Our Story
The day after Valentine's Day in 2010, we had a classic meet-cute at a gym in Durham, North Carolina. Something about the sparkle in our eyes told us that this relationship was going to be something special.
Young, in love, and on the ladder of traditional “success,” we moved to San Francisco.
Liz was running social impact programs in Big Tech (LinkedIn and then Facebook), while Paul was working a job in big law (Ropes & Gray).
As successful as things were on the outside, we remember calling each other one night after client dinners at fancy international hotels (Paul in Mexico City and Liz in Singapore) and wishing that we could just be having pizza in our pajamas at home together.
We realized that we were living from a place of compromise – external compromise. Our work was keeping us apart from each other, and from ourselves.
For the first time, we decided to move toward a life that prioritized our shared desires for connection and balance.
In 2016, we quit our jobs, and moved to Costa Rica (where we host retreats today).
We fell in love with surfing, nature, and bringing more of our true selves into our relationship and the world. This phase always reminds us why we love helping couples ready to scale back on external demands in service of greater connection and adventure together.
We took this vision into building a family together, and the hardship of four miscarriages shattered our world.
This was the second time we realized that we couldn’t compromise our way to wholeness.
Grief and heartache were thrust into our faces and couldn’t be surmounted with a change of job or location. There was no middle ground between trying or not trying for another baby. We fought more than we ever had, and had to learn how to manage healthy conflict and the intrinsic nature of differences and hardship that all couples face.
Everything shifted when we realized that the problem wasn't either of us, our differences, nor our love for each other. We realized that something external to us was incredibly challenging and causing us to struggle – and if we could turn toward that problem together as a team, we could conquer anything.
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This phase continually inspires us to work with couples going through grief, loss, transition, or some other challenge that they are learning to face together. It was also the phase that inspired us to become therapists.
In 2022, thanks in part to journeys of self-discovery through psychedelic medicine, we started bringing this same team orientation, authenticity, openness to difference, and approach to healthy conflict to other areas of life: our predictable date nights, our regularly-avoided tough conversations (touch and money, most of all), the way we really felt about how our days had gone, our desires, our anxieties, our dreams.
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As we leaned into bringing more of ourselves out in all relational moments, we both found ourselves feeling more connected, more joyful, more secure, more playful, more passionate, and more alive.
It’s this aliveness – and the pathway toward it – that we feel so honored to share with others, and to keep living into ourselves every day.
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It’s what inspired us to focus on mindful somatic therapy, working with other couples, teaching the same practices that we've lived, learned, and love together on the path from 50/50 to 100/100.
Our Credentials
Paul Cohen
B.A. Georgetown University
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J.D. Duke University
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M.S.W. Rutgers University
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L.S.W. Licensed Trauma-Informed Individual & Couples Therapist
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Graduate of SoundMind Institute for Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy
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Hakomi Institute - Level One Graduate, Level Two Student
Liz Cohen
B.A. Duke University
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M.S.W. Rutgers University
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L.S.W. Licensed Trauma-Informed Individual & Couples Therapist
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EMDR Level One & Level Two Graduate
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Hakomi Institute - Level One Graduate, Level Two Student
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Specialized training in domestic violence, sexual assault, and trauma in relationships
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