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What fourteen years of open relating has actually taught me, written from inside the experience. I am writing this tonight while my nesting partner is at a sexuality festival with no phone reception. No contact. No quick reassuring text. Just trusting, and being with me. I want to be honest with you: I had a little tear last night. I long for his cuddles. I bought myself a bunch of self-care things, made some art, called a friend, caught up on things around the house, rested.

The relationship you have with yourself is the foundational one. Every other relationship in your life, the way you love, the way you receive love, the way you show up, the way you leave, is shaped from here. Not partially, fundamentally. This isn't a self help idea. It's a relational truth. When you know yourself, really know yourself, you bring something different into connection with others. You stop looking for someone else to tell you who you are. You stop outsourcing yo

I forgave you. I want to be clear about what that means, and what it doesn't. Forgiveness was never about you. It wasn't a gift I was offering, or a door I was opening, or a signal that what happened was okay. It was something I did quietly, in my own body, for my own life. A release. A putting down of something heavy that was never mine to carry in the first place. I'm not bitter and I'm not holding a grudge. I genuinely wish you well. But I have also seen you clearly. You s

When multiple hearts are on the line, everything gets more real. The tenderness gets more real. The fear gets more real. The desire, the history, the healing that walks in the door with every person you choose to love. All of it, more present, more honest, more asking something of you. And when multiple hearts are on the line, the undercurrents really begin to reveal themselves. Alive, and popping up their heads. To stab, or run, or hide, or reach. The parts of us we thought

A boundary is not a wall you build to keep people out. It is an act of self-knowledge. The honest, sometimes tender reckoning with where you begin and where you end. How close someone can actually come to you for love to still exist in the room. Most of us were never taught this. We learned, instead, to make ourselves smaller. To prioritise the comfort of others. To abandon ourselves in service of keeping the peace. We learned that being "good" meant being pliable, available,

We all know chemistry. That pull toward someone that you didn't choose and couldn't explain if you tried. The way everything sharpens when they walk into a room, the way your body registers them before your mind has caught up. Time moves differently. You feel more yourself somehow, and also completely undone, all at once. We fall in love inside that feeling. And then, without really noticing it's happening, we slowly dismantle the very conditions that created it. And here's t

Recently, I found myself in new and uncomfortable emotional terrain. I had never been here before. And it was confusing in the way that only truly new experiences can be. The kind of confusion that doesn't have a map yet, where your nervous system is scanning for something familiar to hold onto and finding nothing. My first impulse was to reach for distraction. For comfort. For anything that might fix it, explain it, or fast-forward through it. I wanted out. But I knew there

And here's why you should work with me. I feel deeply. I make genuine contact. When you are in the room with me, I am actually there with you. Not performing presence. Not waiting for my turn to speak. Truly, fully there. I am deeply sensitive human. I have had to learn how to live with that sensitivity, and now I thrive in it. It has most certainly been overwhelming at times. It has also been the greatest gift of my life. It is why I can feel what is happening in a room befo

And your relationship with discomfort is most honestly revealed inside your relationships with others. You can think you've done the work. You can have years of therapy behind you, a somatic practice, a journalling ritual, a whole interior landscape you've tended carefully. And then someone you love says the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and the body tells the truth. That's where the real data is. Not on the cushion. Not in the quiet of your own company. But in the charged

I heard a version of the same thing from several people in my session room this week. Different stories, different relationships, different losses. But the same thread running through all of them: why can't I just move through this faster? Grief, transition, the end of something that mattered. We want to be on the other side of it. We are impatient with ourselves, uncomfortable in the in-between, and quietly ashamed of how long it's taking. So we push. We get busy. We rationa

We are very good at not feeling. We suppress. We avoid. We stay busy, stay numb, stay anywhere but inside the thing that is trying to surface. We reach for the phone before our feet have even hit the floor. We pour the wine before we’ve taken our coat off. We fill every quiet moment before it has the chance to say something we aren’t ready to hear. And underneath all of it, quietly, something waits. We didn’t arrive here by accident. We were taught this. By systems that rewa

On freedom, self-knowledge, and the inner work no one warns you about. Open relating sounds like freedom. More love. More connection. More possibility. The idea that you don't have to choose, that love doesn't have to be scarce, that the heart has room for more than one. This is the version that draws people in. And honestly, it is not wrong. But it is incomplete. Because what open relating will actually give you, if you let it, is not primarily more connection with others. I

Something ends. And life, somewhat rudely, keeps going. The inbox still fills, the kids still need lunch, the assignments still have due dates and work is piling up. There's this impossible tension of grief sitting right next to the ordinary demands of being human, and nobody really tells you how to hold both at once. So this is for that in-between space. For the days when you're functioning on the outside and quietly falling apart on the inside. For the moments when you don'

It's what happens in the aftermath that tells you something true about a relationship. Repair isn't a perfectly worded apology. It's not flowers or a long text sent at midnight. Those things can matter, but they're not repair. Not really. Repair is the congruence. It's what you do lining up with what you say. It's returning to the conversation with more care than last time, and then actually being different in the next moment that tests you. Sorry without change is just a hol

Most conversations about open relating start in the wrong place. They start with structures. Agreements. Logistics. Who knows what, when. How to tell your family. How to manage jealousy. What the rules are. And those things matter. I'm not dismissing them at all. But underneath all of it, underneath every conversation about agreements and boundaries and communication, is a quieter, more demanding question. Do you actually know yourself? Here's what I've noticed, working with

There's always one person afraid of losing the other, and one afraid of losing themselves. That tension lives in the body before it ever becomes a conversation. It shows up as a hand that reaches a little too often, or a chest that quietly closes when someone gets too close. We don't always know which one we are. And the truth is, we're usually both. At different times, with different people, in different seasons of the same relationship. It flips. The one who once clung beco

The awareness is always the beginning. But it was never meant to be the whole story. I've found myself walking through the same process with a few different clients this week. Not because I planned it, but because it kept being what was needed. So I thought I'd write it down. A lot of therapy lives in awareness. The why, the how, the where it came from. Understanding what triggers you, tracing it back, naming it. And that work matters. It really does. But two clients said som

My boyfriend and I are going on dates tonight. Yes, you read that correctly. We are a polyamorous couple, and tonight we are both going on dates. Separate locations. Different people. Same night. It didn't intentionally land this way, it just did. And it got me thinking about something that doesn't get spoken about enough in open relating. What do you do with yourself while your lover is out with someone else? How you tend to that space says everything about where you are in

There is a difference between asking "can I go on a date?" and saying "I'm going on a date, how does that feel for you?" One is asking for permission. The other is moving from autonomy, while turning toward the people you love. This distinction matters deeply to me. In open relating, I don't believe we need to seek permission from our partners to live, explore, connect or follow desire. But I do believe we owe each other consideration, care, and slowness. Before anything move

Most couples don't arrive at therapy because everything is falling apart. They arrive because something quiet has been building for a long time. A distance that crept in slowly. A fight that keeps returning, wearing different clothes. A season of life that changed everything, and somehow the two of you got lost in the middle of it. Therapy isn't a last resort. For many, it's the first honest conversation in a while. Here are some of the most common reasons couples find their