave and the other isn’t. Couples who love each other and can’t figure out why that isn’t enough.

I work with people who are what I identify as On Decision. They are facing the question of whether to stay and fight for the marriage, end it as gracefully as possible, or wait until the timing makes more sense.

And I work with individuals who are ready to understand their own patterns, what they brought into the relationship, what they’d want to do differently, and what a genuinely healthy partnership could look like for them.

If any of that sounds like where you are, I’d be glad to talk.

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