Lifekey Couples - Specialized in Complex Trauma, Attachment, and Presence-Based Communication

Welcome to Lifekey Couples, mindful-somatic therapy for couples seeking safer, more productive conflict.

Welcome...

Welcome to the website.
The process of finding a counselor can feel a bit daunting - even moreso when trying to find a counselor that feels safe for two people that come from different backgrounds with seemingly opposing needs. Successful therapy depends on a variety of factors, and at the top of that list sits the essential requirement for all parties to feel equally seen, heard, understood, validated in their real, lived experience.
Everything we do, we do for a reason. And underneath the rational explanations, a more precise truth: whether we take a more analytical or emotional approach, emotions remain the underlying drive for most actions in most people. So a clear understanding (cognitive and experiential) of emotions remains an essential component in changing any relational dynamic.
This website serves as a living document. It actually changes every few months as I add, revise, or remove portions for use elsewhere. Hopefully, it will give you some sense of my approach. If you would like to know more about my process as a therapist, please feel free to reach out. Questions are welcome. And first sessions are always free.
For a basic overview of attachment and more on what you might expect in a therapy session with me, please visit Oregon Couples
For those that feel curious about emotions and attachment, beyond this line lies a theoretical framework that (for some people) may facilitate or speed-up the therapy process:

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Attachment Shapes Relationships

Attachment shapes the ways in which we navigate needs/emotions, both intrapersonally (within bodies) and interpersonally (between bodies). So, no matter what the topic of conversation, attachment reactions are going to play a part of every interaction in which dependence and emotions combine.
By its nature, attachment conflict remains a worldwide experience, not exclusive to humans. Through both nature and nurture, genetics and environment, attachment represents an experience often passed generationally through families, and it shapes the way we organize around emotional needs -- the rules that we internalize in childhood and beyond, later applied to each successive relationship.
In anxiously-dominant homes, family members often live blended lives, less often partaking in solo tasks, "in each other's business," finding both dis-ease and comfort in this space which may lack a sense of privacy. Members of the household get less alone-time in comparison to secure or avoidant homes and might internalize beliefs around aloneness as a threat to be avoided, framing it as inhumane isolation versus welcome solitude.
In anxious homes, at least one parent models anxious attachment strategies (make emotions bigger to get attention) and consciously or not conveys the belief that boundaries equal barriers to connection, that real love has no barriers.
In avoidantly-dominant homes, we often find an unspoken agreement to avoid burdening anyone. With a shared nonverbal language, boundaries are not spoken, because a sigh or a gesture serve as enough indication of burden. Each person remains responsible for their own emotions, not asking others for support. And the majority of personal expression remains highly filtered, meaning family members may spend time together - out of duty - without expecting to feel seen or heard. As children become more independent, parents and children may simply feel bored around each other, not verbalizing needs for fear of burdening anyone and therefore simply holding space and biding time with needs unmet.
People know each other, in these avoidant homes, at a surface level. Out of respect for each other, nobody 'pries' into the personal lives of their house-mates, instead simply expecting to function separately and very independently. Individuals tend to move off into their own spaces and focus on generally passive distractions when emotions become uncomfortable.
In avoidant homes, at least one parent models avoidant strategies: contain emotions to avoid burdening others. With this, family members carry built-in emotional-capacity meters and learn that their best chance of getting the most needs met lies in adapting to the capacities of others.
There is a special struggle (and some gifts) for the outliers in these homes – for the avoidant person in an anxious home or the anxious person in an avoidant home.

• In general, when we expect caregivers to respond with soft presence to our needs, we simply express them.
• When we are unsure about their response, this inconsistency triggers some panic, and we may learn through repetition that our emotions will more likely be met only if we draw enough attention. Most parents that reinforce anxious attachment are not doing so maliciously or intentionally. They may have any number of stressors demanding attention, and they bring their own attachment perceptions and strategies around emotional expression.
  When entering this anxious stance, our bodies move naturally to 'fight' mode, which in childhood may elicit support from caregivers. Especially in preverbal times, this energy was our primary form of communication, our only hope to draw attention. In adulthood, fight energy can feel overwhelming to partners and trigger their automated threat responses, creating a self-perpetuating feedback loop as partners pull further away, creating more panic and more fight.
• When we expect our needs to remain consistently unmet, we stop expressing them and move into self-sufficiency strategies, learning over time that we can trust ourselves more than others, that our needs only burden them. As this often happens early in life, even pre-verbally, we tend to rely on rudimentary biological mechanisms to self-soothe. In other words, our body protects us from overwhelm by automatically shifting into freeze and dissociation when emotions become too intense in self or others. This can feel like exhaustion. (Some people actually fall asleep at any sign of conflict.) It can also feel like resignation. And because freeze affects energy, access to language, and muscle tone, partners read us as flat and unresponsive, not present with them, which serves as a trigger for their anxious automations. Even when we are saying all the right words, nothing is landing in our anxious partner because our physical presentation is not congruent with our words.

Later in life, when meeting romantic partners, we tend to be drawn to people that represent something that our childhood homes were missing -- something we do not permit in ourselves -- like vulnerability or personal responsibility. Because these are modes, traits, behaviors, emotions that we have discarded or rejected within ourselves for the sake of survival, we eventually notice the urge to do the same to these traits in partners. If we struggle to communicate, we seek out someone to do the talking and take the spotlight...later resenting them for these valuable skills that keep emotional needs/demands front and center. If we struggle to self-regulate, we seek out someone that feels consistently calm and grounded, later resenting them for the calming tools they bring that distance us all from emotion.
The good news is that our attachment styles can and do change, often in direct reaction to the attachment strategies of those closest to us. The better news is that they do not need to change in order to start have a better relationship today. Their eventual change comes as a side-effect of first understand and taking ownership for our own attachment needs and strategies.

In the Beginning...

It usually starts easily enough. We love our partners for their energy and communication, or maybe we're drawn to their grounding stability. And months or years later, we end up resenting and rejecting the very traits that drew us in the first place. Once dependence kicks in, we start expecting eachother to meet a certain set of needs. It is this dependence that transports parts of us back in time - to more earliest dependencies on caregivers.
We learned a lot about needs in childhood. We saw parents navigate our needs and each other's needs. Depending on the rules of our family system, we might have learned that we're supposed to help people in emotional need...Or we're supposed to ignore them...Or we need to placate them, distract them, punish them. We tend to respond to the emotional needs of others in the same ways we respond to our own, the same ways that others responded to ours.
Very little of this happens consciously, and somehow we choose a partner that breaks all of the 'should' rules and triggers our attachment reactions.

Extremes Indicate Trauma

At the intersection of trauma and attachment, we find the same experience with many names: complex trauma, developmental trauma, interpersonal trauma, attachment trauma. All of these terms refer to the way humans organize around early life experience, especially long-term and repeated social disconnections during vital periods of survival-dependence. Biologically-based modes and strategies get triggered in later relationships, when at least one partner begins once again to experience emotional dependence. This is where automations kick in, creating a feedback loop of reciprocal triggering. This is where we gather negative expectations of one another, our nervous systems eventually associating our partners with threat and unwanted, unbearable sensations. We learn to brace in our partner's presence, and their nervous system braces in response.

Meeting Trauma

Nobody is to blame for these generational patterns that started around some historical trauma.
Everybody did the best they could with the knowledge and tools available to them at the time.
Not that abusive homes do not exist... They definitely do.
Even the most gentle and loving homes bring their own share of benign abuse and neglect, because stressors arise, capacities fall, and nobody can remain present in every moment. Our level of presence as caregivers depends highly on our own attachment limitations, our legitimate needs around time and connection. It is also affected directly by everyday stressors: health, finances, job demands, the big and little traumas of random accidents, and whatever level of support is available from family, friends, community.
We inherit a set of tools to navigate a certain range of emotions. Beyond that, we observe parental reaction to other emotions, and we often internalize that. Maybe they placated sadness, ignored fear, feared and abandoned grief or anger, so we tend to do the same to self and to others. These are the tools that were modeled. And no one is to blame for this, because we cannot know what we do not know.
For any given family, certain emotions may remain unmet for generations, because somewhere back in the line those emotions felt too threatening, too overwhelming. And we pass this down, through both nature and nurture.
While we had no way to know in childhood, we often come to realize later in life that our caregivers were not rejecting us. They were demonstrating their inherited tools to navigate the emotions we expressed. They felt threatened, not by us, but by a generational relationship to the presentation of our emotions.
It was not about us. It was their relationship to emotions in general.
This is trauma. This is life. It's inevitable.
The best tool for trauma found by any culture in history: Genuine community.

Two Extremes on a Spectrum, Between ‘Dramatic’ and ‘Stoic’

It really is all relative.
While we do develop some fixed patterns over a lifetime, the patterns often shift depending on the person we're with in the moment. If our partner leans more 'clingy', we'll feel oppressed or invaded and pull away. If our partner leans more independent, we're more likely to adjust to the opposite role - feeling more insecure, chasing more.
Two super-common modes that routinely polarize relationships: anxious and avoidant: hypo-protected and hyper-protected, dependent and counter-dependent, body and brain, fight and freeze, active and passive, water and oil. One side remains senstive to signs of abandonment (a partner’s need for space, for example), the other hyper-attuned to signs of rejection or situations that could lead to rejection. And the zero-sum game plays out when one side needs another person to regulate, the other side needing the opposite: judgment-free and demand-free alone time. It feels like one has to lose for the other to win.

There is a formula to this work, and PRESENCE remains the foundation.

There is no shortcut around partners' needs. If they are attachment needs, they are sacred needs. And both parties bring legitimate needs for space and connection in order to regulate and feel secure in the relationship.
We're not trying to change attachment.
We're learning to increase and sustain presence in order to help each other feel seen, heard, felt, honored. This is where we feel love and associate one another with feelings of softeness and safety.
When working with couples, our focus remains somatic and experiential, finding ways to associate physical feelings of safety with one another, so that just the thought of a partner can actually calm and soften our body.
Many individuals come to therapy braced, reactively chasing or rejecting their partner. While we actually have limited predictive power from research, we do know that intimacy cannot thrive in protective modes. This bodily clenching (even when barely visible) signals threat to others, activating their nervous systems. With great evolutionary value, threat reactions in human bodies are contagious. Without an intervention of some form, this mutual physical bracing is predictive of a relationship that is less likely to last.
This bodily constriction serves as an indicator, suggesting we are not fully present, that we are instead reacting to some perceived threat, often one from our past. It means we are moving into automation, and we cannot connect and protect at the same time.
In avoidant modes, especially, our internal managers often require some cognitive buy-in to the framework of attachment and to the concept of payoff for investing time and energy into personal growth that actually requires increased vulnerability over time. In the case of therapy, part of the trust lies in awareness that a non-judgmental third-party has capacity to stay present and model presence even when both partners go offline and see one another through triggered lenses.
Presence is safety. We feel most seen/heard/honored/understood (loved) when someone holds safe presence for us and finds the best in us.

Honoring Internal Parts

Acceptance precedes change.
Before we can change our experience, we first have to understand and accept (and even love) the parts of self that play a part in it. Many of our internal conflicts (much like the external ones) play out in the same way every time, leaving us in the same situation. Mindfully tracking these interactions in session gives us some insight and allows us to experiment with new strategies. More awareness means less automation and allows us to see the dynamic inner relationships that drive our behaviors. By bringing the unconscious to consciousness, we find choice. This is where change becomes possible: remaining mindfully present with self and other at the same time.
Whether anxious or avoidant, we'll find internal parts that are overwhelmed by our own scared and lonely parts, and therapy can help us learn to provide for our own needs in a consistent way that our parts actually trust over time, thus relaxing our braced bodies, softening us, and easing expectations on others. It's a two-way street, a reciprocal feedback loop: external presence models for us how to meet ourselves, and internal presence facilitates external presence. Others teach us how to meet our own emotions, and when regulated, we remain more likely to stay present with self and others. This present attention is what allows us to feel seen, heard, understood, appreciated at our core. It's actually what most of us yearn for in a partner. And once we've internalized it in ourselves, life does indeed feel safer.
None of us can do it on our own. We cannot even conceptualize without an external reference, some form of a model. Whether it's found in parents, friends, partners, counselors, books, movies, or elsewhere, repeated experiential learning is the language of the nervous system. We can and must develop a cognitive framework. After that, our triggered moments find peace when actually finding the experience they've always wanted, even if they had no words to articulate that need.

Attachment and Emotions

Emotions remain an essential and unavoidable part of life. Even when we don't know how to recognize them, they are built in to every body. They show up measurably in every moment of life, and we all spend our waking and sleeping hours attempting to regulate around them. And as much energy as we put into avoiding them, they are actually a gift.
As a social experience, emotions represent needs made visible to self and others through our bodies. Just like cats purr or hiss, like dogs wag their tails or snarl, humans share emotions visibly, even when trying to contain them.
Our attachment history shapes our relationship to needs, either viewing them as a collaboration, a necessary dependence, or a burden. Depending on past experience with emotions completing or not, we might see emotions as normal and natural, or we might see them as a trap to be either avoided or outsourced.
Feeling or expressing emotion does not equal dysregulation.
Dysreguation occurs when we feel threatened or overwhelmed by a particular range of emotions or emotional expressions in self or other. Because we learned that this particular range of emotion affected caregivers. We learned that these emotions were 'bad', and we often came to the conclusion that we were 'bad' for having these emotions. Even in infancy, this as a first shame, and it set up an early internal conflict as we adapted to the perceived needs those around us.
(Separate from strategies around amplifying or diminishing emotions, we hold relational survival rules as moral judgments, felt viscerally and intensely. "Partners save each other." "Partners do not burden each other." Not only are we trying to navigate emotions in self and others, we are trying to get our partners to change their 'wrong' strategies.)
In avoidant modes, we naturally distance from emotions. In anxious modes, we move into and amplify emotions. And these strategies become signals of threat for our partners in their opposite strategies.
When we each bring different strategies to navigate intense emotions, we're bound to face and re-face conflict that feels unbearable to one or both partners. Often, one side comes in wanting to feel safe to express their whole range of emotions, the other side triggered by this emotional intensity, perceiving this emotional presentation as unnecessary, overwhelming, and unproductive. Many an avoidant will frame their partner's emotion as counter-productive, like eventually, "All the screams sound the same. White noise..."
The built-in anxious strategy: elicit external attention to appease and regulate internal parts. Avoidant: ease the burden of others, do not draw attention, do not burden, distance from emotion for everyone's sake. (Also, in protective avoidant modes, we find ourselves easily judging/policing others that break these internalized counter-dependent rules.)
The underlying goal of both: connect and preserve the closest possible relationship within the perceived emotional capacity of a caregiver or partner.
In truth, when triggered and offline, neither side knows what to do with intense emotions in the room. Both want to preserve the relationship through opposing strategies. Thus, the stalemate – stuck between long, looping, unproductive conflicts or the alternative of no real intimate communication at all. The anxious side cannot let the conflict end, holding out endlessly for the resolution they see their partner withholding. And the avoidant, braced and protected, cannot soften enough to provide the resolution their partner seeks. One side needs resolution before allowing space. The other cannot provide that resolution until experiencing the regulating effects of space.

Novel Strategies...Move Toward Emotion in Self and Other.

While our inherited tools and our biologically built-in strategies may work to keep us alive in childhood, they tend to backfire dramatically and routinely in any adult relationships that carry emotional dependence.
In anxious modes, when all of our instincts (or child parts, or internalized strategies) scream pursue, our partner may need space. They can feel unseen or unimportant when we ignore this legitimate need, and they could easily resent us for pursuing. In therapy, we can learn to hold presence internally, providing a consistency in connection that may have been missing for years or decades.
In avoidant modes, feeling an anxious partner's emotions (needs) escalate, when our body freezes and our brain says we must disengage to de-escalate, the opposite is often more effective. When all our instincts say 'disengage', the opposite is often needed and way more effective. Engaging and giving full presence is actually calming for your partner. And not knowing how to do this is normal. And it's hard to find the trust to soften enough for our presence to be felt, especially when language goes offline, adding even more challenge to our often limited skills around vulnerable communication, never learning to speak needs when we already internalized their absence of importance to others. It can feel like a big set up to be trapped for hours by the parts of our partner that they themselves fear.
Our instincts around de-escalation are not always accurate to present-moment needs, and sometimes a present therapist can help us test out the theory that a partner can actually calm when we stay engaged with them.
These critical moments of reciprocal triggering represent an ongoing opportunity to step back and approach with a soft presence, essential to witness both self and other. Either way – witnessing inside or out – requires the same basic steps of communication that meet these most human needs to feel seen, heard, understood, appreciated, and honored for who we are.
Our nervous systems will not believe or trust this without practice, without bodily feedback, so couples therapy for attachment issues remains inherently somatic and experiential. It's hard to believe resolution/completion exists until we feel our bodies calming and recognize the physical shift from protection to connection.
Intimacy and conflict go hand-in-hand, and therapy provides an opportunity to find ways to faciliate 'presenced' conflict, to feel genuinely safer for both sides.
As trust develops in our nervous system, most of us recognize a sense of permission available through sustained presence over time – permission to live and love vulnerably, to feel more fully accepted, understood, appreciated, even if we felt some skeptical judgment (which is actually protection, based on real experience) at the onset of this journey toward connection.
If you would like to explore more, please reach out.


Lifekey Counseling provides mindful-somatic attachment teletherapy for individuals and couples throughout Oregon.

For more information on location, fees, or modalities, or to contact via encrypted online form, head over to the contact page at Lifekey Counseling.


Click to email: couples@lifekeycounsel.com
Click to leave a voicemail: 503-284-6754

(Contact via email or online form tends to get faster response than voicemails.)