The Center for Relational Recovery offers an individualized proven path and treatment program that will improve your relationships, resolve current and past traumas, and transform your life. We do this through…
What is Relational Recovery?
Relational Recovery is the imperfect, courageous and vulnerable act of allowing yourself to know and be known in relationship with others in a way that heals past wounds, changes you, matures you and ripens you into the authentic self you were created to be.
Relationships are where we grow, where we heal, where we laugh and play, and where we have our most intense experiences of being intimately known and loved.
Relationships are also where we struggle. They are the places where shame about who we are can surface causing us to raise our protective masks and hide our true selves. They are the places where our imperfections show up causing us to feel dismay over failing someone in some way. They are where our deepest longings for love and connection are at times disappointed or overlooked. They are where we can sometimes experience direct harm that leaves us wounded and closed off.
If our most significant wounds happen in relationship with others (and they usually do) then doesn’t it make sense that our healing and restoration must also happen in relationship? But a different kind of relationship. One based on the trust, safety, compassion, empathy, and grace that enable us to reveal our true selves to one another, imperfections and all. Relationships that create a space and opportunity to experience Relational Recovery.
Treatment Approach
These overarching principles guide treatment at the Center for Relational Recovery in the following ways:
- We believe that early childhood attachment experiences with parents and other caregivers significantly shape a child’s emotional and relational development, including their perception of themselves (self-perception) and their perception of themselves in relationship to others.
- The attachment patterns learned in childhood play out in the life of the individual as they mature into adulthood. These attachment patterns show up in the person’s relationships with others. They also show up in the therapeutic relationship.
- Therapists have their own attachment patterns, learned in childhood, that also inform how they interact relationally with others and show up in the therapeutic relationship. For therapists to be effective, they must be aware of their attachment patterns and relational dynamics and embrace a process of ongoing growth and maturity. Therapists are not relational “gurus,” but are instead fellow journeyers with their clients, learning and growing equally as a result of the therapeutic relationship.
- Healing occurs through being able to explore internal feelings and realities, including past wounds and deep places of pain, terror, anxiety and fear, while being emotionally held in the safe space of the therapeutic relationship.
- Healing occurs through the relational experiences that challenge what was learned in childhood and open clients to a new way of knowing and being known. Group therapy provides a space for these types of new relational interactions to be experienced. It provides a place to practice vulnerability, experience acceptance, learn to ask for needs to be met and to receive from others. Treatment at the Center for Relational Recovery is group therapy based.
- Treatment is team-based: When you come to the Center for Relational Recovery, you get the benefit of being treated by the entire Clinical Team. The Clinical Team consults together regarding each person’s treatment, allowing clients to gain from each of the team member’s specializations, expertise and perspectives. Each member of the team has different areas of interest and different skills and certifications to offer to our clients.
- Systems perspective: For couples that are treated both individually and as a couple at the Center for Relational Recovery, the clinical team works with clients from a systems perspective. This allows us to look at the “system” the couple has created together, seeing all the relational dynamics and how they interweave and interact in the relationship. This method allows couples to make quicker progress, as the “whole story” of the relationship is being understood and addressed throughout therapy.