Couples Therapy & Marriage Counseling | Couples Workshops | Raleigh, NC
Where insight becomes change
Ninety days of intentional couples work, with precise clinical guidance, real accountability, and async access, built on the neuroscience of how people change and aimed at how each of you is actually wired.
Already sure?Go straight to the application.
“I did not design this program in a conference room. I designed it in the room where couples sit.”
For years, I worked the way most therapists work: weekly sessions, open-ended arc, insight as the primary currency. And I watched what happened. Couples would understand their pattern with extraordinary clarity and then go home and repeat it. The insight was real. The change was not.
Traditional talk therapy focuses on insight and analysis. REWIRE builds daily disciplines that shift your core negative self beliefs living in the subconscious. Because the subconscious speaks in feelings and images, not sentences, insight alone never reaches it, which is why you can understand your pattern perfectly and still find yourself stuck inside it.
MAPSS Analysis™ helps us reverse engineer what’s happening between the two of you in your relationship and the unmet core needs underneath it, all the way down to those beliefs. We identify them and distance ourselves from the parts of ourselves that hold them as true and rewrite them in the same way they were written, through emotional processing and somatic interventions, until your body believes new and more helpful beliefs. When the map shifts, the identity shifts, and the patterns and the loops go with it.
How change actually happens is the center of everything I do, and I call it head down, body up.
Head down is how we understand it. We start with the moment that went wrong and walk it down: what your mind locked onto, what it meant to you, the feeling underneath, and the story where it was first written.
Body up is how it actually changes, because that’s the order it happens in. A need goes unmet, your nervous system fires a feeling before you’ve thought a single thought, a part of you runs the strategy it built to protect that need, your brain welds a meaning onto it from the oldest story you have about yourself, the scan, biased to find exactly what that story predicts, finds it, and only then does the thing your partner sees come out. By the time your head gets there, your body has already decided.
Mind
Trigger
Attribution
Loop
Perspective
Survival strategies
Sentiment
Nervous system wiring
Story
Core needs
That’s why understanding alone doesn’t hold. Naming a feeling turns the volume down, but it doesn’t change what turned it up, because the reaction is a prediction your body learned to make, and predictions don’t update through explanation. What changes them is working them through, over and over.
Map It
Rewire It
Lock It In
The first thirty days are set out in detail before you start. The rest is the shape of the road, adjusted from what day 30 and day 60 show us.
Phase 1 · weeks 1 to 4
You each learn how your own body runs the pattern before we ask the relationship to change it, and from the first week the two of you practice connection through your Huddle. Both of you take the Inner Compass in week 0, the week before we start, and your reports become the map the rest of the plan is matched to.
Phase 2 · weeks 5 to 11
This is where the old beliefs get rewritten, one at a time, with feeling and in the body, and where the repairs the two of you need happen in session, with me in the room.
Phase 3 · weeks 12 and 13
What you’ve practiced becomes the way you live, and your Huddle stays, because it’s how the two of you keep living an intentional life once the program ends. We build the habits you’ll keep after the ninety days, and at day 90 we look back at where you started, measure what changed, and decide together what comes next.
Here’s what ninety days can look like, week by week. It’s an example, not anyone’s plan: yours is matched to your Compass and to the work the two of you bring, and only the first thirty days are set before you start.
Week 0
The Inner Compass
You each take the Compass. Your reports fill in the first four weeks before day 1.
Week 1
Each of you on your own with me
Ninety minutes each. We lay the ground: the agreements, your break plan, and your own window with one tool for it. Your Huddle starts at home.
Week 2
Each of you on your own with me
An hour each. We start naming the parts of you that step in when the pattern starts, each of you naming only your own.
Week 3
Joint session
Two hours together. The agreements said out loud, your Compass reports side by side, and Mementos Excavations begins.
Week 4
Integration week
You keep the Huddle, your standing dinner and your break plans going on your own.
Week 5
Joint session · day 30
Your first evaluation. We look at what changed and set the next thirty days in writing.
Week 6
Integration week
Memento Shift becomes a daily practice, a little every day.
Week 7
Each of you on your own with me
An hour each, taking one old sentence at a time down to where it’s felt and where it started.
Week 8
Joint session
A repair in session, with the hurt named and the other one staying present while it lands.
Week 9
Joint session · day 60
Your second evaluation, and the last thirty days set in writing.
Week 10
Integration week
The week goes live in your hub on Sunday at five, as every week does.
Week 11
Integration week
You practice what you’ve rewritten in the places the old pattern used to run.
Week 12
Integration week
You build the habits you’ll keep after the ninety days.
Week 13
Joint session · day 90
We look back at where you started, measure what changed, and decide together what comes next.
Everything for the week lives in one place, on your phone, private to the two of you and me. Your week goes live in the hub every Sunday at five.
Every day starts here, with how you slept, how you feel and the plan for the day, and closes with an evening check-in.
At the center of it is the Huddle. Once a week you sit down together, look back at the week, look ahead at the next one, and plan your conversations and your adventures. Over ninety days it becomes the spine of your life together.
Each week it holds two twenty-minute conversations for connection, an adventure the two of you plan, a six-second hug at every coming and going, and a place to set something aside for me. How it starts is matched to the two of you, and it stays after the program ends, because it’s how you keep living an intentional life.
So the old beliefs get rewritten the same way they were written, with repetition and feeling together. A big part of this program is something I call Memento, where each of you begins to shift the maps you inherited, a little every day, with emotion, meditation and intention, until the shift holds. What we’re shifting isn’t what happened to you. It’s what happened within you.
Mementos Excavations finds the old sentences each of you carries, Memento Mapping takes one at a time down to where it’s felt and where it started, and Memento Shift rewrites them every day. I named it Memento because the event is gone, the past is dead, and the future is not yet born.
A premium program, run with high accountability, high touch and real guidance.
Time with me, matched to the work
Two years in the making
So the change happens from the body up
Your week, ready when you are
REWIRE goes wherever you are
By text and through the hub
Real tracking, not guesswork
Learning that fits your life
You can use an FSA or HSA card.
Begin ApplicationAt intake, we assess together and determine which configuration fits. You do not have to figure that out before you reach out.
Not sure which track fits? You do not have to figure it out alone. Start the application below and we will land on the right configuration together.
Emotionally Focused Therapy gives us the pattern: each partner’s move, the feeling on top, and the need for closeness underneath it. It’s the best-studied approach to couples therapy there is, and it’s why so much of the work is small spoken reaches, a want said out loud and a reach made gentle, rather than big talks.
John Gottman’s lab found that the way back for a couple who’ve drifted runs through the friendship first: knowing each other’s world, appreciation said out loud, and turning toward the small moments of connection that happen every day. Your Huddle, your dinner and your adventures come straight from that.
The research on trauma and the body, from Stephen Porges, Peter Levine and Bessel van der Kolk, agrees that the body decides whether closeness feels safe before the mind gets a vote. So we calm the body first and build the conditions, and nobody is asked to push through.
Underneath all of it is the developmental frame I use, which sees each of your patterns as something that once kept you safe rather than a flaw.
Composite case. Not a specific client.
A composite case
They came in three weeks after she’d discovered the messages. He was apologizing. She was deciding. Neither of them knew what they were actually deciding about.
The work was not the affair. The work was what the affair had revealed about a system that had been running for years without either of them naming it. He’d been lonely inside the marriage for a long time. She’d been managing the household and assuming the loneliness was a season. The affair was a symptom. The system was the problem.
We mapped the five layers underneath the rupture. His core need had been visibility. Hers had been competence. Both had gone unmet for years. Neither had ever asked for either out loud. The affair had broken the silence by force.
The repair took eight months. They are not the couple they were. They wouldn’t want to be. They are now the couple who runs an explicit operating system instead of the one their parents handed them.
Repair is a skill, not a moment.
I wanted to take a moment to tell you my story. I have been dating a great gal for 6.5 years. We have had many ups and downs and times it seemed hopeless for us to truly excel and be the couple we dreamed of being. She is very sensitive and gentle at the core, and me not so much. When we finally decided we needed help, I contacted Christian and knew right away on the phone he would be a good fit for us as a couple. We were really fractured, we basically had horrible communication skills and both of us are type A personalities which made it even worse. This made it tough on Christian. He never took sides he made both of face our challenges, he rescued us from the brink several times. I am happy to say we are now happier and healthier as couple than we have every been. We have become friends we like each other and it is because of Couple Forward. Counseling does work when you find the right coach!
Because the change has to happen in the body, and the body changes through practice, not explanation. Naming a feeling turns the volume down, but it doesn’t change what turned it up, because the reaction is a prediction your body learned to make, and predictions don’t update through explanation. What changes them is working them through, over and over. Ninety days gives you enough weeks of small daily practice, with evaluations at day 30, 60 and 90, for the new way to become the one your body reaches for first.
Because understanding happens in your head, and the pattern runs in your body first. A need goes unmet, your nervous system fires a feeling before you’ve thought a single thought, a part of you runs the strategy it built to protect that need, your brain welds a meaning onto it from the oldest story you have about yourself, the scan, biased to find exactly what that story predicts, finds it, and only then does the thing your partner sees come out. By the time your head gets there, your body has already decided. That’s why the work runs head down, to understand it, and body up, to change it.
It is customized to each couple rather than delivered from a template. Phase one maps your specific cycle, and the plan is then sequenced around your specific wiring and your specific next chapter, which is why it is described as a targeting system rather than a curriculum.
It is the documented failure mode of open-ended work rather than a failure of the couple: roughly 35 to 50 percent of couples who complete treatment return to pre-treatment distress within two years (Snyder and Balderrama-Durbin, 2012). The named mechanism is that skills learned in a calm room do not activate under threat. Structured between-session work, defined outcome arcs, and measurement exist to address exactly that, which is what the 90-day structure is built around.
It is not for a couple looking for weekly open-ended conversation, and it is not for a couple where only one partner is willing to commit to the structure. The couples who move fastest in this format are not the ones who understand the most. They are the ones who commit hardest, because the nervous system needs enough repetition to recode.
A short application, not a sales call. I read every one personally. If we are a fit, we set up a 20-minute call to confirm the configuration that makes sense for you.
Eight short sections.
