When Traditional Couples Counseling Hasn't Worked: Depth-Oriented Therapy for Healing Relationship Wounds
You've sat on that couch before. You've learned the communication techniques, practiced the active listening, maybe even filled out the worksheets. You've shown up week after week to traditional couples counseling, hoping this time would be different. And yet here you are, still carrying the same wounds, still cycling through the same painful patterns, still wondering if your relationship can truly heal or if you're both just going through the motions.
If this sounds familiar, I want you to know something important: you're not failing at couples therapy. Traditional couples counseling simply wasn't designed to reach the depth of what you're carrying. (And honestly, no amount of "I feel" statements is going to touch on what's really going on when your nervous system has decided your partner is a threat.)
I'm Moonraker, a licensed therapist with over 20 years of experience working with couples in Santa Fe, Sedona, and Pagosa Springs. I've spent the last two decades specializing in depth-oriented therapy for couples whose wounds run deeper than surface communication issues. Through EMDR therapy, Internal Family Systems, Gottman Method principles, and psychedelic-assisted therapy, I guide couples through transformational healing rather than symptom management.
Why Traditional Couples Counseling Falls Short for Deep Relationship Wounds
Traditional couples counseling often operates from a skills-based model. You learn to use "I statements," schedule date nights, and divide household responsibilities more fairly. These tools have their place, certainly. But when you're dealing with profound relationship wounds like betrayal trauma, shared loss, attachment injuries, or the accumulated weight of unprocessed trauma from your individual pasts, communication skills alone won't touch what's really happening beneath the surface.
The couples I work with in my Santa Fe, Sedona, and Pagosa Springs locations aren't struggling because they don't know how to communicate. They're highly intelligent, often successful individuals who can articulate their feelings quite well, thank you very much. What they're struggling with is something deeper: the way past trauma has colonized their nervous systems, the protective parts that activate before their conscious mind even registers what's happening, the somatic memories stored in their bodies that no amount of talking will release.
Traditional couples therapy typically focuses on behavioral change and conflict resolution. But when one partner's body goes into freeze mode during conflict because of childhood trauma, or when betrayal has shattered the fundamental sense of safety in the relationship, or when shared grief has created an unbridgeable canyon between you, surface-level interventions feel like trying to heal a compound fracture with a band-aid. Which, let's be honest, doesn't work particularly well.
I developed Canyon Passages specifically for couples who need more than what traditional approaches offer. This isn't another version of the same thing you've already tried. This is a fundamentally different approach to healing relationship wounds, one that addresses trauma at the root, works with the nervous system directly, and creates the conditions for genuine transformation rather than temporary behavioral modification.
The Depth-Oriented Difference: Treating Wounds, Not Just Symptoms
When couples come to me in Santa Fe, Sedona, or Pagosa Springs after traditional counseling hasn't worked, I often hear variations of the same story. They learned all the right techniques, they understand the concepts, they even practice the skills. But when the real moments arrive (when old wounds get triggered, when vulnerability feels terrifying, when the body remembers what the mind wants to forget) all those tools disappear and they're right back in the familiar painful dance.
Depth-oriented therapy for couples doesn't bypass these moments. We move directly into them. I use therapeutic modalities that work with your nervous system, your implicit memory, your somatic experience, and yes, even your consciousness itself to create healing at the level where your wounds actually live.
Through EMDR therapy, I help couples process the traumatic experiences and attachment injuries that traditional talk therapy can't reach. When betrayal trauma keeps replaying in your body, when an argument sends you into a physiological state of threat, when you can't seem to access the love you know you still feel, these aren't problems that more communication skills will solve. These are neurobiological patterns that need direct intervention at the level of how your brain and body have encoded the trauma.
Internal Family Systems brings a revolutionary understanding to couples work. Instead of seeing your partner's anger or withdrawal as the enemy, IFS helps both of you understand that these are protective parts trying to keep you safe from old wounds. When I guide couples through IFS work, we're not just resolving the current conflict. We're helping each person develop a compassionate relationship with their own protective parts and create space for the vulnerable parts underneath to finally be seen and held.
The Gottman Method provides the research-backed framework for understanding what actually predicts relationship success or failure. But I don't use Gottman principles as a checklist of behaviors to practice. I integrate them into a deeper process of healing, where the fundamental safety and attunement in your relationship gets rebuilt from the ground up.
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy: When Couples Need to Break Through, Not Just Work Through
Here's something most traditional couples therapists won't tell you, either because they don't know it or because it's outside their scope of practice: sometimes the most profound relationship healing happens in expanded states of consciousness.
I offer both ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and psilocybin-assisted therapy for couples in my Santa Fe, Sedona, and Pagosa Springs practices. This isn't recreational drug use rebranded as therapy. (Though I've definitely had to clarify that distinction more than once.) This is carefully structured, clinically supervised psychedelic-assisted therapy that creates the neurobiological conditions for healing that years of traditional talk therapy often cannot achieve.
Psychedelic-assisted therapy for couples works by temporarily quieting the defensive parts of your ego, allowing you to access deeper compassion, see beyond the stories your wounded parts have been telling, and experience your partner and your relationship from an entirely new perspective. The therapeutic use of ketamine or psilocybin in a safe, intentional setting can help couples break through the walls that trauma has built, soften the rigid protective patterns that keep you separate, and reconnect with the love and connection that's been buried under years of hurt.
I want to be clear: psychedelic-assisted therapy isn't a magic bullet, and it's not appropriate for every couple. There are medical contraindications, safety protocols, and a rigorous preparation and integration process that must be followed. But for couples who are genuinely stuck (who have done the work, tried the traditional approaches, and still can't seem to get to the other side of their pain) psychedelic-assisted therapy can be the catalyst for the transformation they've been seeking.
The preparation phase for couples psychedelic-assisted therapy involves several sessions where we build safety, clarify intentions, work through individual trauma that might surface during the medicine journey, and establish the relational foundation that will hold the expanded state work. The actual medicine session is carefully held and supported, with me present throughout to guide the process and ensure both emotional and physical safety. Then comes the critical integration phase, where we spend multiple sessions weaving the insights and experiences from the journey into the fabric of your daily relationship.
EMDR for Couples: Healing Attachment Injuries and Betrayal Trauma
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR therapy, has become one of my primary tools for working with couples carrying deep relationship wounds. As an EMDR consultant, I've seen this modality create breakthrough healing for couples when nothing else has worked.
Traditional couples counseling often asks you to "let go" of the past, forgive and move forward. But trauma doesn't work that way. When betrayal has occurred, when an attachment injury has shattered your sense of safety, when accumulated smaller wounds have created a massive rupture, these experiences get encoded in your nervous system in ways that talking about them won't resolve.
EMDR therapy works directly with how traumatic memories are stored in your brain. Through bilateral stimulation (typically eye movements, but sometimes tactile or auditory stimulation) EMDR helps your brain reprocess traumatic experiences so they no longer trigger the same intense physiological and emotional responses. For couples, this means we can address the specific moments when trust was broken, safety was violated, or emotional abandonment occurred, and actually heal them at the neurological level.
I use EMDR with couples in Santa Fe, Sedona, and Pagosa Springs to treat betrayal trauma, infidelity wounds, attachment injuries from critical relationship moments, and the individual trauma that each partner brings into the relationship. Sometimes I work with both partners simultaneously on shared traumatic experiences, like the loss of a child or a major life crisis you survived together but never fully processed. Other times, I work individually with each partner on their own trauma while the other witnesses, creating a powerful opportunity for deep seeing and holding.
What makes EMDR particularly effective for couples is that it doesn't require you to have perfect insight into why you react the way you do. Your nervous system has stored these protective responses, and EMDR helps your brain update that storage system without requiring you to perfectly articulate or understand every nuance. This is especially helpful for high-achieving individuals who are used to solving problems through analysis and often feel frustrated that they can't simply "think their way out" of their relationship pain.
Internal Family Systems: Understanding the Parts That Protect and the Parts That Hurt
One of the most transformative frameworks I bring to couples work is Internal Family Systems, or IFS. This therapeutic approach recognizes that we all have different parts: protective parts, wounded parts, and a core Self that is compassionate, curious, and capable of healing.
In traditional couples counseling, your anger might be labeled as "the problem," or your partner's withdrawal might be identified as what needs to change. But IFS helps us understand that your anger is actually a part trying to protect a younger, more vulnerable part that was hurt or dismissed. Your partner's withdrawal is a part that learned long ago that showing vulnerability led to pain, so shutting down feels safer.
When I work with couples using Internal Family Systems in my Sedona, Santa Fe, and Pagosa Springs practices, we're not trying to eliminate these protective parts. We're helping each of you develop a compassionate relationship with your own parts and create the safety for your partner's parts to relax their protective roles. This shift from fighting against parts to understanding and appreciating them changes everything about how couples relate to conflict and trigger moments.
IFS also provides a powerful framework for working with what I call "relationship parts," the protective patterns that develop specifically in response to wounds within this particular relationship. The part that braces for criticism, the part that preemptively withdraws to avoid rejection, the part that attacks before it can be attacked. These aren't character flaws or personality problems. They're intelligent protective strategies that made sense given your relational history, and they can be worked with directly through IFS.
Many of the couples I work with are highly successful professionals, creatives, or entrepreneurs who are frustrated that they can manage complex projects and challenging situations in their careers but feel helpless in the face of their relationship patterns. IFS helps them understand that this isn't a failure of intelligence or effort. You can't think your way out of what your parts are doing to protect you, but you can build a relationship with those parts that allows for genuine healing and change. (Your overachieving manager part might not like hearing this, but it's true.)
Who Depth-Oriented Couples Therapy Is For
The couples who thrive in my practice aren't looking for quick fixes or surface solutions. They're typically midlife or later, often at a significant crossroads in their individual lives as well as their relationship. Maybe you've built successful careers, raised children, created the life that looked right from the outside, but somewhere along the way you lost the connection with your partner or discovered wounds that success couldn't heal.
You've probably tried traditional couples counseling before, maybe more than once. You're intelligent, articulate, and capable of implementing the communication skills you learned. But those skills haven't touched the deeper pain you're carrying: the betrayal that shattered your trust, the shared trauma you survived but never processed together, the individual wounds from your past that keep showing up in your present relationship.
You're open to approaches that go beyond conventional therapy. The idea of EMDR therapy, psychedelic-assisted work, or exploring the spiritual dimensions of relationship healing doesn't scare you off. In fact, you're actively seeking a guide who can hold both clinical credibility and soulful depth, someone who understands the science of trauma and the mystery of transformation.
Privacy and exclusivity matter to you. You don't want to be another case number in a large group practice or a corporate ketamine clinic. You're looking for boutique, personalized care where you work with the same experienced therapist throughout your entire journey. You value depth over convenience and are willing to invest significantly in the quality of your healing process.
I work with couples in Santa Fe, Sedona, and Pagosa Springs through both in-person and online sessions, depending on what makes sense for your particular situation and the modalities we're using. Some of my couples travel to one of these locations specifically for intensive work, while others engage in ongoing therapy through a combination of online preparation and integration sessions with in-person intensive experiences.
What Makes Canyon Passages Different
Canyon Passages is intentionally not a large group practice or a clinical mill churning through couples. When you work with me, you get my full attention, my two decades of experience, and my genuine investment in your healing. I'm not handing you off to a less experienced therapist after the initial consultation. I'm not following a standardized protocol that treats every couple the same. I'm creating a completely personalized journey based on your specific wounds, your unique relationship dynamics, and what your healing actually requires.
My background combines clinical expertise with spiritual depth in a way that's rare in the therapy world. I'm a licensed trauma therapist and EMDR consultant with specialized training as a clinical sexologist. I've also trained in shamanic practice and bring a deep respect for the spiritual dimensions of healing. This means I can hold the clinical rigor and ethical boundaries you need while also creating space for the soulful, transformational experiences that happen when healing goes deep.
I don't promise to "fix your communication in ten sessions" or guarantee specific outcomes on a predetermined timeline. What I offer is something more honest and more profound: a passage through the wilderness of relationship pain toward genuine transformation. Some couples find significant healing in a few months of intensive work. Others engage in a longer journey that unfolds over a year or more. What matters isn't the timeline, it's that you're finally doing the work that can actually reach your wounds.
The couples who choose Canyon Passages over other options do so because they recognize themselves in this approach. They've tried the surface fixes and know they need something deeper. They understand that real transformation requires both clinical skill and spiritual sensitivity. They're ready to invest in boutique care that treats their relationship as the complex, sacred thing it is rather than a problem to be solved with standardized techniques.
The Canyon Passages Process for Couples
When couples first reach out to me, we begin with a brief application or contact form where you share what's bringing you to this work. Then we have a 15 to 20 minute fit call where I learn more about your situation and you get a sense of whether my approach feels right for you. This isn't a sales call, it's a genuine mutual assessment of whether we're a good fit and whether depth-oriented therapy is appropriate for what you're facing.
If we decide to work together, you'll complete a secure digital intake process that includes the standard clinical forms as well as specialized assessments for trauma history, relationship patterns, and if we're considering psychedelic-assisted work, thorough medical and psychological screening. I take safety seriously, both emotional and physical, and this intake process ensures I have the information needed to create the most effective and safe therapeutic experience for you.
Our first session is typically 90 minutes and serves as both an initial assessment and the beginning of our work together. I'm not just gathering information, I'm starting to create the relational safety and attunement that will hold all of our future work. By the end of this first session, you'll have a sense of whether this feels different from what you've tried before and whether you're ready to commit to the depth this work requires.
From there, I create an individualized framework for your journey. This isn't a standardized treatment plan, it's a personalized roadmap based on your specific wounds, goals, and what the healing process reveals as we go deeper. For some couples, this might look like several EMDR sessions focused on specific attachment injuries, followed by integration work using IFS and Gottman principles. For others, it might be preparation sessions building toward a psychedelic-assisted intensive experience, followed by multiple integration sessions where we weave those insights into your daily relationship.
I offer both ongoing weekly or biweekly therapy and intensive formats where couples come to Santa Fe, Sedona, or Pagosa Springs for concentrated work over several days. Some couples find that intensive formats create the spaciousness and immersion needed for deep healing, while others prefer the sustained support of regular sessions over time. We'll determine what makes sense for your particular situation, schedule, and healing needs.
Location-Based Healing in Santa Fe, Sedona, and Pagosa Springs
There's something about these three locations that supports the kind of transformational work I do with couples. Santa Fe offers the high desert landscape, the rich cultural tapestry, and a community that has long honored both clinical excellence and spiritual practice. Sedona provides the red rock grandeur and an energy that many couples find supports their opening to new possibilities. Pagosa Springs offers the healing hot springs, mountain serenity, and a quieter container for deep work.
For couples who travel to one of these locations for intensive work, the journey itself becomes part of the healing. You're stepping out of your normal environment, away from the demands and distractions of daily life, into a space held specifically for your transformation. Many couples find that this physical journey mirrors the inner passage they're making from wounds to healing, from protection to openness, from surviving to truly thriving together.
I also work with couples online when in-person sessions aren't practical or when we're in preparation or integration phases of psychedelic-assisted work that requires the actual medicine sessions to happen in person. Online sessions can be remarkably effective for EMDR therapy, IFS work, and the relational processing that forms the foundation of couples healing. The key is creating the safety and attunement that allows depth work to happen, regardless of whether we're in the same physical space. (Though I'll admit, there's something powerful about sharing the same room, breathing the same air, being fully present together in three dimensions.)
Moving Beyond Surviving Toward Thriving
If you're reading this, chances are you're tired of just surviving your relationship pain. You've tried the traditional approaches, learned the skills, implemented the techniques. You know how to communicate better, that's not actually the problem. The problem is the wounds that communication can't reach, the trauma that stays locked in your nervous system, the protective patterns that activate faster than your conscious mind can intervene.
You don't need another version of what you've already tried. You need a fundamentally different approach, one that meets trauma where it lives in your body and nervous system, one that honors the spiritual dimension of relationship healing, one that offers the clinical rigor and the soulful depth required for genuine transformation.
This is what I offer through Canyon Passages in Santa Fe, Sedona, and Pagosa Springs. Through EMDR therapy, Internal Family Systems, Gottman Method principles, and psychedelic-assisted therapy, I guide couples through depth-oriented healing that finally touches what traditional couples counseling couldn't reach. This isn't about managing your symptoms or learning to cope with the pain. This is about transforming the wounds themselves and discovering what becomes possible when you heal at the root.
The couples I work with aren't looking for easy, they're looking for real. They're willing to go into the difficult places, to face what they've been protecting against, to allow the kind of vulnerability that transformation requires. They understand that healing relationship wounds isn't a linear process with guaranteed timelines, but a passage that requires courage, commitment, and a skilled guide who can hold both the clinical and the sacred.
Taking the Next Step
If what I've described resonates with where you are in your relationship journey, I encourage you to reach out. You can contact me through the Canyon Passages website to begin a conversation about whether depth-oriented couples therapy might be right for you. During our initial fit call, we'll explore your situation, discuss the various therapeutic modalities that might support your healing, and determine whether my approach aligns with what you're seeking.
I don't work with every couple who contacts me. This work requires readiness, genuine commitment from both partners, and alignment with the depth-oriented approach that defines Canyon Passages. If we're not the right fit, I'll be honest about that and, when possible, suggest alternative resources that might better serve your needs.
For couples who are ready for this level of work, I offer something rare in the therapy world: genuine expertise in trauma treatment combined with extensive training in spiritual practice, clinical rigor paired with soulful presence, and a commitment to your transformation rather than just your symptom relief. I bring over 20 years of experience working with couples, specialized training as an EMDR consultant and clinical sexologist, and the perspective that comes from my own shamanic practice and deep respect for the mysteries of healing.
Traditional couples counseling serves many people well, and I honor the work that happens in those spaces. But for couples carrying deeper wounds (trauma that traditional talk therapy can't reach, attachment injuries that require neurobiological healing, spiritual disconnection that needs soul-level work) a different approach is necessary.
You've tried everything else. Now try transformation. Reach out to Canyon Passages and let's begin a conversation about what's possible when couples therapy finally goes deep enough to touch what's actually wounded and creates the conditions for healing that lasts.
Your relationship wounds don't have to define your future. With the right approach, the right guide, and your own courage to do this work, healing is not only possible, it's waiting for you on the other side of this passage.
