The Chicago Center for Relational Health (CCRH) was founded on the belief that the largest contributor to our overall health and well-being is the quality of our relationships.

 

Our Mission

Our mission is to help individuals, couples and families connect and thrive. We work with clients to ensure they better understand their histories, attachments and patterns so that they can develop strategies and skills to lead a meaningful life and engage in healthy relationships both with others and with themselves. We intentionally define relationships as any interaction or connection with someone else whether that be a friend, family member, partner, colleague, neighbor or stranger.

The world is not a pleasant place to be without someone to hold and be held by.
— Nikki Giovanni, writer, poet, activist

Our focus

We founded CCRH because we saw an opportunity to focus on relational health in a way that we thought was being neglected. In our experience as both clinicians and clients we noticed that the work was often couples or family or individual. We thought - shouldn’t it be all of it at the same time? No matter our current relationship status we have been or hope to be in relationship with someone. Regardless of our current family status we were raised by someone. Most significantly none of us are individuals only. We live, work, love, grow, succeed, thrive and are oppressed within the context of relationships. Our belief is that relationships are the most significant contributor to our overall health and most of us are not tending to them appropriately.

This does not mean that CCRH is only for clients who are married, have a partner or are having family conflict. Our work focuses on your overall emotional and relational health and that includes your own mental health struggles and diagnoses, your desires and hopes and challenges and also the relationship you have with yourself.

Research shows that an increased understanding of your own resources and vulnerabilities, coupled with the tools to help explain them to others, leads to a healthier and more fulfilling life. We want that for you and for all of us.

what we do

  • Work with Individuals, Couples and Families to better understand their history and how it impacts their present.

  • Give you tools and skills to improve functioning and reduce symptoms.

  • Evaluate, assess and make a treatment plan specific to your needs that is flexible, adaptable and relevant to your life.

  • Continually collaborate with clients and push against the traditional top-down hierarchical therapeutic relationship.

  • Use techniques like DBT, CBT, PACT, EMDR and the Collaborative Change Model to help clients make changes, reduce symptoms and improve the quality of their lives.

  • Work from a trauma informed perspective that understands and accepts that trauma is pervasive, chronic and must be understood in order to do good clinical work.

  • Collaborate with physicians, outside therapists and other integral partners to aid in the healing and change process.