This summer marks 16 years since I started Clarity Counseling Seattle.
I’ve never paid much attention to business anniversaries, but 16 years feels like a good reason to stop for a moment and think about what I’ve learned—not so much about running a therapy practice, but about relationships, change, and what actually seems to help people.
I’ve been a therapist for more than 20 years. Over that time, my work has led me deeper into couples therapy, sex therapy, and approaches that help people understand the emotional patterns underneath what they do. Some things are much clearer to me now than they were when I started.
Most Relationship Work Is Actually Work on Yourself
All relationships take work, but I think people sometimes misunderstand what that means. Much of the work is not figuring out how to get your partner to behave differently. It’s understanding what happens inside you when the relationship becomes difficult.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS) and its couples therapy application, IFIO, this kind of inward shift is often called making a “U-turn.”
Instead of immediately focusing on what your partner just did wrong, you turn some attention toward yourself. What am I feeling right now? What is happening in my body? What meaning am I making out of what just happened? What part of me has gotten activated? And knowing all of that, how do I actually want to respond to my partner?
That doesn’t mean ignoring legitimate problems or taking responsibility for someone else’s behavior. It means developing enough awareness of your own internal experience that you have more choice about what you do next. It’s one of the ideas that shapes how we approach couples and relationship therapy at Clarity.
Sometimes You’re Using an Old Tool for a New Problem
One of the things I’ve become increasingly interested in is how often the strategies creating problems in an adult relationship began as pretty reasonable strategies much earlier in life.
Maybe you learned to become quiet when someone was angry. Maybe you fought hard to make sure you weren’t overlooked. Maybe you became extremely independent because depending on other people didn’t feel safe. Maybe you learned to please, withdraw, control, anticipate, argue, or disappear emotionally.
Those strategies may have helped you deal with parents, bullying, trauma, instability, rejection, or simply the normal difficulties of growing up. A strategy that helped you at 10 years old may be the wrong tool for the job when you’re sitting across from your partner decades later.
Your nervous system may still be trying to protect you, but it may be responding to the present as though it were the past. Therapy can help people understand where those patterns came from and develop ways of responding that fit the relationship they’re actually in now.
Therapy Can’t Stay in the Therapy Room
John Gottman famously distinguishes between the “masters” and “disasters” of relationships. Borrowing that language, I see a similar distinction in therapy: the “masters” aren’t simply the people who have good insights while they’re sitting in the office. They’re the people who allow what happens in therapy to change what they actually do once they leave.
They take what we talk about and practice in the office and bring it into their lives that week. They know what they’re working on, and it stays on their radar between appointments.
That’s why I often like beginning a session by asking something like: What can we celebrate since I last saw you? What felt like a win? What did you work on that you feel good about? What progress did you make on the piece you knew was yours to work on?
To me, that’s part of what being a “master” of a relationship looks like. It doesn’t mean doing everything perfectly. It means staying engaged with your own growth and practicing what you’re learning when your therapist isn’t there to help you do it.
The people who benefit most from therapy are usually willing to let the process change how they actually live, not just how they think during the hour they’re sitting with me.
Conflict Isn’t the Problem
Couples are often worried because they have conflict. I’m usually more interested in how they have conflict.
Healthy relationships need disagreement. There has to be a way for two different people to say, “Something about this isn’t working for me.” In fact, I can sometimes be more concerned when couples tell me they never have conflict, because that can mean they’ve become very good at avoiding subjects that need to be talked about.
Conflict isn’t the same thing as fighting, and a complaint isn’t necessarily either one.
Complaints get a bad rap in relationships, but we actually need to be able to say things like, “I felt alone when that happened,” “I need more help with this,” “I miss spending time with you,” or “I didn’t like the way we handled that.”
If the listening partner can stay open rather than immediately hearing the complaint as an attack, these conversations help partners understand each other and keep adjusting the relationship as life changes.
A healthy relationship is not one where nobody ever has a problem. It’s one where problems can be brought forward and talked about without the whole relationship feeling threatened.
I’ve written more about this in What Therapy Teaches Us About Relationship Conflict, including what may be happening underneath the surface issue couples are arguing about.
Sex Gets Harder When Desire Becomes the Scorecard
Working deeply with couples eventually led me to train extensively in sex and intimacy therapy, because relationship problems and sexual problems so often overlap.
One thing I wish more couples understood is that they can put too much emphasis on desire and not enough on pleasure. Sex educator and researcher Emily Nagoski uses a phrase I love: “Pleasure is the measure.”
Rather than continually asking, “Do I want sex enough?” or “Why doesn’t my partner desire me the way they used to?”, it can be much more useful to become curious about whether the sexual experiences you’re creating together are actually pleasurable.
One of my mentors put it another way that has stayed with me: let sex be about connection, pleasure, and play.
Long-term couples can also get frightened when the intensity they experienced early in the relationship changes. The honeymoon stage is powerful and exciting, but it is also temporary. Long-term intimacy asks something different of us.
Passion can still be very much alive, but couples often have to learn how to intentionally create the conditions for curiosity, pleasure, affection, novelty, and erotic connection rather than assuming those things should continue to happen automatically.
I explored this idea in more depth in Why Focusing on Pleasure Instead of Desire Can Transform Your Intimacy.
I’ve Had to Keep Growing, Too
My own development as a therapist has followed the needs of the people sitting in front of me.
Early in my career, I realized that even when I was working with an individual client, I needed to understand relationships much better. So I spent years studying couples therapy through books, workshops, consultation, and training, eventually becoming a Certified Gottman Therapist and developing a deep foundation in Emotionally Focused Therapy.
Then working with couples made something else obvious: I couldn’t adequately help many relationships without understanding their sexual relationships. That led to another long period of training and ultimately becoming a Certified Sex Therapist.
More recently, I’ve gone much deeper into Internal Family Systems (IFS) and its application to couples work, Intimacy From the Inside Out (IFIO).
I don’t think therapists ever really finish learning how to be therapists. At least I hope we don’t.
I want to keep building a skill set that helps me understand the person or relationship in front of me rather than forcing every client into the same way of working.
Clarity Has Changed, Too
For more than half of these 16 years, Clarity Counseling Seattle has been a group practice rather than just my own therapy practice, and that’s one of the things I’m most proud of.
Today I get to work alongside a team of clinicians who have also chosen to specialize deeply in relationships, intimacy, sexuality, and the emotional patterns that shape people’s lives.
What started as my own Seattle therapy practice in 2010 has gradually become a group of therapists doing this work together. Over time, Clarity has become known locally for work around relationships and intimacy, and it means a lot to me that the practice has grown in that direction.
Sometimes, It’s Time to Ask for Help
Maybe the biggest lesson isn’t particularly complicated.
I believe many of the answers about what needs to change in our lives are already somewhere within us. But if you could have figured everything out by yourself by now, you probably would have.
There comes a point when continuing to think harder, try harder, or repeat the same strategies doesn’t get you any further. Sometimes it’s time to ask for help from people who have dedicated their professional lives to helping people understand what is keeping them stuck and what might help them move differently.
You still have to do the work. A therapist can’t do that part for you. But you don’t necessarily have to figure out how to do the work on your own.
After more than 20 years of being a therapist and 16 years of Clarity Counseling Seattle, that may be one of the things I believe most strongly: it’s okay to ask for help getting somewhere you haven’t been able to get on your own.
If that feels like where you are right now, you can start here, tell us a little about what you’re looking for, and we’ll help you figure out what kind of support might fit.