Audrey Schoen, LMFT

Audrey Schoen, LMFT California Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist. Online video counseling for clients in California.

Helping couples and adults gain insight and clarity to feel more grounded, improve communication and create connection in their relationships.

A couple came to me recently on their third therapist in two years.The first two never once named the pattern between th...
06/23/2026

A couple came to me recently on their third therapist in two years.

The first two never once named the pattern between them. Just a lot of "and how did that make you feel?" while the same fight played out in the room week after week.

You're allowed to expect more than that.

Couples therapy isn't supposed to be a venting session with a referee. If you've been showing up, doing the work, and still leaving sessions feeling like nothing is actually shifting, it’s time to start asking some questions. Something is missing.

Here's what you can ask for, and what you should hear back:

→ "Can you name the pattern you're seeing between us?"
→ "What are we actually working toward?"
→ "We've done this before. What will be different here?"
→ "I need you to be direct with us, not just reflective."
→ "We want tools and homework, not only conversation."
→ "If this isn't working in eight weeks, I want to talk about why."

A good couples therapist will not flinch at any of those questions. They'll be relieved you asked.

You don't have to keep paying to be politely stuck. 🤍

If you're in California or Texas and ready for couples work that actually names what's happening, you can reach out through my site.

Most high-achievers who walk into my office say some version of the same thing in the first session: "I'm fine. I'm just...
06/22/2026

Most high-achievers who walk into my office say some version of the same thing in the first session: "I'm fine. I'm just not great."

That sentence is the whole map. Because "fine" is what we've been trained to call survival when we're scared of being seen as ungrateful. Functioning isn't the same as thriving, and somewhere underneath the calendar and the performance reviews and the dinners you remembered to plan, you already know the difference.

So when a client tells me they're fine, I ask one question: "Fine compared to what? Surviving isn't the bar we're working toward here."

I watch something shift. The shoulders drop. The story changes from "I don't really need this" to "oh. That's actually the problem." Because the issue was never that the pain was big enough to qualify. The issue is that you've been grading yourself against a baseline of just barely holding it together, and calling that a life.

You're allowed to want more than fine. That's not entitlement. That's the work.

You're telling me about the meeting that wrecked you last Thursday, or the argument with your spouse last week you canno...
06/21/2026

You're telling me about the meeting that wrecked you last Thursday, or the argument with your spouse last week you cannot stop rehashing in your own head. Your eyes keep drifting to the same spot on the wall behind my left shoulder.

That spot isn't random. That's Brainspotting.

We find the exact place in your visual field where your nervous system is holding a stuck experience. Then we stay there, quietly, and let your brain do what it's been trying to do for months or years on its own.

It sounds strange on paper. I know. Most of my high-achieving clients come in skeptical. They've already done years of insight-oriented talk therapy. They understand their patterns. They can explain their childhood in a paragraph. And they still can't stop the 3 a.m. spiral or the chest-tight feeling before every board meeting.

That's the gap Brainspotting closes. Talk therapy gives you the map. Brainspotting helps your body actually put down what it's been carrying. The before and after is usually small and physical. A longer exhale. Shoulders that finally drop. The story about last Thursday loses some of its charge.

I use it in my practice in Roseville and online across California and Texas, usually alongside Relational Life Therapy or ART, depending on what you're working through. If you've been doing the work and still feel stuck in your body, this might be why.

You've solved every hard problem in front of you. Except this one.And the reason it won't move isn't that you're not try...
06/20/2026

You've solved every hard problem in front of you. Except this one.

And the reason it won't move isn't that you're not trying hard enough. It's that effort is the exact tool that got you here, and you're trying to use it on something it was never built to fix.

Here's what I see in my office every week. The founder who can close a round but can't tell their spouse they're scared. The executive who optimizes everything except the Sunday night dread. The parent who runs a team of 40 but gives their partner the worst 90 minutes of the day, every day, after the kids are in bed.

The higher you climb, the less anyone around you expects you to struggle. Which means you carry it alone. And functioning is not the same as thriving, even when your calendar, your numbers, and your reviews all say otherwise.

So consider this your permission slip:

✓ You're allowed to be high-functioning and still need support.
✓ You're allowed to admit the cost of building this has been higher than you planned.
✓ You're allowed to stop giving your partner your worst hours.
✓ You're allowed to solve this the same way you'd solve any hard problem. With the right help.

You don't have to be in crisis to start. You just have to be honest that the strategy of doing it alone has a ceiling, and you've hit it.

If you're ready, that's the work I do with high-achievers and couples, online in California and Texas and in person in Roseville. 🤍

Your therapist should have sat in the client chair too.Not just studied it. Not just supervised it. Actually been the on...
06/19/2026

Your therapist should have sat in the client chair too.

Not just studied it. Not just supervised it. Actually been the one in the room with their own stuff on the table, paying for the hour, doing the uncomfortable work of changing.

There's a real difference between a clinician who understands struggle intellectually and one who knows what it costs to actually move through it. You can feel it the moment you sit down. One person is interpreting you. The other is recognizing something.

I don't ask my clients to go anywhere I haven't gone myself. That's not a tagline. It's a standard. My own therapy, my own consultation, my own work on the patterns I bring into the room. Because the parts of me I haven't met are the parts I won't be able to meet in you.

So if you're shopping for a therapist, here's a question worth asking on a consult call: "What does your own ongoing growth work look like right now?"

Listen for a real answer. Not credentials. Not years in practice. The actual answer.

That's the person you want across from you.

You've solved harder problems than this. So why does your own anxiety feel completely unsolvable, even when everything e...
06/18/2026

You've solved harder problems than this. So why does your own anxiety feel completely unsolvable, even when everything else in your life is working?

When you're wired to perform, it's easy to treat every internal struggle like a performance problem to solve. If you find yourself snapping at your partner over unwashed dishes, or feeling completely flat during a quiet evening, you might assume you're failing.

These experiences are actually signals with deep meaning. Irritability, emotional numbness, and relationship friction are physical data points, warning you that your system has been running on empty.

Swipe through the graphic to see the three things high-achievers consistently misread as character flaws, and how to start listening to what they actually mean.

You've been in weekly couples therapy for six months and you're still having the same argument about the dishes, the in-...
06/17/2026

You've been in weekly couples therapy for six months and you're still having the same argument about the dishes, the in-laws, the phone at dinner.

That's not a failure. It might just be the wrong format.

Weekly therapy is designed for couples who are relatively stable, both motivated, and have the bandwidth to practice something new in the seven days between sessions. Small shifts. Steady integration. It works beautifully when the foundation is intact and you're refining the dynamic.

Intensive therapy is a different tool. It's for couples at a turning point. When one person has a foot out the door. When the weekly cadence keeps getting derailed by travel, kids, work, life. When you can feel that one hour a week isn't catching up to what's actually breaking down between you.

Neither format is better. They solve different problems. The question isn't "which kind of therapy works," it's "which kind of therapy matches where this relationship actually is right now."

If you've been grinding through weekly sessions and the needle isn't moving, that's information. Bring it to your therapist. Ask directly: is the pace serving us, or are we outrunning it?

You don't have an anxiety problem. You have a tolerance-for-not-knowing problem.In 1817, the poet John Keats named somet...
06/16/2026

You don't have an anxiety problem. You have a tolerance-for-not-knowing problem.

In 1817, the poet John Keats named something most high-achievers have never been taught: Negative Capability. The capacity to stay inside uncertainty and doubt without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Read that last part again. Irritable reaching.

That's what most of my high-achieving clients do with their inner lives. A hard feeling shows up and within seconds it's been diagnosed, categorized, assigned a root cause, and slated for resolution by Friday. Discomfort becomes a project. Grief becomes a ticket to close. A quiet ache on a Tuesday morning becomes a problem to optimize.

It works everywhere except the places that matter most. Your marriage. Your body. Your kid's hard year. The 3am question about whether the life you built is actually the one you want.

You cannot achieve your way out of those. They require the one skill you were never trained in: stillness.

Sitting with what's unresolved, without fixing it, without naming it, without turning it into a five-step plan, is often the most difficult and most transformative work I do with clients. It feels like doing nothing. It is actually the thing.

What would shift if, the next time something hard came up, you didn't try to solve it for ten more minutes than usual?

You've solved the dishes argument seventeen times. New system. New agreement. Two weeks later, same fight.Because the sy...
06/15/2026

You've solved the dishes argument seventeen times. New system. New agreement. Two weeks later, same fight.

Because the system was never the problem.

The topic of the fight is almost never what the fight is actually about. He forgot to text when he was running late. She's furious. He thinks it's about a text. It's not about the text. It's about whether he holds her in mind when she can't see him.

In my office, I call this a proxy fight. A surface conflict standing in for an unspoken emotional need. Couples don't repeat fights because they're stubborn. They repeat them because the real question never gets answered.

Every new argument is the old argument wearing a different coat.

If you and your partner keep landing in the same fight with different scenery, the work isn't a better system. It's naming what the fight is actually asking for.

That's the conversation I have with couples every week, in person in Roseville, CA and online throughout California and Texas.

The argument started over an unwashed pan. It was never about the pan. Well, it's not ONLY about the pan. Monday it's th...
06/14/2026

The argument started over an unwashed pan. It was never about the pan. Well, it's not ONLY about the pan.

Monday it's the dishes. Friday it's the credit card bill. Next week it's who forgot to call the school. The topic rotates. The feeling underneath stays exactly the same.

In couples therapy we call this content vs. process. The content is whatever you're technically fighting about. The process is the older, deeper message underneath: Do I matter to you? Am I carrying this alone? Do you actually see me?

One partner feels unseen. The other feels accused. Both are right about their feeling and wrong about the cause. And until you can name the real conversation, you'll keep relitigating the dishes for years.

Swipe through. If you recognize your own recurring fight in here, that recognition is the first move.

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