Navigating Complex Relationships

Reversing and Preventing Ongoing Relational Traumatization in High Distress Relationships

Learn to map and work with painful relational dynamics - where the desire to connect and the need to self-protect are constantly competing.

This advanced training equips therapists with a cohesive, multi-level framework to address the complexity of difficult, high-stakes relationships where traditional approaches often fall short or cause harm. 

Do you

  • Believe deeply in the value of relationships - but feel jarred when it's at the cost of a client’s safety, dignity, sense of reality or basic sense of self?
  • See individuals in painful relational and feel unsure how to help without seeing the other person involved?
  • Work with couples where traditional models like EFT or Gottman fall flat, escalate conflict, or actually make things worse?
  • Struggle to assess what is going on and what needs to happen with clients where attachment needs, trauma responses, and current safety dynamics are deeply entangled?
  • Feel caught between clinical neutrality and personal concern, when seeing dyads and one partner seems more vulnerable and authentically invested, and the other seems to be dominating or weaponizing the work?
  • Work with clients who are ambivalent, flipping between roles, or unsure if they’re the "problem" or the one being harmed?
  • Find yourself being asked to address questions of relational viability?

  • Does your client demand answers about their impossible relationships?
  • Do you have individuals or couples who found classic couples work frustrating, demeaning, silencing, or gaslighting? 

These are the clients and dynamics that we embrace in this training.

 

Drawing from a wide range of relational, trauma-informed, and abuse-aware models, this track equips therapists to support clients whose relationships may not meet the minimum threshold for co-created safety, to prevent and reverse ongoing traumatization and to reach clarity on the viability of the relationship and possibility for positive change.

Therapists will learn to hold complexity without resorting to over-simplified frameworks or counter-productive interventions, help clients stay relational without self-abandonment, and recognize when connection is possible and when - respectful - self-protection must take precedence.

 

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WHAT IS A COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP?

A relationship which we rely upon for safety, care, and nurturing, instead is either overtly threatening or simply doesn’t meet the minimum threshold of relational safety:

Confusion at the Heart of the Experience

In complex relational situations, relational attempts fail, individuals experience severe confusion, the survival system takes over, and navigation is relegated to defensive impulse.

Without a map to guide these clients, therapists have a parallel process of feeling a deep sense of confusion and directionlessness as their interventions fail, and professional intuition breaks down into anxious attempts to offer anything that might help.

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Complex Relationships and Available Therapy Models

Available models of both individual and couples therapy tend to fall short for couples who need relationship work, but for whom dyadic therapy feels too unsafe. 

Couples therapists often recognize that the dynamic isn’t safe or collaborative enough for dyadic work - and refer one or both partners to individual therapy.

Individual therapists see that the pain is relational - and suggest couples therapy.

Clients end up bounced between modalities that weren’t designed for what they’re living through. Consulting therapists are left treating without a map.

This training is for clinicians who want to stop that cycle.

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WHAT YOU'LL GAIN

A Framework that Honors Complex Realities in Relationships

  • A cohesive meta-model for working with relational complexity - that accounts for love, power, trauma, and resilience without forcing false formulas
  • A clear framework for assessing when dyadic work is appropriate and when it’s not
  • A mapped-out therapeutic approach delineating what can be done effectively when only one party is in the room
  • Tools for working with clients in long-haul relational processes - where change is nonlinear, unpredictable, and deeply taxing
  • A refined capacity to help clients stay open to transformation and initiating shifts in relational dynamics without losing themselves in the process
  • Language and a map  offering clients clarity and direction - even when the outcomes can’t be guaranteed
  • An approach to individual resilience that doesn’t minimize the impact of the other person’s behavior, yet still identifies domains of agency and the restoration of selfhood in a way that resonates with clients in substantial distressLanguage, discernment, and confidence to offer clients clarity - even when the outcomes can’t be guaranteed

What this is not: This training is not a quick fix or a formulaic protocol. It requires commitment to learning and applying a nuanced, multifaceted approach to some of the most challenging relational work in clinical practice.

What this is: a meta-map that contextualizes different approaches, based on the premise that different relationship profiles operate with different rules, and must be tended to with different considerations.

This track offers a paradigm shift, and by necessity, a multi-dimensional model, for how we support clients navigating relationships that fall outside the bounds of “safe” or “healthy” - but are still ongoing, due to choice, or realities bigger than the client can manage.

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WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

A Synthesis of Relational Models, Abuse, Power & Safety Informed Models, and Individual-in-Relationship Models

MODULE 1

Deterioration, Confusion, and Disintegration in Relationships

When relationships shift from a source of safety to a source of threat, the result is a cascading breakdown across multiple levels - relational, individual, clinical, and systemic. This module maps that progression, from relational degeneration and compromised safety, to individual disintegration and loss of selfhood, to clinical backlash and systemic failures. We explore the core conundrum: the fact that connection maps and survival maps are both competing to shape the relationship. Participants will gain a felt sense of what it is like to live in this reality - including the erosion of selfhood, values, trust, and reality - and the ways these dynamics trap people in cycles they cannot see clearly, much less navigate productively.

MODULE 2

Systemic Oblivion, Denial, and Unintentional Abandonment

The challenges in high-stakes, unsafe, or chronically misaligned relationships do not exist in a vacuum. They unfold in a broader societal context that often does not have the knowledge, power, wherewithal, or skill to address these realities. This module examines the intersection of authority, power, resources, and the individuals seeking help, and how well-meaning helpers can perpetuate abandonment due to the difficult involved in comprehending and holding of “messy” truths, or inability to confront power dynamics. We will look at the landscape clients and clinicians are in - so clinicians can better anticipate the systemic realities that shape the experience of the individual, the trajectory of the relationship, and potentially, the therapy.

MODULE 3

Clinical Confusion, Fragmentation, and Disillusionment

This module takes a candid look at the therapy room itself. We examine how traditional models - abuse-informed, safety-informed, trauma-informed, and love/trust-informed - each bring valuable tools but also important blind spots when applied in isolation. Participants will learn to recognize where couples therapy can harm the individual, and where individual therapy can destabilize the couple or threaten the partner. We map the minefields, taboos, and structural mismatches that contribute to clinical fragmentation, and introduce a unifying framework that organizes different approaches and the value they bring, according to client profiles and relational realities.

MODULE 4

From Confusion and Psychic Disintegration to Clarity, Coherence, and Direction

When narratives are incomplete, contradictory, or distorted - as they often are in unsafe or high-conflict relationships - clients can lose access to their own sense reality. In this module, we explore how to help individuals “unblend” from confusion without resorting to artificial or premature labels or certainty. We examine the dynamics of discrepant narratives, the meaning of “truth” and access to it in relational contexts, and the role of hidden dynamics in shaping perception. Participants will gain tools for helping clients reclaim and stabilize their own coherent narrative, even in the face of ongoing relational ambiguity and intentional or unintentional gaslighting.

MODULE 5

The Restoration of Self

This module focuses on helping clients rebuild grounded selfhood - the clarity, capacity, and inner stability that make intentional choice possible. We expand the definition of resilience to account for the many dimensions that are compromised when relational safety is partial or absent, and explore how to strengthen selfhood, one’s grip on reality, clarification of and connection with one’s values, relevant direction, emotion regulation, and ultimately, self-leadership, so clients can withstand relational fluctuations without losing themselves.

MODULE 6

Stopping the Cycle of Relational Breakdown

Relational resilience - or “resilient relationality” - is the capacity to sustain openness, boundaries, and equanimity, even when the other partner is not equally able or willing to engage. This module shows how to reverse the survival-based cycles that dominate unsafe dynamics, creating an optimal environment for generating healthier relating. Whether both partners are engaged or only one, we focus on interrupting reactivity, restoring a minimum threshold of safety, and a gentle invitation to relationality without self-abandonment.

 

What This Curriculum Makes Possible

This advanced training gives you a cohesive, integrative framework to assess and intervene in complex relational dynamics - especially when conventional couples or individual therapy falls short.

  • Nuanced Case Conceptualization
    Learn to identify diverse client and couple profiles, recognizing that not all relationships will be viable, and help clients discern relational possibilities without oversimplified promises.
  • Discern Viability
    Learn to assess whether a relationship has the capacity to move toward relationality - or if one or both individuals are locked in patterns that make healing unlikely at this time.
  • Work Effectively with Only One Partner
    Develop strategies to support individual clients in transforming their side of the dynamic - whether their partner is unwilling, unavailable, or unsafe to engage.
  • Navigate Power, Survival, and Safety
    Understand how threat responses, power imbalances, and unprocessed trauma shape relational stuckness - and how to safely intervene without reinforcing harm.
  • Build a Bridge Between Individual and Relational Work
    Offer an approach that addresses the person in relationship - not just their internal world or the external behaviors of the couple. Learn to hold the paradoxes of attachment and self-protection, power and dignity, grief and hope.
  • Map the Path from Fragmentation to Integration
    Use a structured four-tiered model to diagnose disintegration and guide the reintegration process - from systemic denial, clinical meandering, relational breakdown and internal confusion, to individual coherence and relational resilience.
  • Understand why your usual tools (IFS, EFT, CBT, somatic work) break down when safety and reciprocity are inconsistent
  • Discern whether to pursue individual healing, relational repair, or protective distancing - without feeling like you’re “choosing sides”
  • Help clients remain relationally available without asking them to tolerate the intolerable
  • Work effectively with hope - neither crushing it nor colluding with magical thinking
  • Know how to support one partner when the other refuses to come to therapy
  • Stay grounded when working with cycles of emotional abuse, push-pull dynamics
  • Offer meaningful help even when the outcome is unclear, nonlinear, or painful
PROGRAM STRUCTURE

Live, authentic learning,
rooted in nuance and designed for depth.

 

Course Length

26-weeks

Dates

October 26, 2025 - June 30 2026
*Jewish calendar compatible

Class Time

Wednesday 
8-10pm IST
1-3pm EST

Class Format

Live Zoom

Annual Bundle Price

9,000 ILS /
~ $2,700 USD

Class recordings available through July 2026
Option to join an Integration Group:

Only open to participants or graduates of CRR training
Additional 3,000 ILS when purchased with your track (normally 6,000 shekel)
2 hours weekly, pending acceptance and placement in a group

Certification

Certification is offered at various levels, with full certification awarded to those who complete both Track 1 and Track 2, along with two years of active participation in the Integration Group.

Check Out Our Training On Relational Trauma Therapy >
ABOUT ME

Hi, I'm Rikki.

I have devoted over a decade to studying what makes people thrive in relationships of influence and how those in said positions can create such relationships. Taking the concept of “trauma-informed” to the next level, the CRR was founded to be a “safety-informed” training institution, focusing on closing gaps in the field for professionals working with complex relational dynamics.

Who This Is For

This training is for you if you are the clinician who stays with these clients instead of giving up on them, blaming them, or forcing them into pre-mature decisions - but wish you had a model that gave you a clear sense of how to help - without over-promising an outcome that might not come.

Therapists, who like their clients, wish there were a better map.

You might be:

  • A couples therapist trying to support relationships that feel fundamentally unsafe, one-sided, or entrenched in destructive patterns. You suspect that standard couples therapy isn’t just ineffective - it may be harming your clients - but you don’t know what to offer instead.

An individual therapist working with a client whose partner, parent, or child isn’t in the room - but whose impact is ever-present. The relationship is complicated, ongoing, and deeply consequential - and you want to help without feeding false hope or reinforcing self-abandonment.

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Einat A. Bronstein MSW, Senior Lead IFS trainer, Certified IFS supervisor, Co-Founder of The Israeli Institute for IFS

"Rikki is one of the most bright, talented, creative and skilled therapists that I know. She possesses vast and diverse professional knowledge, along with the ability to attune accurately to what each client needs and provide it in an intelligent and compassionate way. I trust her implicitly as a therapist, a teacher and a supervisor."

Jill Shames MSW, Advanced Black Belt, Certified Martial Arts Therapist and Instructor Trainer, Senior Empowerment Self-Defense Instructor, Karate and a Self-Defense Instructor

"I have had the honor of serving as a Personal Safety and Violence Prevention professional for more than 35 years. I am well-acquainted with Rikki Jacobson Davies and her work. Rikki is a consummate professional who knows that when it comes to Abuse Prevention, knowledge is never enough. Her programs integrate intimate knowledge of the Science of Safety with the art of Experiential Learning. The educators with whom she works emerge from her training programs informed, dedicated and skilled in passing on evidence-based knowledge and real-world skills for preventing and interrupting the cycle of violence. I recommend Rikki's programs with no reservations whatsoever."

Anonymous

"The Navigating Complex Relationships training from CRR was not only transformative for me professionally, but also deeply healing for me personally and for my marriage. Despite learning various couples modalities and extensive inner work, I was not able to fully understand and begin to heal from the ways in which I and my marriage were hurt by well-meaning couples therapists from leading couples modalities. The conceptual clarity I got in NCR helped me see the ways in which my marriage was truly more complex than the regular modalities have the ability to understand and effectively treat. I came out of NCR with a greater appreciation for what the couples modalities have to offer but also a real understanding of their limitations, as well as the consequences of misapplying couples work when the foundations of emotional safety are not in place. I'm no longer angry at the couples therapists I was hurt by - I just understand the place of couples work as well as its limitations, and am eager to serve the community to fill the gaps that couples therapy cannot fill. My marriage today is the most whole that it's been since before we entered couples therapy, largely thanks to the understanding of ourselves, of each other, and of the ways we affect each other which I gained from NCR and brought home with me each week. I cannot recommend it highly enough."

Avigail Stoll

"This is my second year training with Rikki, and I found both years to be extremely helpful in my practice and also in my understanding of myself as a human. The nuance that she brings to the work that we do has brought my work and my understanding of myself to a new level. I found specifically that the language she gives to those places that are really hard to define are valuable to the client, valuable to me, and valuable to the profession as a whole. I highly recommend that anyone interested in advancing themselves as a person and as a therapist take Rikki’s courses."

Yami Breitowitz, LCSW Lakewood, NJ

"Rikki's teaching is a masterful blend of depth, clarity and authenticity, making complex concepts both accessible and impactful. I wholeheartedly recommend her classes to clinicians at any stage who are looking to expand their knowledge and refine their skills."