Relational & Attachment Therapy · Austin, TX & New York
Depth-oriented therapy for adults stuck in repeating relationship patterns, struggling with intimacy and closeness, or caught between knowing what they do and being unable to change it. In-person in Austin, TX and telehealth across Texas and New York.
Get in Touch The ApproachThe Approach
Most people who come to this work are not confused about themselves. They can tell you exactly what they do, how they pull away when someone gets close, why they end up in the same kind of relationship, how their fear of being a burden keeps them from asking for what they need. They've often read the books. Done the therapy. They understand their patterns.
And they're still in them.
That gap is where this work lives. Relational patterns operate largely outside awareness. They're not failures of understanding, they're unconscious organizations of experience that formed early and have been running ever since. Knowing about them, even knowing them well, doesn't automatically reach the level where they actually live.
What reaches that level is what happens between two people. The therapeutic relationship is not just a container for the work, it is the work. The same patterns that play out in a client's life outside will eventually surface inside the room, in what gets enacted between therapist and client. That's not a problem to manage. It's the material. Working with what shows up in the relationship directly, in real time, is where something actually shifts.
Currently accepting new clients →"Understanding your patterns is the beginning. Having a different experience inside a relationship is what actually changes them."
What This Work Addresses
The same dynamic across different relationships, different partners, different contexts. A different cast of characters and the same feeling at the end. The pattern is not bad luck. It has a logic, and it can be understood.
Wanting closeness and finding it hard to let people in. Or letting people in too quickly and then feeling exposed. Or oscillating between the two. These patterns usually started as adaptations to something earlier.
Difficulty saying no, taking up space, or having needs. The sense that your job in a relationship is to manage other people's comfort. Often accompanied by resentment that builds quietly underneath.
Relationships that feel perpetually precarious, either fearing people will leave, or fearing they'll get too close. Sometimes both, in different relationships or at different moments in the same one.
How It Works
Relational patterns don't come from nowhere. They formed in response to early experiences and became organized largely outside of awareness. The work involves bringing that history into view, not as explanation or excuse, but as something that can finally be examined rather than just repeated.
The therapeutic relationship is where the unconscious material becomes visible. What a client does in relation to the therapist, how closeness feels, what gets avoided, what gets enacted, is usually a version of what happens everywhere else. Working with that directly, as it's happening, is what makes this different from talking about patterns in the abstract.
Change comes through having a different experience inside a relationship, not just understanding the old one better. That takes time and a certain kind of attention. It's the work this kind of therapy is designed for.
FAQ
Therapy that works with the unconscious patterns shaping how you relate to others, including how early experiences organized the ways you connect, protect yourself, and manage closeness. A central part of the work is what shows up in the therapeutic relationship itself, which tends to be a live version of what happens everywhere else.
Yes. That gap is exactly where this work operates. Insight alone rarely changes relational behavior, which runs mostly below the level of conscious decision-making. This work goes beneath understanding to the level where patterns actually live.
Yes. Relational patterns show up everywhere, in friendships, at work, with family, and in the relationship with yourself. Being single doesn't mean there's nothing relational to work on.
No. This is individual therapy focused on your own patterns, attachment style, and inner world. Couples therapy is a different modality and is not offered here.
Yes, across Texas and in New York via Attune Psychotherapy.
Sessions start at $175, with sliding scale availability. In Austin the practice is private pay. In New York, Aetna and Cigna are accepted through Attune.
Get in Touch
If you've spent time understanding yourself and still find yourself in the same patterns, this work might be what you're looking for. Reach out for a brief consultation.