Where Healing Actually Happens

There’s a reason some people leave therapy feeling clearer, more grounded, and more themselves-and others leave feeling more confused than when they started.

Often, the difference isn’t motivation, intelligence, or effort. It’s the lens through which their experiences are being understood.

Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT) begins with a simple but radical premise: human suffering does not exist in isolation. Our symptoms, coping strategies, and survival patterns are shaped within relationships—past and present, personal, cultural, and historical. And because of that, healing must also be relational.

Relationships as the Unit of Care

Unlike individual models rooted in diagnosis and symptom reduction alone, MFT is grounded in systems thinking. This means we look at how people are shaped by—and in turn shape—the families, partnerships, institutions, communities, and cultures they move through.

From this perspective, distress is not a personal failure, it’s information about: 

• nervous systems adapting to unsafe environments‍
• roles and rules learned early and carried forward‍
• stories that once protected us, but now limit our capacity

When therapy focuses only on the individual, change often stays at the surface. MFT, by contrast, is oriented toward second- and third-order change, the kind that alters patterns, beliefs, and values, not just feelings. This is where real integration happens: when the underlying assumptions of the system shift, not just the behavior of one person inside the system.

Why Capacity Matters More Than Coping

Many therapeutic models focus on managing symptoms, especially in the managed care framework that drives mental healthcare through phrases like "medical necessity." While coping tools can be useful, they often leave deeper questions untouched:

Why did this pattern emerge in the first place?
What context made it necessary?
What wisdom does it hold?

Systems therapy is less interested in “fixing” and more interested in expanding capacity—the ability to respond with flexibility, agency, and self-trust across changing environments and naturally evolving relationships.

What was once extraordinarily adaptive can become maladaptive as our environments, relationships, and selves change but our rules and narratives remain the same.

This is why MFT work is often surprisingly efficient. When patterns are addressed relationally-within couples, families, or even internalized relationship maps-change can happen quickly and sustainably. The system reorganizes. New options become possible, and new stories emerge.

Narrative Therapy: Reauthoring What Was Never Wrong

Narrative Therapy has become central to my work because it honors both context and dignity. Rather than locating problems inside people, it asks how problems have influenced lives and how people have already resisted, survived, and reshaped those influences.

This approach is especially powerful for survivors of sexual and relational violence.

Instead of reinforcing labels that collapse identity into trauma, narrative work creates space to:

• Externalize the problem (violence, shame, silence)
• Map its impact without blame
• Identify moments of agency, resistance, and choice
• Invite witnesses who can reflect strength back to the survivor

Healing, here, is not about erasing the past. It’s about restoring authorship.

From the Therapy Room to Larger Systems

This relational lens doesn’t stop at the therapy door.

In my work supporting systems like the U.S. Navy’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, narrative and systemic frameworks help shift conversations away from individual blame and toward structural accountability. Culture, policy, and power all shape outcomes and lasting change requires us to address those contexts directly.

The same is true for helping professionals and advocates. Without systemic support, even the most compassionate people burn out. Capacity must be cultivated not only in individuals, but in the systems that hold them.

My systems orientation is why I also advocate for change within my profession. The rules of MFT must also continuously adapt in order to better serve clinicians like myself and the people who entrust us with safeguarding their stories and helping their relationships evolve.

This Is Not Therapy as Usual

Marriage and Family Therapy-and narrative work in particular-offers something different:

• Transparency instead of mystification
• Collaboration instead of hierarchy
• Depth instead of diagnosis alone

This work is not about fixing who you are. It’s about remembering what has always been true beneath the noise, and sometimes identifying the sources of those inputs.

But you are not broken. Your patterns make sense. And with the right relational support, there is space for something new to emerge.