When clients come to me for somatic healing, there is almost always physical, emotional, and psychological pain they are holding from unresolved conflicts.

Within Western culture, all of us have chronically low capacity to address the daily tensions in our close relationships. We’ve lost the muscle of working through our differences, or we never learned it to begin with. What we learned is to blame, shame, and separate.

But most of us simply don’t have the time or desire to relearn skills for repairing conflict. From little unspoken hurts to debilitating breakdowns, our best bet is getting outside support.

And here is where I see typical therapy or mediation fail. Therapy asks for years of “working on ourselves,” which often depletes our energy rather than restoring it. While mediation reinforces a dynamic of being against each other, focusing on “winning,” or at least “not losing.”

When working with conflicts, it’s not the time to heal anyone. We only heal and grow when we feel safe and trusting. Deep conflicts arise because trust and capacity have withered. This is why I bring a lot of my own capacity and trust to the table, and focus on restoring that within the relationship as much as possible.

This gets us pretty far to resolving a conflict, but there’s even more at play, which mediation fails to address. For conflicts to actually resolve, it is also important to bring light to the historical forces at work in the relationship. All of us have been shaped in different ways (and with disproportionate impacts) by our past experiences, relationships, cultures, and proximity to power and privilege. These differences always shape how each of us shows up in conflict. They are often unrecognized, but hugely responsible for the root causes.

I help illuminate all the unseen dynamics that led to a conflict — the histories, beliefs, triggers, and misunderstandings. To keep it from recurring, I help create new practices and agreements that satisfy everyone’s different needs.