Somatic Therapy for Relationships

Change is inevitable.

The question is: are you willing to change together?

Get the tools to learn how.

I support relationships with building resilience for life’s ups, downs, and changes.

In this work, we’re often answering the question: how do we feel connected even when things are hard?

Answering this question often looks like connecting to what’s already feeling good, getting to the root of what’s hurting, finding the longing underneath the fear, shut down, or resentment, and practicing the tools to feel connected to your individual selves and your relationship at the same time.

This is brave work that requires willingness from both partners to show up and practice. This work is also simple—not asking you to perform perfection, only asking you to slow down and bring what’s present into relationship.

Starting relationship therapy can bring up a lot, and I want you to know that it is not just a practice of turning towards what is hard week after week, but also a practice of tending to what feels good.

This is a space to garden your love together—to pull the weeds and to smell the flowers.

Hi, I’m Shallyn!

I work with romantic relationships, friendships, and other partnerships that are seeking support with:

  • how to navigate traumas and triggers in connection

  • how to work with blame and shame when they inevitably show up in conflict

  • communicating, loving, and understanding across differences (i.e. different cultures, different neurotypes, different sexual identities, different races, different experiences of gender, different class experiences, different experiences with illness and disability, etc.)

  • embarking on a mutual process of understanding how your pasts are informing your present

  • finding what works for your relationship beyond “shoulds,” norms, and expectations

  • how to understand and work with attachment patterns in relationship

  • how to practice rupture and repair (and build trust that when there’s rupture, repair is on its way)

  • how to slow down your conflicts and really hear one another

  • mapping how your nervous systems respond to one another

  • knowing when and how to co-regulate and when and how to self-soothe

  • recovering intimacy

  • nurturing trust and safety as a consistent practice

  • holding emerging or shifting sexuality and/or gender identity in relationship

  • moving between relationship models (i.e. monogamy, polyamory, openness, etc.)

  • processing relationship transitions & change

  • deciding whether or not to stay in relationship

  • holding (potentially or seemingly competing) needs, wants, & boundaries

Relationships are beautiful and complex.

Somatic Therapy can give your relationship the tools it needs to reconnect with its beauty and navigate its complexity.

Breaking Patterns

We create patterns that others depend on and then, the last thing we ever imagined happens: we grow and change and then, to stay vital, we must break the patterns we created.

There is no blame or fault in this. It is commonplace in nature. Watch the ocean and the shore do their dance of buildup and crumble, and you’ll see this happen daily.

What is difficult at this juncture is to resist complying with how others see us or witholding who we really are.

The challenge—which I don’t do well, but stay committed to—is to say to those we love:

“I am more than I have shown you, and more than you are willing to see. Let us work our love and know each other more fully.”

-Mark Nepo