01
Recurring conflict and communication
Understanding the conversations that keep repeating and developing different ways to raise concerns, listen, respond, repair, and make decisions together.
Relationships, marital & premarital
Sometimes the argument is not really about the argument.
You may keep returning to the same disagreement even when both of you want things to be different.
I work with couples and partners across Georgia who want to understand what keeps happening between them, what each person is carrying, and what might actually help the relationship move forward.
When the same thing keeps happening
The pattern can become bigger than the problem that started it.
One person brings something up.
The other feels criticized, misunderstood, controlled, dismissed, or overwhelmed.
Someone pursues the conversation.
Someone pulls away.
The conversation gets louder, longer, colder, or more familiar.
Eventually you may be arguing not only about what happened today, but about everything this particular disagreement has come to represent.
Relationship work can help us slow that pattern down enough to see what is actually happening between you.
Then we can decide what needs to change.
What we might work on
Relationships carry more than communication.
02
Household labor and mental load
Looking at who notices, remembers, plans, initiates, delegates, completes, and follows up on the work required to keep a household and family functioning. This is not only about dividing chores. It can also be about ownership, responsibility, recognition, fairness, and rest.
03
Roles, expectations, and fairness
Examining the spoken and unspoken assumptions about what each partner should do, provide, manage, sacrifice, or prioritize.
04
Trust, connection, and repair
Working with disconnection, resentment, hurt, unmet expectations, and the process of rebuilding a sense that both people can participate in the relationship differently.
05
Family influence and boundaries
Looking at the ways parents, siblings, extended family, culture, and family-of-origin expectations can enter the relationship.
06
Transitions and changing roles
Navigating marriage, parenthood, career changes, caregiving, relocation, changing finances, shifting responsibilities, and other periods when an arrangement that once worked may no longer fit.
The work between you
The goal is not to decide who is the problem.
Couples can become very good at presenting evidence.
Who started it.
Who does more.
Who remembers correctly.
Who has already tried.
Who needs to change first.
Those questions may contain important information, but they can also keep a couple inside the same argument.
I am interested in what is happening between you.
What pattern have you built together?
What does each person do when that pattern begins?
What is each person protecting, asking for, avoiding, or carrying?
Where is responsibility clear, and where has it become blurred?
What would each person need to do differently for the relationship itself to function differently?
This does not mean treating every problem as equally caused or every behavior as equally harmful.
It means looking carefully at the relationship without reducing the entire problem to one person.
Premarital work
You do not have to wait for a crisis to talk about how you want to build a life together.
Premarital work can create space for conversations that are easy to postpone when a relationship is going well.
We can talk about expectations around:
- Money
- Household responsibilities
- Children and parenting
- Family boundaries
- Religion and belief
- Sex and intimacy
- Career
- Rest and leisure
- Decision-making
- Conflict
- Caregiving
- Traditions
- Roles and responsibilities
The purpose is not to eliminate disagreement before marriage.
It is to become more intentional about the agreements, expectations, and ways of handling differences that you are bringing into it.
Household labor & mental load
Sometimes “helping more” is not the same as sharing ownership.
Household labor is one of the places where relationship expectations become visible.
A task may look shared from the outside while one person is still responsible for noticing that it needs to happen, remembering when it needs to happen, deciding how it will happen, asking for help, and checking that it was completed.
That difference can affect fairness, trust, resentment, rest, and the way partners experience one another.
This area of my work also informed Nilea, a tool I created to help make household labor, mental load, ownership, and fairness easier to see and discuss.
Explore NileaWhen beliefs change
Sometimes a relationship has to make room for questions neither person expected.
Changes in religion, spirituality, or belief can affect much more than what happens on a particular day of the week.
They can raise questions about identity, values, parenting, family relationships, traditions, community, sexuality, and the future a couple thought they were building together.
Partners do not always change in the same direction or at the same pace.
Relationship work can make room for those differences without assuming that one person must adopt the other’s beliefs.
Religious trauma & deconstructionHow I work
Understanding the pattern matters. Changing how you participate in it matters too.
My approach is relational, systemic, holistic, integrative, and engaged.
I pay attention to the relationship between the two of you, but also to the larger context surrounding it.
That can include family history, culture, identity, work, parenting, caregiving, belief, money, household responsibilities, stress, and the expectations each person learned about what relationships are supposed to look like.
We will ask questions and make room for complexity.
We will also look for choices.
- What can be said differently?
- What needs to become explicit?
- What needs an agreement?
- What boundary is missing?
- What responsibility needs clearer ownership?
- What repair is possible?
- What does each person want to practice outside the therapy session?
Therapy in Georgia
You do not have to solve the relationship before you come in.
I work with couples and partners located throughout Georgia via telehealth.
You can come in knowing exactly what you want to work on, or simply knowing that the way things have been going is no longer working for you.
We can start there.