Couples and Relationship
Therapy
We're all a little weird, and life is a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in to mutually satisfying weirdness - and call it love - true love. Robert Fulgham
Alison Buckley, LMFT
I have been in practice for over 20 years. Throughout this time, a common theme that has resounded is a struggle to balance the different parts of ourselves that vie for attention. We feel conflicted between the desire for connectedness and separateness, for healthy entitlement and support for another person, for safety and security and for novelty and fun. Good relationships, regardless of the structure, require each of us to hold onto ourselves while remaining in contact with others.
I am honored to help you work through the family patterns, personal stuck points, and often unconscious dynamics that create upset in your life. Moreover, I work with all types of relationships.....married, partnered, non-monogamous, same-sex, and gender non-conforming.
Education and Experience
I received my Masters in Counseling Psychology from CSUS and my BA from UC Davis. My education is rooted was rooted in the Psychodynamic, Family Systems, and Object Relations approaches. I learned that we tend to, although innocently, create similar painful relationships in our adult lives the we learned as "normal" in our families.
Post-graduate training includes gestalt group therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Relational Life Therapy (RLT). I am a certified RLT therapist and have found tremendous success helping clients work from this frame. I am also a Level 2 trained IFS therapist.
My group therapy training also includes an 8-year research study in collaboration with Yale and UC Berkeley. Here I led clinical groups helping families learn how to co-parent effectively and develop respectful and connected relationships with each other and their children.
