HEY, I'M rachael
the founder and dreamer behind The Relational Studio. I'm on a mission to make relationships more satisfying. You in?
I'm one of those people who's had to learn everything the hard way...
I never had role models for healthy relating. My parents divorced when I was in elementary school and basically never spoke again. Nobody taught me how to resolve conflict, sustain long-term friendships, or settle a disagreement without setting fire to the whole connection. I wasn't taught how to have a healthy sense of self-interest or assert my needs. I was taught to be agreeable. It took me a while to figure out those weren't the same thing. I spent the first half of my life learning about relationships through a dense fog of heartache and confusion.
So by the time I got to college I threw myself into learning everything I could about people and how we work. I got a couple of psychology degrees and became a devoted student of the human experience. Eventually I realized that silence wasn't a strategy and self-sacrifice wasn't a love-language. Twenty years of clinical work later, and I'm still learning. And every person I've sat with has wanted the same thing: to experience love and feel deeply connected. To themselves. To the people they're closest to. That's what it comes down to. Every time.
What I started noticing, year after year in my therapist's chair, was a pattern.
The women who landed in front of me weren't broken. They were tired in a particular way. A way that was hard to name and painful to feel. They had built careers and households and reputations on the strength of being the one who handled it all. They were big feelers who loved hard and protected everyone. And they made it look easy. By all visible measures, their lives were a huge success. Privately though, they were coming apart at the seams.
I recognized it because I had been there myself.
I spent a long stretch of my life confusing being compliant with being lovable, and managing other people's feelings instead of being in touch with my own. Untangling those threads took years of my personal depth-work: therapy, self-reflection, grieving, hard conversations, and the slow, unflattering project of coming up against my own internal criticism and negative self-talk. I know the inside of that self-abandonment cage because I lived in it.
The Relational Studio grew out of all of it: the clinical years, and the harder-earned personal ones.
I call this space a studio on purpose. A studio is a place where you learn and practice. Where you get to be creative and try new things. In this studio, the craft is in the returning. Here, we treat relating - to ourselves, to the people we love, to the lives we're actually living - as a real practice, because that's what it is. Nobody is born knowing how to do this. Most of us were not taught. And yet returning to your own sense of things, developing a sense of self-trust and self-compassion are some of the most meaningful practices you can cultivate.
The work I do is shaped by four bodies of thought I have trained in deeply: Jungian and transpersonal psychology for the depth and the unconscious soul layer, schema therapy and attachment theory for the developmental architecture and life-patterns, Buddhist contemplative practice for the ground of self-compassion, and yoga and somatic work for the energy that lives beyond language.
If you've been the one holding it all together, and something inside of you has begun to fray, you're not alone.
If you find yourself depleted rather than nourished by your relationships and wondering if there's a more aligned and authentic way to show up for yourself and others - I think there is. I've watched women find their way toward it. Including, slowly, myself.
I'm crafting a revolution
I want to live in a world where midlife women stop apologizing for outgrowing the lives they built. Where the inner work of relating is treated as the serious craft it is. I want the second half of your life to be more yours than the first half got to be.
So much of whether a life feels good - things like connection, ease, and the texture of your ordinary Tuesday comes down to the quality of your relationships. The one you have with yourself. The ones you have with everyone else. Let's treat them like the creative opportunity they are.
That's what The Relational Studio is for.
"You have a right to experiment with your life... I think we have a right to change course. " - Anais Nin
I'm all about
Five mile walks, shelf bras, gallery walls, bamboo sheets, and musky, earthy fragrances.
I'm not about
Double standards, clutter, shifty people, and subscriptions that are as hard to get out of as cult-membership.
SOMETHING BROUGHT YOU HERE
It might be this...
- You know something needs to change but you can't quite name what
- You've spent years being hyper-responsible and you're starting to feel the cost of it
- You don't want to blow up your marriage or the life you've built - but you do want to feel better
- Your tolerance for self-betrayal has hit zero
WANT TO KNOW HOW WE CAN WORK TOGETHER?
Here's how I can help
Right now, the only way to work with me is inside my course, The Reckoning.
I say the only way like it's a limitation, but I don't experience it that way. The Reckoning is where I've put my full body of work: over twenty years of clinical practice, my own long reckoning, and everything I've learned about how this kind of growing-up actually moves. It's also where the women in it get to do something that they can't do alone: connect with other women who are inside the same brave, unglamorous work, and stop feeling like the only one.
If you've read this far and something in you is leaning in, this is where I'd send you next.
TELL ME MORE ➡
Where are you most disconnected? And what will bring you back...
Somewhere in midlife, a woman realizes she has lost touch with herself. The feeling arrives quietly at first... in the fatigue, the dissatisfaction, the resentment. In the relationships that were once fulfilling but have started to feel like work, or in an inner life that used to feel richer, freer or more alive.
The Reckoning is a framework for that moment. It maps the four relationships that can quietly fray in a midlife: with yourself, with the people closest to you, with your friendships, and with what you have called sacred.
This is a short, honest quiz that will tell you which one is most in need of your attention right now. Sixteen questions. Five minutes. You'll get a personal reading, written for the woman the answers describe.
Coming Soon - Stay Tuned!
