All Posts

There’s a particular kind of magic that happens when we love someone over time. Not just the obvious things, the shared meals and inside jokes and the way they know how you take your tea, but something quieter and more profound. Slowly, often without noticing, the person we love begins to bring out parts of us we didn’t know were there, or parts we’d forgotten, or parts we’d been waiting our whole lives for someone to see. I often ask couples a simple question in sessions, an

I didn’t plan for FF couples to become one of the most common dynamics in my practice, but somewhere along the way, they did. Couple after couple arrived in my room, on my screen, and I began to notice the threads that kept weaving through their relationships. This has become some of the most tender and alive work I do, and I want to share a little of what I’ve learned. When I say FF, I mean couples where both people were assigned female at birth and live with a female hormo

You are teaching the people closest to you, your partner, your family, your friends, what you will accept, what you will quietly absorb, and how far they can go before anything changes. Sit with that for a moment, because it asks something of us. It asks us to look not only at how we are being treated, but at the part we play in keeping it that way. How the teaching happens Nobody sits their partner down and says, you can be late every time and I'll still cook dinner. Nobody

The truth is, one of the biggest reasons I chose open relating was because infidelity was so present in my early years of relating. I was someone who was keen and open to sharing, even from the very beginning. With my first boyfriend and my best friend, I was open to sharing love, because I simply loved to share love. I never really subscribed to the usual monogamous conditioning, even from an early age. But as I moved into my later teens, I kept meeting the same contradictio

Infidelity happens. It's more common than many of us realise, and it's so often hidden beneath layers of shame. And it happens in monogamous and open relationships alike. When it arises, it can be deeply isolating, even inside the relationship itself. We shame ourselves. We shame our partner. And we fear the gaze of others. Why did she stay? Why didn't she just leave him? They could have worked on it. There is no right or wrong here. Every person, and every relationship, carr

There is a moment in almost every conflict where something in us takes over. The voice gets sharper or goes quiet, the chest tightens, the jaw sets, and before we've chosen anything at all we're already halfway down a road we've walked a hundred times before. Most of us know this road intimately. We just rarely notice we're on it until we're somewhere we didn't want to be. What I see again and again, in the room with couples and with people working on how they relate, is that

If you're reading this, you probably already know there's more available to you. More depth in your intimacy, more presence in your pleasure, more of that connected and alive feeling where sex stops being something you do and becomes something you're inside of. What I've come to understand, in my own body and alongside the people I sit with, is that the way into that depth isn't through better technique or more effort, it's through the body itself, through learning to feel wh

Before you read on, take a moment to notice your body. Where is your breath moving easily, and where does it seem to stop? Is anything held in your jaw, your shoulders, your belly? You don't need to change a thing. Just let yourself arrive here, in the place where all of this actually happens. Every feeling begins as sensation. Before anger has a story, it's heat rising through the chest and a jaw that wants to set. Before grief has words, it's a pressure behind the eyes and

On repeating cycles, giving grace, and letting the healthy adult lead There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from finding yourself back in the same place over and over again. The same ache, the somehow same kind of relationship, the same moment where you notice yourself bending a little further than you meant to, and the same quiet voice afterwards asking, why do I keep doing this? again? If you know that voice, I want to begin by saying something gently. Don't be

It's taken me a while to write this. I recently ended a relationship because one of my non-negotiables was crossed. It was a hard choice to make, really hard. There was love there, real tenderness, and part of me wanted to find a way through. But I knew it wasn't something I could see us coming back from, and I knew my body no longer felt safe with him. I want to write about this, not to tell his story, but because I think non-negotiables are some of the most important and le

Heartbreak asks a lot of the body and the heart. It reaches into our sleep, our appetite, our sense of who we are, and the way we move through an ordinary day. These aren't fixes, and they don't make the grief go away, but they're the small, steady ways I'm caring for myself while I move through it. 1. Keeping no contact. We didn't go straight into no contact, and the dance in and out hurt more than the ending itself. Now we're holding the line, as a boundary of care. Each ti

In my recent breakup, we didn't go straight into no contact, and it was rough. We danced in and out, a message here, a conversation there, some light hang outs, each one opening the wound a little further just as it was starting to close. I was so heartbroken, my feelings and sensitivities so high, and every bit of contact sent my whole system back to the hurt. We're in no contact now, moving towards our separation, and even though I deeply miss them, I'm grateful this is wha

I've been moving through a breakup, and if I'm honest, my body has been more of a teacher than my mind. My mind understood the ending fairly early, but my body is taking its own time. It keeps reaching toward what it knew, wanting the voice, the touch, the familiar relief of contact, wanting a quick fix for a pain that doesn't really have one. So I've had to slow down and notice. To feel the pull to reach and the equally strong need to pull back, not away from love, but towar

How do you play? I mean that as a real question, not a rhetorical one. So many of us have lost our access to play somewhere along the way to adulthood. It got buried under responsibility, under seriousness, under the quiet belief that being an adult, or being in a serious relationship, means being composed. Boring. But play, play my darling, is not the opposite of intimacy. It might actually be one of its deepest forms. Think about the last time you were truly silly with your

Have you ever found yourself getting really irritated by someone's behaviour, almost like it hits a nerve you did not even know you had? Maybe it is that one person at work who always seems too confident, or a friend who is overly emotional, or even someone you barely know who just rubs you the wrong way. It is easy to write it off as a personality clash, a difference in how we relate. But what if there is something more going on. Carl Jung put it simply. Everything that irri

I wonder if your familiar with this experience... The scroll that gives you a break from your reality. The glass of wine that isn't really about the wine. The shopping cart that always fills, or the delivers that arrive and you can't remember ordering. The cigarette you didn't even want but your hand somehow ended up with. The way your fingers through your phone without awareness to social media. The snacking that stops when the box is finished. We've been taught to see these

There's a thought that keeps so many relationships holding their shape long after the shape has stopped being true. The thought goes something like this: if I stop reaching, if I stop bridging the gap, if I stop being the one who softens and adjusts and holds the whole thing together, it will all fall apart. So you keep reaching. You play the role your partner needs someone to play. You become the regulated one, the flexible one, the one who understands, the one who doesn't a

Before any of us had language for want or need, we had a body. And that body was already learning, long before we could name it, what was safe to reach for and what wasn't. So many of us grew up in homes where children were meant to be seen and not heard, where a want voiced too plainly got called greedy, or too much, and a need voiced too plainly got met with irritation, or silence, or something worse. As children we took what was offered, what was allowed, because that was

There's a myth we've been sold about safety, and most of us have been quietly organising our whole relational lives around it. The myth goes something like this, out there somewhere is a person who will finally make us feel safe. Once we find them, once we do the work, once we get the relationship right, the risk will stop. The world will soften. We'll finally be able to exhale. I want to gently take that myth apart, because I think it's costing people something. Not the desi

Honesty is the floor, not the ceiling. Most people think honesty is the whole job. Don't lie. Don't cheat. Answer the question when you're asked. Tick the box, call it integrity, call the relationship "honest." It's not nothing. But it's the floor, not the ceiling. Here's my take on the differences and why I see them valuable, to understand the difference. Honesty Honesty is reactive. It's what happens when something is asked of you and you tell the truth instead of a lie. It