Koo Im Robbins
Licensed Therapist for
Couples and Individuals
Licensed Therapist for
Couples and Individuals
Relationships are core to our identity and play a fundamental role in the quality of our life, shaping who we are, and how we perceive ourselves. Relationships are endowed with our heart’s deepest longings: to be seen, loved, and accepted, to find healing and wholeness, and to reach our greatest potential. It is no wonder that relational conflicts can feel so heartbreaking, and terrible.
Relational therapy explores the impact of early and current relationships on a person's sense of self and wellbeing. In session, Ms. Robbins works with clients to identify and break free from these self-defeating cycles. With a better understanding of how these negative patterns undermine their relationships, clients often experience improved communication with their partner, reignited closeness, a more productive approach to parenting, and clarity in facing life transitions.
For clients open to the process, individual therapy can be life-changing.
The perennial challenge is to discover and rediscover the thing you know to be true: that regardless of what others have been saying, this life is yours. So many things get in the way of this simple point of clarity. We are saddled by grief, the pain of loss, the misery of regrets, resentments, terrors of our victimization, and delusion borne of hard lessons we learned too well as children. But we are not children any more. In simple language, therapy helps us to grow up.
Underlying virtually all therapeutic modalities is the grounding premise that the conscious mind is not really in charge. Instead, we more often take our commands from emotions operating below the surface.
Current research suggests that the most powerful and effective therapies contain a psychoanalytic element, meaning they are involved in the process of making subconscious messaging available for examination by the conscious mind. Once these secrets are revealed, clients can choose for themselves whether these are, in truth, the feelings they want to have, the behaviors they want to practice, and the way they wants to show up in the world.
Research-Based Therapies That Work
Emotionally Focused Therapy ("EFT") combines experiential psychotherapy (e.g. Gestalt therapy), with attachment theory, EFT is based on the premise that human emotions are connected to human needs. These emotions get played out in relationship dramas that replicate an earlier attachment trauma, often from childhood, when a core need for care, trust, and connection was frustrated.
Similar to EFT, Stan Tatkin's Psychobiological Approach (or "PACT") focuses on early attachment, its effect on the developing brain, and the autonomic nervous system.
The parent/infant attachment system creates a life-long model for what it means to be in relationship. What we know about that system, a secure relationship is based on attraction and the ability to reach for our partner and ask for what we need in a way that invites our partner to move closer. By contrast those with an insecure attachment may fear abandonment or the smothering of their authentic self. The goal in Tatkin's approach is to create a healthy and secure functioning relationship in which both partners bind themselves to the bedrock principles of non-abandonment, taking priority over more self-interested values.
To achieve a secure functioning relationship and obtain clarity about the critical need for relational bedrock foundations, we engage in psychodrama. Instead of merely talking about events we attempt to recreate conflicts and then resolve them under therapeutic supervision, as they are being felt. Working out early attachment events in real time allows us to observe how these memory-based traumas show up in the here-and-now of the body's systems, the heartbeat, in cortisol release, in oxytocin, in the mind's propensity to compulsively play out an obsolete trauma loop that may not have much connection to the facts of the world anymore.
While Sue Johnson's Emotionally Focused Therapies and Stan Tatkin's Psychobiological Approach asks couples to look inward, the Gottman Method analyzes relationships from the outside.
John Gottman is an MIT trained statistician and psychologist who developed a model for divorce prediction and marital stability based on four decades of empirical studies. His mathematical models are able to predict which couples will divorce in seven to nine years with 81 - 90% accuracy.
One of Gottman's hallmark discoveries is that there are certain behaviors, known as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, are highly predictive of divorce. They are: criticism of a partner's personality; contempt, which is usually derived from a position of superiority; defensiveness intended to deflect and blame others; and stonewalling, which is displayed through emotional withdrawal.
Former Clients
"Working with Koo Im has been a great experience. She brings a depth of wisdom and knowledge to the sessions that help set the stage for breakthroughs, but even more importantly she listens deeply and leads with caring and empathy that helps us feel heard and seen on a profound level.
"I don’t know what I would’ve done if I didn’t have Koo Im to help guide me after the loss of my husband. Looking back to my loss compared to where I am today, I’m in a much better place. I attribute so much of my adapting, adjusting and moving forward to her."
Ms. Robbins is a Bay Area native, a licensed marriage and family therapist, wife, and mother. Prior to private practice, Ms. Robbins worked at Pathways Home Health & Hospice as a bereavement therapist, counseling individuals, children, couples, and families, grieving the death of a loved one.
Ms. Robbins has had a varied career. Previously, she practiced law in the federal courts, taught mathematics to high school students, and served as president of the National Education Association, Santa Fe Local Chapter. She holds an M.A. in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute for Integral Studies, in San Francisco, a J.D. from the University of New Mexico, and a B.A. in Classics from St. John's College.
