Christine Bonaci

You’re so sick of just surviving that you can’t remember what it feels like to actually live.

You’ve got insight and are not new to working on yourself. You’ve picked up coping skills along the way, but somehow you’re still white-knuckling through the same toxic patterns.

You’ve spent years trying to understand why you keep ending up in relationships that drain you. Maybe you’ve wondered how you could be so smart, so self-aware, and still find yourself making excuses for people who hurt you, doubting your instincts, or staying long after you know it’s time to leave.

The truth is, these patterns usually didn’t start in adulthood. They started in the relationships that taught you what love, safety, and belonging looked like. If you grew up walking on eggshells, managing someone else’s emotions, earning love by being “good,” or never quite knowing which version of a parent you were coming home to, those adaptations don’t simply disappear because you become an adult. They often become the blueprint for the relationships you choose later.

You know what you need to do; you just can’t seem to get out of your own way and do it.

The people I work with are curious and done settling for surface-level fixes. Many are highly accomplished, well-educated, well-traveled, well-established but privately exhausted, and still swirling in patterns that don’t match the life they’ve built. Many are navigating the aftermath of trauma, relationships where the other person’s behavior felt confusing, controlling, or impossible to predict, or the specific disorientation of knowing there’s a “before and after” without knowing how to live in the after.

Even after years of trying to figure this out, you might still find yourself:

• Ruminating over every interaction, past or present
• Returning to a relationship you know isn’t good for you
• Living a life that doesn’t match who you actually are
• Carrying a low hum of dread that never fully goes away
• Struggling to slow down, set a boundary, or ask for what you need
• Shutting down the moment a voice gets raised

I come to this work from an unusual background: I spent years as an investigator working violent crime cases, including child abuse, sexual assault, and human trafficking, before becoming a therapist. That, combined with my own healing journey through childhood trauma and C-PTSD, means I don’t flinch from the hardest parts of your story. I’ve spent decades witnessing trauma and its aftermath, both professionally and personally, and I bring that depth of experience to our work together.

Therapy with me is direct, collaborative, and grounded in psychoeducation. I want you to understand the why behind your patterns, not just the what. We’ll work with real-time examples, role plays, and practical skills, alongside deeper exploratory work, so insight actually turns into change. I take a mind-body-spirit approach, because healing isn’t just cognitive; it’s relational, somatic, and, for many of my clients, spiritual too.

My goal isn’t to help you get rid of your patterns, behaviors, or emotions. It’s to help you understand and integrate them, so they become part of who you are today, instead of something running the show from the background.

If you’re ready to stop surviving and start living, I’d love to talk.