Relationship Difficulties
Home -Services
About Relationship Difficulties
Relationship Therapy in Santa Monica & Los Angeles
Relationship difficulties are rarely just about the other person. The patterns we bring to our closest relationships how we communicate, how we handle conflict, how much we let ourselves be known are often rooted in our earliest experiences of connection and loss.
Dr. Sally Hackman, PhD, MFT, helps adults in Santa Monica and Los Angeles understand the relational patterns that keep them stuck, whether they show up in romantic partnerships, friendships, family dynamics, or adult relationships with parents or grown children.
Key Points
Guiding You Toward Healthier Connections.
Empowering Resilience
Understand the unconscious beliefs about yourself and others that drive how you show up in relationships and develop the capacity for the closeness, honesty, and mutual respect you deserve.
Healing Space
Individual relationship therapy offers a private space to explore dynamics that are too complex or too vulnerable to work through alone. Available in person in Santa Monica or via Zoom.
Transformative Support
Dr. Hackman integrates attachment theory, relational therapy, and psychoanalytic insight to address communication problems, trust issues, patterns of conflict, and difficulties with adult children or aging parents.
OUR COMMITMENT TO YOU
Your Wellbeing Is Our Priority.
Whether you are navigating a recurring conflict with a partner, struggling to connect with an adult child, feeling unseen in a friendship, or finding that you keep ending up in the same painful relational dynamics individual therapy can help you see the pattern clearly, understand its origins, and change it.
0
+
Years of Relationship Therapy Experience
0
Serving Santa Monica Continuously
0
%
Confidential Always
0
$
First Session Free If You Don't Return
FAQ
Common Questions
Yes. Even without your partner in the room, individual therapy can change a relationship substantially — by helping you understand your own patterns, triggers, and needs, which changes how you show up with the other person. Relationships are systems, and systems respond when one part of them moves.
Sometimes it largely is. But the work still begins with what you can see and change in yourself, because that is the only part of the system you have direct access to. That is not a way of assigning blame to you — it is a way of getting traction. And when one person in a relationship genuinely changes, the dynamic between them usually shifts too.
Yes, and this is one of the most common reasons people start. You do not need anyone’s permission or participation to understand your own patterns. Many people begin individual work precisely because their partner won’t attend, and find that the relationship changes anyway — sometimes enough that the partner becomes willing later.
No. Couples counseling involves both partners in the room together, working on the relationship as the client. Individual relationship therapy is one person working on their own relational patterns, wherever those patterns appear — not only in a romantic relationship. Dr. Hackman offers both, so it is possible to start with one and move to the other without changing therapist.
Yes. Because Dr. Hackman works with individuals and couples, you can begin on your own and bring your partner in later if you both want to — without either of you starting over with someone new, and without having to explain the history twice. [CONFIRM: some clinicians decline to see a couple after seeing one partner individually, for good clinical reasons. This answer should reflect Sally’s actual practice.]