Hello, my name is Grayson Wallen and I am a Licensed Therapist in California helping relationships foster friendship, manage conflict and create shared meaning that lasts. I work especially well with those who are looking to get to the root of their problems and are willing to look at their emotions.

Do I need therapy? If you are struggling with your work, relationships or love then these are great reasons to seek therapy. The research on couples therapy shows that most couples wait six years too long on average before they get the help that they need.

How do you assess a relationship? a. This Assessment takes at most 10 hours to complete and involves 3 meetings with me and online questionaries and recoding videos of you having conversations with your partner. After all this work is done, we will have 19 pages of data on what is going well and what hurts the most in your relationship. The reason we do this is because it gives us an x-ray of your relationship and how to help you feel the most satisfied together in the shortest amount of time.

What is Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy? a. ISTDP is a focused form of therapy that aims to help you see within yourself, the experiences that shaped you the most and how you have learned to deal with these experiences in both healthy and conflicted ways. We do this by looking at events in your life (past or present), how you feel about it (emotions) and monitor what you do with the feelings you have instead of feeling them (defenses).

I earned my Masters of Counseling degree at Phoenix Seminary and have since then completed Gottman Method Couples Therapy trainings levels 1-3 and also have experience working with people of faith seeking to understand how their faith and feelings can work together.

What is the Gottman Method? The Gottman Method for Couples Therapy is a way to help relationships boost their satisfaction in researched and proven ways to help. This is rooted in the research conducted by Dr. John Gottman. After learning what makes relationships work and fail, he applied relationship best practices to conflicted and failing relationships and learned that anyone can have a good relationship with the right focus in the right areas.

What is Marathon or Weekend Intensive Relationship Therapy? Weekend intensives or Marathon Therapy is an alternative to traditional couples therapy that allows for about 6 months of couples work to be done in a weekend. We do this by meeting for 6 hours per day for 2-3 consecutive days and take breaks as needed. Couples recovering from betrayals, affairs or other big issues could benefit from longer sessions as well as those looking to jump-start or rejuvenate a relationship in a weekend. Its important to note that most couples need more than 6 months of therapy and that Marathon Therapy can be an efficient way to go about healing and change.

What are the next steps to working with you? If you would like to work with me, you will need to schedule a first session and complete some online forms which will take 15 minutes or so. For individual therapy, we will meet for 3 consecutive hours in one day and for Relationship Therapy we will start your Relationship Assessment with a 90 minute first session together.