Every so often a client will ask me a question that I genuinely appreciate. Sometimes it’s explicit:
“I’ve read on your website that you have lived experience with polyamory. Does that mean you’ll think my monogamous relationship is unhealthy or judge me? Will you try to convince us to open our relationship?”
Other times it’s a little more subtle, but I can hear the concern living just beneath the surface. And, I completely understand why people wonder about this. Our relationship structures are often deeply intertwined with our identities, families, cultures, faith traditions, and our understanding of what it means to “love well.” Relationship structures are rarely just preferences– they’re often embedded in an entire philosophy of what it means to be a good partner, a trustworthy person, or even a moral human being.
So yes: it makes sense that a client might wonder whether sitting across from a therapist who is openly poly means they’ll be judged for choosing something different.
However, the answer is: absolutely not.
But I’d actually like to answer that question with more depth. Navigating life with two life partners, if anything, has given me an even greater appreciation for how much work expansive and non-monogamous relationships require. There is nothing inherently easier about maintaining multiple attachments, navigating competing needs, tending to jealousy, repairing ruptures, coordinating lives, or remaining emotionally responsive to more than one person you deeply care about. I don’t romanticize polyamory any more than I romanticize monogamy. The reality is that if someone were to time travel back to my 18-year-old self and tell them that I’d someday navigate life with a partner of 10 years and another of almost 18 years, I’d tell them they were experiencing delusions!
I do not believe there is a universally “correct” relationship structure for everyone, or one that is more emotionally honest or healthy than another.
What I Actually Care About
Some people flourish in monogamy, while other flourish in expansive partnerships. Some discover that the relationship structure they thought fit them no longer does as they move through life, while others spend years exploring alternatives only to realize that monogamy feels deeply aligned with who they are. Some would love to be in open partnerships, but due to their pragmatic reality, context, or nervous system, they choose to remain in closed relationships.
None of those outcomes strike me as inherently “more evolved” than another. What matters to me is congruence: Does the relationship you’re building genuinely reflect your values? Does it support the kind of life you’re trying to create? Does it allow you to show up with integrity, honesty, and emotional responsiveness?
Those are the questions that interest me far more than whether a relationship is monogamous or open.
How My Own Thinking Has Been Shaped
Many people know that I’m an Emotionally Focused Therapist. Fewer people know how deeply Narrative Therapy, feminist theory, and postmodern thought have shaped the way I think. Over the years I’ve spent a great deal of time examining many of the assumptions I inherited about relationships, family, gender, sexuality, success, and what constitutes a meaningful life. That process has been incredibly important to me personally.
But something I want clients to know is this: just because I have engaged in a great deal of deconstruction does not mean I expect my clients to do the same. If your faith is central to your life, I want to understand that faith and the meaning it holds for you. If your cultural traditions are deeply important, I want to understand them and let them guide our work. If monogamy is deeply aligned with your values, I have absolutely no interest in persuading you otherwise.
Likewise, if you’re exploring ethical non-monogamy, I’m not interested in assuming that your exploration is pathological or that your relationship simply needs to become monogamous again.
Therapy, as I understand it, is not about helping people become more like me. It’s about helping people become more fully themselves. And as a post-modern therapist, I believe there are many ways for people to engage in that experience and author a life that works for them.
When Couples Live Inside Different Stories
Where this becomes especially relevant is in couples therapy. When I’m working with an individual, my client is the human sitting across from me and I can meet them exactly where they are. We don’t necessarily have to question beliefs that they don’t want to question, and we don’t have to move toward conclusions that don’t feel authentic to them.
When I’m working with a partnership, however, my client becomes the relationship itself, which fundamentally shifts the work a bit.
Sometimes couples don’t come to therapy because they disagree about “what to do,” but rather, they come because they are living inside entirely different stories about what love means.
One partner may believe that experiencing attraction to someone else necessarily means something is broken in the relationship. Another may experience attraction as an ordinary part of being human and believe the more important question is how we choose to respond to those feelings. One partner may understand exclusivity as the defining feature of commitment while another understands commitment primarily through honesty, transparency, and shared agreements. Sometimes one partner worries that the other has a sex addiction, while the other experiences themselves as someone beginning to question long-held assumptions about desire and relationships. Sometimes one partner is engaged in profound personal deconstruction while the other feels frightened that everything they’ve built together is suddenly being called into question.
Those divides are incredibly painful places for couples to find themselves, and because we are indeed in a relational space, we need to be able to address these differences in a more direct and immediate way than we might in an individual space.
The Power of Narrative Work in These Moments
Before we can meaningfully decide what to do, we often need to understand the stories that each person is living inside. This is where narrative work can be incredibly powerful, not because my goal is to dismantle anyone’s beliefs or because I think everyone should deconstruct monogamy, religion, or any other inherited value system.
Rather, I think it is powerful because it leads to congruence between two (or more) humans who love each other but are interpreting the world from very different lenses. It can be profoundly healing to ask questions like:
Where did this belief come from?
Has it been consciously chosen, or quietly inherited?
Is it still serving you?
Does it help you move toward the relationship you want, or is it contributing to pain that neither of you has been able to name?
Sometimes those conversations lead people to reaffirm the beliefs they’ve always held. There is something deeply grounding about thoughtfully examining your values and arriving at the conclusion: “Yep, this still feels true for me.”
Other times, people discover that some of their assumptions no longer fit the life they’re trying to build. Neither outcome is better, and my role is not to determine which worldview wins. My role is to help people understand themselves, understand one another, and determine whether there is a way to build a relationship that honors both people’s deepest values.
When There Isn’t a Way Through Together
Here is the touchstone of this work: sometimes this work means repairing the relationship, while other times it means creating an entirely new way of relating. And sometimes, it means arriving compassionately and honestly at the realization that two people are asking one relationship to hold fundamentally incompatible visions of what partnership should be.
As painful as that can be, I don’t consider that a failure of therapy. Sometimes clarity and congruence are the most compassionate outcomes therapy can offer.
What I Actually Bring Into the Room
At the end of the day, I don’t believe my job is to help people become more progressive, more traditional, more monogamous, more polyamorous, more conservative, more religious, or less religious.
I believe my job is to help people become more intentional, emotionally honest, and more connected to the values that genuinely feel like their own. And then to develop the capacity and self-anchoring energy to bring that to the humans they love.
That’s the one perspective I bring into every session: human beings are wonderfully complex, relationships are rarely as simple as our cultural narratives would have us believe, and I feel deeply honored whenever someone invites me into the privilege of making sense of that complexity alongside them.
