Decolonized & Sex-Positive Somatic Relational Therapy

“All Real Living is Meeting” - Martin Buber

As we wound in relationships, so we heal in relationships.

I work with dyads, triads, polycules, co-parents, metamours and other folx navigating ethical non-monogamy. My practice centers BIPOC, QTBIPOC, trans/non-binary/third gender, 2SLGBTQIA+ folx. I am particularly interested in helping folks explore diverse ways of connecting and healing intergenerational trauma patterns in relationships. I hold values of pleasure activism, sex-positivity, and being of service to folx deconstructing traditional relational structures and exploring Poly, CNM, ENM, Kink practices within cultural context.

I help folks explore the ways patterns of communication, embodiment, power, connection, boundaries, intimacy, sex, and love play out in relationships. I will work with you to build concrete coping skills to interrupt harmful relational patterns and build deeper, authentic, mutually respectful connection. I recommend 60 minute sessions for dyads and 75-90 minute sessions for 3+ folks.

I am also influenced by the following therapeutic perspectives:

Decolonizing Somatic Resource Models: Working to build concrete distress tolerance, emotional regulation, relational, and communication skills to identify and interrupt habituated relational patterns that no longer serve you, and practicing new ways of being with each other. Highlighting and refining existing resources. Somatically re-excavating resources buried by colonization in the body.

Attachment: & Interpersonal Neurobiology: We all have habituated patterns of connecting and disconnecting from early childhood that play out in relationships. On an attachment approach we look how these patterns are manifesting in the relationship and build coping skills to shift towards attachment and communication patterns more in line with your current relational values.

Intersectional Diversity: I invite couples to explore the ways in which cultural positioning, social identity, power, privilege, and oppression play out in relational dynamics. At times, this may lead to challenging internalized and relational patterns of oppression and working towards a more liberated relational frame. I work from a sex-positive frame and am allied with 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. I am sex-positive, kink friendly, poly friendly and support ethical/consensual non-monogamy.

Somatic Therapy: I aim to help you build deeper connections of body, heart, and mind so you can attune more deeply with one another. I highlight not just what is said, but how is it said, verbally and non-verbally, and inviting you both to be with what you are sensing, thinking, and feeling in the present moment in relationship to each other. Somatic Therapy also deeply compliments attachment approaches, as the subtle ways in which we attach (connect, disconnect, and communicate) with each other are often non-verbal and embodied. Somatic or Body Psychotherapy is the general modern name given to practices that often have their roots in embodied cultural ways of knowing communities of color have been practicing for ages.

Narrative psychology: Oral storytelling has been a healing part of many communities of color long before white academia discovered narrative psychology. I help couples in identifying, deconstructing, reforming, and retelling the stories, assumptions, interpretations, meanings they bring into a relationship. Sometimes these stories are limiting, rigid, inflexible, ways of coping people have learned at an early age that perhaps no longer serve the relationship. In couples therapy, you collaborate to shift from limiting stories to creative, flexible stories that are more true to your current values, and flexible enough to adapt to your specific and nuanced lived-experiences today.