Shay Reeves (she/her)

Relationship struggles rarely begin with the other person — they begin with the patterns we bring into connection. I work with individuals and couples navigating conflict cycles, emotional distance, communication breakdown, and intimacy ruptures. My approach gets beneath the surface dynamic to the deeper wound driving it, so that real change — not just better communication — becomes possible.

Low self-esteem rarely looks like what people expect. It often looks like high achievement, over-giving, and an exhausting need to earn your place in every room. I work with clients to untangle the beliefs, experiences, and relational patterns that taught them they were too much — or not enough. The goal is a self-trust so grounded it doesn't depend on anyone else's validation to hold.

Our earliest relationships taught us what love feels like, what we deserve, and how safe it is to need someone. Those lessons don't disappear — they show up in every relationship we have as adults. Using attachment-focused and somatic approaches, I help clients understand their relational blueprint, grieve what was missing, and build the capacity for genuine intimacy — with others and with themselves.

Psychodynamic therapy believes that what drives us is largely invisible to us — shaped by early experiences, family systems, and unconscious patterns we never chose. With a decade of experience, I use this lens to help clients see the story beneath the story: why they love the way they love, protect themselves the way they do, and repeat what they most want to change. Insight here isn't just intellectual. It becomes liberation.

The body keeps score — and it also holds the path forward. I work with what lives in the nervous system, not just the narrative. Clients learn to recognize how their wounds show up physically — in tension, shutdown, or the chronic holding of too much — and how to work with the body as a site of healing, not just a vehicle for the mind.

EFT is one of the most well-researched approaches to couples therapy — and one I've practiced extensively across a decade of relational work. It helps couples move beneath the conflict cycle to the vulnerable emotions and unmet attachment needs driving it. For individuals, it deepens self-understanding and builds the emotional capacity for genuine intimacy. The result isn't just less conflict. It's real closeness.