Couples coaching for relationships at a turning point

You still love each other.
But the undertow of your entrenched dynamic might be stronger.

Welcome, I'm so glad you found your way here.

I’m LiYana Silver, relationship coach of 24 years and author of Feminine Genius and the forthcoming Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce.

Couples coaching first identifies and then frees you from the unhealthy patterns that keep you stuck and erode your relationship: recurring conflict, years of distance, fallout from betrayal, sexual dissatisfaction, or loss of aliveness.

In our direct, compassionate Three-Phase Process, you'll wake up to your entrenched dynamic, do deep healing, and learn key relational skills to (re)build

Partnership that is authentic, connected, and strong.

This work is for partners who dearly want to:

Trust each other (again)
Create deep intimacy and relate with undefended, open hearts
Feel understood, met, seen, safe, and chosen
Have your sex life back—or expand it to be more adventurous, juicy, sacred
Feel that the relationship as well as both of you are healthy, connected, and vital
Know whether it’s time to part ways or that this relationship can last—and flourish

I imagine you've tried so much. Being more patient. More understanding. Communicating with more care. Giving space. Giving it some time. Date nights. Books, workbooks, workshops. Maybe you’ve both done years of work on yourselves.

And yet somehow you’re caught in a recurring relational pattern: the knee-jerk dynamic that takes over once conflict begins—despite how conscious, well-meaning, or evolved you are.

Maybe you’re completely mystified about what’s going on. Or maybe you can explain exactly what’s happening. But it still isn’t changing.

This work exists for this moment:

When you want to not only understand what keeps derailing you—and also learn how to stop it, turn it around, and (re)create an aligned, passionate relationship.

You’re not fighting about what you think you’re fighting about.

What’s bringing down your relationship isn’t just the issues like how they load the dishwasher. Why they don’t want sex anymore. Who carries more. Who always initiates. Who withdrew. Who forgot. Who strayed.

Those things matter. And we’ll get to them. But they are rarely the deepest issues.

We first need to attend to the recurring relational pattern:

What happens inside each of you when conflict starts?
What parts of you do you protect?
What triggers your wise, present self to leave the room?
What old adaptations come online? And what particular havoc do they wreak on the relationship?

Maybe one of you pushes and the other withdraws. One feels rejected and the other gets defensive. One gets angry, critical, and mean and the other apologizes, walks on eggshells, and goes numb. One finds faults and the other tries to fix it. One blows up unpredictably and the other blows up even bigger.

You leave the interaction feeling unseen, hurt, contemptuous, justified, defeated, or right—but alone.

This is because ...

You are trying to solve the wrong problem.

Until the recurring relational pattern changes, the same arguments, shutdowns, resentment, and disconnection will keep returning—no matter how much insight, effort, or love you bring.

Our Three-Phase Process

Our Three-Phase Process moves you out of cycles of conflict, restores your connection, and gives you the skills to (re)build an authentic, fulfilling relationship.

Over months (not years), we’ll focus on:

Identifying the Recurring Relationship Pattern
Healing the trauma that drives that unhealthy pattern
Learning new relational skills that allow an attuned, lasting connection to emerge

Phase One

Identify the Recurring Relational Pattern

Our focus is not yet the content of your arguments, issues and complaints (we’ll get to that), but first on the choreography that traps you in the downward spiral.

What triggers each of you?
How do you protect yourself?
Where does your connection break down?
What unhealthy behaviors have you developed that are harming the relationship?
Through which filters do you see your partner, so they “always” show up the same?

This phase wakes you up to the entrenched dynamic you’re stuck in. Because once we know the pattern, we can change it.

Phase Two

Heal the trauma that drives the pattern

What happened to you in your past shapes what feels dangerous, impossible, unfair, or necessary to you now.

In phase two, we focus on healing your old wounds that not only drive unhealthy behaviors but also deepen the entrenched dynamic.

Current conflict activates old wounds—and the adaptations you made because of those wounds: Ways to stay safe and loved. To avoid criticism, abandonment, engulfment, humiliation, chaos.

We do not shame those adaptations. We understand, respect, and update them. With both partners present—and also in solo sessions—we do corrective emotional work:

Deep trauma healing
Belief repatterning
Inner child, reparenting, and parts work

You’ll gain insight into your partner’s pain and patterns, which naturally deepens the empathy, care, and trust between you.

Phase Three

Learn new relational skills

This phase is for learning and practicing skills meant for minute-to-minute disconnections and reconnections:

Calmly and with respect, handle conflict, arguments, issues, and complaints
Negotiate and build boundaries
Nurture and care for your connection
Create and sustain intimacy
Speak up with love, assert your needs, ask for what you want
Get vulnerable and open your heart
The four steps to repair (for the little and big issues)
Emotional self-regulation and co-regulation
Accountability without stirring up blame or shame
Real-time interruption of destructive cycles

These skills help you not get swept into your unhealthy pattern, find your way back to each other when things wobble, and form the spine of your loving relational dynamic.

My Approach

My work with couples is rooted in Relational Life Therapy (RLT), focusing on both the relationship dynamic and the individuals inside it.

We will find the root of the problem quickly, usually in the first session or two, so our work doesn't drag on without you noticing any changes or a clear path forward.

Drawing from developmental psychology, family systems, feminist theory, and neurobiology, I pay close attention to things many approaches leave unnamed:

Who over-functions and performs being “fine”?
Where is there a power imbalance between the two of you?
Who feels safe (or entitled) to express themselves and who fears retaliation if they do?
Who exerts control and how? By being a peace-keeper? Tyrant? Micro-manager?
What is your preferred means of protecting yourself? Lashing out? Putting up walls? Being right? Retaliating? Collapsing?
Precisely where and when did you learn to protect yourself in those ways?
What hormonal or life transition are you in?
What are your complaints? Because: under every complaint is a rich, juicy desire.

Your relationship has its own presence, shape, essence—and so it’s on behalf of the partnership’s flourishing, as well as yours, that we do this work.

Let's Connect

If your entrenched pattern has become stronger than your connection, this is the moment to interrupt it.

Schedule a 45-Min Consultation

This is free, when you’re pretty clear you’d like to work together but want to meet, have a few questions answered, and confirm we’re a fit. And then we'll:

Decide on our cadence: How often we’ll have sessions and whether we’ll have just joint or also solo sessions.
Plan our time-frame: For example, three months or six months. However, we’ll stay flexible and can add or remove sessions or otherwise adjust as we go.
Pre-session background gathering: You’ll both share with me, via questionnaire, your goals, challenges, the patterns/problems as you see them, what you want to change, your history, identities, and family makeup.
Schedule our sessions: Our first session will be in-depth, where we’ll identify your Recurring Relational Pattern and create a roadmap for the rest of our work together.

Sessions are 90 minutes. Single sessions are a sliding scale between $400-350, but packages (two, three, four, or more sessions in a month) can reduce that significantly.

This work may be a fit for you when …

You still care. But something (or a lot of somethings) isn’t working.

You may be navigating betrayal, emotional distance, sexual dissatisfaction, recurring conflict, opening your relationship, or uncertainty about staying together.

You’re asking:

How did we end up here?
Are we still on the same team?
Can we repair faster than the damage is accumulating?
Is this a rough spot, or is this the end?

You're in one or more of these places:

An unsatisfying sex life: too little, too much, not the right kind, or not at the right times. And you want it to be hot, fun, attuned, and work for you both.
Growing distance, unresolved resentments, same fights. You are “losing yourself” in the relationship. You want to feel like you’re on the same team, with a stronger, healthier relationship than before.
Interest in exploring consensual non-monogamy, and want to do so in a way that strengthens your bond vs destabilizing it.
You or your partner are in perimenopause, “manopause,” or another huge life transition, which is demanding systemic-level change from your partner and partnership. You want help navigating the upheaval while making sure your relationship doesn’t implode, but stabilizes and flexes along with you.
Dealing with the complexity of infidelity. You want to see what’s salvageable, rebuild trust, do real repair beyond the victim/perpetrator binary. You know you can’t go back to the status quo and want help moving forward into something radically better.
Unsure whether to stay or separate—and want to explore that from a more connected, less reactive place.

You want help, in real time, changing the painful dynamic between you into exquisite skill and care.

This is powerful, beautiful work

It’s my honor to do this work with you: identifying and interrupting the relational patterns that keep taking over, so you can move out of reactivity, rebuild trust and intimacy, and (re)grow true partnership.

I know you still care deeply about each other but are exhausted by the repeating, painful dynamic.