Some relationship issues are too difficult for weekly sessions
Infidelity. Financial betrayal. Intimate partner violence. Abandonment. Coercive control. Stay-or-go decisions. Opening up.
To help you get through this moment, we offer Relationship Intensives. These are dedicated spaces for the conversations your relationship cannot afford to postpone any longer.
Schedule a Discovery CallMaybe you’re working through something like…
- A newly-discovered infidelity
- A stay-or-go decision (discernment counseling)
- A new identity or desire that shakes the foundation of the relationship
- A move towards opening the relationship
- A life-changing shift in family dynamics: a birth, a death, kids moving out, retirement, illness
Three kinds of challenges, a highly customized process
Reckoning & Repair
Affairs. Betrayal. Secret sexual behavior. Major breaches of trust. Unexpected disclosures. Infidelity of all sorts.
Repair cannot begin with pressure to forgive, reckoning needs to come first. What happened? What did it mean? What has been damaged? What accountability is required? What does the injured partner need to understand? What is possible now?
Then, if both people choose it, we begin the actual work of repair. An intensive provides enough space to do more than repeatedly reopen the same wound.
Relationship & Lifestyle Design
Perhaps you’re considering ethical non-monogamy. Perhaps one partner has raised the possibility of opening the relationship and the other is terrified. Perhaps you’re already practicing polyamory or consensual non-monogamy, and agreements that once worked no longer do.
Or perhaps the discussion isn’t monogamy at all, but other midlife changes that have revealed profound questions about sexuality, sexual behavior, identity, autonomy, commitment, marriage, family, work, and the shape of the decades ahead.
A Relationship Intensive creates room to ask: does our relationship work in its current form, or do we need to change our agreements? What belongs to the individual? What belongs to the relationship? How do we grow together, or separately?
Partnership Intensives
You don’t have to wait for a five-alarm relational fire. Some couples use intensive work to address longstanding conflict, strengthen communication, reconnect sexually, navigate blended-family life, make major financial or lifestyle decisions, prepare for marriage, or rethink what partnership should look like in the next chapter.
The central question becomes: what are we building together now? That can be enormously useful after ten, twenty, or thirty years together. It can also be helpful to explore before saying “I do.”
Time, privacy, and preparation, by design
We begin with your nervous system, your body, your heart. Time in our consultation room to settle, relax, and really get deep. This concentrated time together lets us follow important conversations rather than constantly interrupting them like in weekly sessions.
The intensive is private and built entirely around the people in your relationship.
The intensive starts before the intensive with a Relationship Assessment to give our clinicians a peek into your relationship. This assessment helps identify the core issues, patterns, history, and goals—and challenges within each of you.
Sex is often a big part of the conversation, but we also know that a great sex life needs to be held within a great relationship, so we start there. Communication, intimacy, Gottman-informed relational skills, and so much more.
Led by Christopher Frier Brown, LCSW-S, CST, co-facilitated by Sex & Relationship Coach Andrea Devon Bertoli, MA
Christopher is an AASECT-Certified Sex Therapist and Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than 20 years of clinical practice focused on relationships, sexuality, attachment, betrayal, and major relational transitions. His approach is warm and direct; he’s curious but not passive. He asks the hard questions that get to the core of the issue.
His work focuses particularly on the places where individual psychology meets intimate relationships: attachment, sex, betrayal, desire, trauma, relationship structure, rupture, repair, and the major transitions of adult life.
Andrea may also be invited to contribute Sex Coaching into the intensive. Andrea brings a holistic, pleasure-positive approach to sex and relationship coaching that draws on mindfulness, Tantra, and yoga traditions. The structure is determined by what your relationship actually needs, not by forcing every couple through the same program. We build it for you.
Schedule a Discovery CallLocation, format, and investment
Where
In-person in the East Bay, or online.
Format
Two days, four to six hours per day.
Investment
Starting at $2,500 per two-day intensive.
When the conversation matters this much, give it enough room.
Schedule a discovery call. Tell us what has happened, and why you’re considering an intensive. You do not need to have the answers before calling, you just need to know that the way things are going now isn’t enough.
Schedule a Discovery Call