GET certified IN trauma informed relationshipS
We provide consulting, training, and certification in Trauma Informed Relationship Counseling for Individuals and Couples to licensed therapists, coaches, and other helping professionals.
Whether you work with couples, individuals, or both, having a truly trauma informed approach to relationship issues is essential.
This goes beyond just knowing how to work with Big T Traumas (the traumas that often result in a diagnosis of PTSD or C-PTSD) to understanding how small t traumas from childhood exert a powerful influence on adult intimate relationships, creating the difficulties, dissatisfaction, and disconnection that so many clients encounter in their intimate relationships.
Because these painful childhood experiences are common, and they don’t rise to the level of PTSD, relational trauma from childhood is often overlooked in the research that ultimately informs our training as therapists.
This is tragic because these small t traumas of childhood create unhealed relationship wounds that end up surfacing in adult relationships and create significant distress for individuals and couples, contributing not just to relationship problems but also depression, anxiety, and other mental health challenges.
Some of the most common ways these unhealed wounds from childhood affect clients include:
Feelings of shame that interfere with connection and intimacy
Inappropriate guilt
Difficulty being vulnerable with others
Fear of intimacy
Difficulty setting healthy boundaries
Repetitive relationship patterns
Difficulty communicating
Difficulty handling conflict in relationships
Struggles with self-compassion and self-love
Repeatedly choosing partners who are unhealthy/unavailable
Social anxiety
Childhood experiences of ruptured connection to a parent or caregiver cause children to internalize painful messages about themselves. These messages continue to affect relationships well into adulthood, especially relationship with intimate partners but also with close friends, relatives, and even coworkers.
Hey there … I’m Angela Amias, lcsw.
I developed the Trauma Informed Relationship Counseling for Individuals and Couples model of relationship therapy to bridge the gap between cutting edge research on relational trauma and traditional models for relationship counseling.
It’s the first comprehensive relationship counseling model that integrates a trauma informed approach to help both individuals and couples overcome relationship struggles and create more satisfying connections.
As you probably know, trauma informed care is the wave of the future … And it’s already here.
Health care is undergoing a massive transformation as the impact of trauma on our health and wellbeing is gaining more widespread recognition.
While trauma informed care has become the new standard in many areas of health care, a clear, specific, and nuanced understanding of how trauma impacts intimate relationships has lagged behind.
First wave relationship counseling models, including the Big Four (the Gottman Method, the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, and Imago Relationship Therapy), were originally developed decades ago, in the absence of what we now know about trauma and its impact of relationships.
Now we need a new model of relationship counseling: one that’s built from the ground up that incorporates an understanding of many forms of relational trauma clients experience. We need not only a trauma-informed perspective but also a relationship counseling model that’s truly designed to reflect the diversity of contemporary relationships—rather than the white, heteronormative, middle class model of marriage that was considered the norm in relationship counseling a generation ago.
Thanks to the work of cultural luminaries like Brené Brown, Bessel van der Kolk, Esther Perel, Gabor Maté, as well as the many other non-clinicians who’ve bravely written and spoken publicly about their histories of childhood trauma, clients are arriving in our offices more aware of their own past trauma than ever before.
Many clients are actively searching for therapists who are skilled not just at treating Big T traumas, but also able to help them know what to do about the ways that their past trauma is still affecting their adult relationships.
This requires an understanding of the many ways that relational trauma during childhood impacts adult relationships, including:
‣ the subtle patterns that develop as a result of clients’ working models of relationships formed in childhood
‣ uncovering the secret relationship contracts at work in current (or past) relationships
‣ identifying the specific relationship skills they missed out on developing during childhood
‣ knowing how working models of relationships developed in childhood relate to specific challenges and growth opportunities in adult relationships (especially, but not limited to, intimate romantic relationships)
‣ a knowledge of the ways that patriarchy causes gendered trauma during childhood that sets women up to be unable to trust what they know and men to be unable to know what they feel … and more importantly, how to support all people in speaking what they know and knowing what they feel
Clients want hope—hope that their painful past experiences aren’t a life sentence for unhealthy or unsatisfying relationships.
With an increased awareness of trauma, many are now recognizing their own past trauma and are seeking to understand what this means for them.
Desperate for information about trauma and in the absence of knowing where to go and who to turn to for help, many turn to the internet to understand what their past trauma means for their current or future relationships.
And what they learn on the internet is inaccurate and completely heartbreaking.
In the words of one lovely woman who turned to the internet to understand what her childhood trauma meant for her: “You’re doomed. If you grew up in any kind of abusive family, you’ll continuously choose a partner with whom you replicate the same abusive patterns from childhood. You’re incapable of choosing better, or having boundaries, or even recognizing any of this. Sometimes I even got the impression that growing up in this way actually attracted abusive people and that there was no way to guard against attracting people like this.”
Our clients who’ve survived painful childhood experiences deserve better than this and we—as therapists—can give it to them.
With the right training and skill set, we can give them not only hope but also the new understandings of themselves and new experiences of connection and healing they deserve.
about us
We provide training, consulting, and certification in Trauma Informed Relationship Counseling. We’re the creators of the Five Relationship Archetypes and the founders of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma informed relationship programs. We’re also the hosts of the Alchemy of Connection podcast. We developed the Relationship Yes! Test, a simple and elegant five question checklist for healthy relationships, designed for those with a past history of relational trauma, to help them know what’s working (and what might not be working) in their intimate relationships.
Angela Amias, LCSW
Clinical Director
Angela Amias, LCSW, is a relationship therapist and nationally recognized relationship expert. She’s also the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma informed relationship programs for individuals and couples. She founded the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships to provide training and education to therapists who want to help their clients heal past wounds and create more fulfilling relationships.
Angela developed the Trauma Informed Relationship Counseling model of relationship therapy to bridge the gap between cutting edge research on relational trauma and traditional models for relationship counseling. It’s the first comprehensive relationship counseling model that integrates a trauma informed approach to help both individuals and couples overcome relationship struggles and create more satisfying connections.
Angela got her start as a therapist working at one of only a handful of clinics in the United States that specialized in treating profound attachment trauma in adopted children. As a trauma focused family therapist, Angela’s role was to help adoptive parents understand the inner world of their wounded child, while she also helped the children in her care learn how to trust again, so they could get close to their adoptive parents.
When she left this role to become a therapist at a holistic healing center, working with women and men with depression, anxiety, and run-of-the-mill relationship issues, she imagined that her specialized skill set for treating attachment trauma would no longer be needed.
What she actually discovered was the exact opposite.
To her surprise, the struggles her adult clients described in their romantic relationships were remarkably similar to what she’d witnessed at the trauma clinic. Nearly all her adult clients seemed to be carrying some of the same core wounds from childhood that she’d first seen in severely traumatized children.
This was true despite the fact that many of her clients reported having unremarkable childhoods, with seemingly adequate parenting when they were young. And yet, they’d still grown up internalizing messages that created problems in their adult relationships.
This convinced Angela that people don’t have to experience severe Capital T Trauma to be wounded by painful childhood experiences. Things like frequent criticism, parental unpredictability, a lack of positive attention, or a sense that our authentic selves aren’t lovable all affect us deeply … in ways that we carry with us into our adult relationships.
This realization—that nearly all of us have core wounds from childhood that interfere with our ability to create healthy, intimate relationships—changed the course of Angela’s career.
The truth is: in Angela’s work with hundreds of individuals and couples, she has yet to encounter anyone whose relationship problems in adulthood don’t have roots in childhood experiences.
This insight led Angela to pioneer the development of Trauma Informed Relationship Counseling for Individuals and Couples, which helps clients understand the connection between their childhood experiences, what they learned about relationships as a result of those experiences, and the issues they’re currently experiencing in their relationships.
It was her work with hundreds of individuals and couples that informed the creation of the Five Relationship Archetypes. This model reflects the five key ways that childhood relational trauma impacts adult intimate relationships, based on the messages we internalize as children about ourselves and how we need to behave in relationships with others. With Daniel Boscaljon, Angela also developed the Relationship Yes! Test as a simple, five question assessment to help people measure the health of their intimate relationship.
In an effort to understand intimate relationships from all angles, Angela has trained and practiced as a discernment counselor, helping couples on the brink of divorce to decide whether to separate or try to heal their relationship. She’s also a certified divorce mediator.
Angela holds additional training in therapeutic writing and journaling as tools for trauma recovery, emotional healing, and personal growth. She uses these tools to help transform past pain into the seeds for future possibilities … possibilities that include the kind of loving, intimate relationship with self and others that each person deserves to have. Her approach to healing relational trauma seamlessly blends creativity and healing, reflecting her profound faith in the power of honoring our true stories.
She received her Master’s of Social Work at the University of Iowa in 2009 and also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, also from the University of Iowa.
As a relationship expert, Angela has been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Well + Good, Salon, Forbes, MSN, Women’s Health and the Toronto Sun. On the topic of relationships, she’s been a contributing writer for Inc. and Fatherly. On the subject of trauma, she’s a contributing author of the Clinical EFT Handbook, published in 2013.
In her spare time, Angela is a mixed media artist. Her artwork has been exhibited in numerous galleries around the United States and published in several journals and magazines. She’s also the co-creator of the Faces of the Divine Feminine Oracle, published in 2017.
Born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Angela now makes her happy home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. On sunny days, you can find her cozied up with a book or hiking in the mountains with Daniel.
You can find her art at angelaamias.gallery.
Daniel Boscaljon, PHD
Director of Research & Program Development
Dr. Daniel Boscaljon is an internationally respected author, scholar, and teacher. In addition to his role as the Director of Research and Program Development at the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, he’s also the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma-informed relationship programs for individuals and couples. As an award-winning educator and coach, Daniel helps people rediscover their innate value, individual gifts, and inner resources.
Daniel’s interest in trauma-informed relationships emerges from his struggle to move past the ways his childhood trauma negatively impacted his life and relationships. As is true of many survivors, as he healed past wounds, he discovered a desire to use his skills and experiences to help others recover. This led him to focus his career on how to help others create lives that no longer are controlled by the past, so they can find personal meaning and fulfillment in the future.
Daniel has two PhDs from the University of Iowa. His graduate education allowed him to deeply engage with sources of traditional wisdom as well as psychoanalysis and narrative. After a brief academic career, he shifted to working with adults by providing educational training and development for groups and working one-on-one as an executive coach, integrating his education with the ability to make a bigger impact in the world. In his role at the Institute of Trauma Informed Relationships, he helps design programs that support therapists, counselors, and coaches in their healing work with clients.
As an expert on relationships, trauma, and human flourishing, Daniel has been featured in many publications, including NBC News, Newsweek, Harper’s Bazaar, MindBodyGreen, Forbes, Verywell Mind, Lifehacker, Salon, and many others.
Born in California and raised in Iowa, Daniel now happily makes his home in the wilds of Wyoming. You can learn more about him at danielboscaljon.com.
Wondering if this program is right for you?
Use the button below to reach out with your questions or set up a free consultation. We’ll chat about your work with clients, your professional goals and whether becoming Certified in Trauma Informed Relationships is a good fit for you. And you’ll have the chance to get answers to any questions you have about the program.
Featured in
Angela Amias, interviewed by journalist Nicole Karlis for Salon. In Heard–Depp defamation trial, the stigma of borderline personality disorder looms large
Therapists also say [borderline personality disorder and histrionic personality disorder] are complex disorders that don't necessarily factor in a person's past traumas or environmental factors. Angela Amias, a couples therapist and co-founder of Alchemy of Love, told Salon both disorders are "typically rooted in trauma. So those are labels that are put on someone's behavior, but it's not actually speaking to the root of where that is coming from, in somebody's traumatic reactions to current situations that are based on their past experiences," Amias said. "I don't think they're helpful labels.”