By Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093, founder of My Mental Climb.
TL;DR. When a couple comes in considering opening their relationship, the first therapy conversation is rarely about whether to do it. It's about why, what your attachment patterns are doing under the surface, whether the existing relationship is solid enough to add complexity to, and what structure would actually fit your lives. The clinician on our team who leads this work is Michelle Cortez, AMFT #146795, supervised by me. Four books pair well with the work in session (Jessica Fern's Polysecure, Tristan Taormino's Opening Up, Kathy Labriola's Jealousy Workbook, and Liz Powell's Building Open Relationships), but you don't need to read any of them before your consult. The therapy works whether you've done a lot of reading or none.
Why I'm writing this and who it's for
Most of the couples I see who are considering opening their relationship are not in crisis. They love each other. They've been together a long time, often a decade or more. The question came up because of something specific: a friend's open marriage that's working well, a season of mismatched desire neither of them knows how to address, a slow recognition that one or both of them are not strictly monogamous in how they experience attraction, or a deeper sense that the structure they signed up for at 26 isn't quite the structure that fits at 40.
Many of them have done some reading. Some have done a lot. Others have done none and just want to talk to someone who's seen this work clinically. By the time they call us, they're either deeply curious or deeply anxious, often both. They want a therapist who's not going to pathologize the question and not going to romanticize the answer.
I'm Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093, founder of My Mental Climb. I'm writing this rather than Michelle, who actually leads this work on our team, because I want to be direct about why I'd point a couple in this situation to her specifically. Michelle is the clinician I'd refer my own friends to if they were thinking about opening their relationship, and the rest of this post is what she actually does in the first conversation and why I trust her with this work.
Why the first conversation isn't about "should we"
A therapist who has done this work seriously isn't going to tell you whether to open up. That's not the job. The job is to help you understand what's actually driving the question, what your relationship can hold right now, and what the realistic structure of an opened-up relationship would even look like for the two of you specifically.
Michelle's first conversation with a couple in this position covers five things. None of them require homework on your part beforehand.
The four books that pair well with the work
I'm going to list four books up front because clients often ask what to read, and these are the ones Michelle and I would point you toward. None of them are prerequisites. The first conversation works whether you've read all four, one, or none. Read them at your own pace, ideally alongside the therapy work as specific questions come up rather than as a study guide before you book.
What the books are useful for is filling in vocabulary, structures, and frameworks between sessions. The therapy is where you do the work specific to your relationship. The books are where you find context for what you're learning in the room.
Polysecure by Jessica Fern (2020)
Polysecure is the most clinically-grounded book on consensual non-monogamy currently in print. Jessica Fern is a polyamorous clinical psychotherapist who built her practice working with non-monogamous clients. The book extends attachment theory, the same framework that shapes most modern couples therapy, into non-monogamy.
Her central thesis: secure attachment is the prerequisite for polyamory working well, not the result of it. The first half of the book is a thorough primer on attachment. The second half is her HEARTS model, six practices for building secure attachment across multiple relationships. Useful as a companion to attachment work in session.
Opening Up by Tristan Taormino (2008)
Opening Up is the most accessible primer on the actual logistics of different open-relationship structures. Taormino interviewed hundreds of people in non-monogamous arrangements and reported what was working and what wasn't, without moralizing.
The book maps the territory: hierarchical polyamory, kitchen-table polyamory, parallel polyamory, swinging, relationship anarchy, solo polyamory. Each structure has its own logistics, communication demands, and typical failure modes. Useful as a reference once you and Michelle are working through which structures might fit your lives.
Esther Perel endorsed the book when it came out, which matters because Perel has spent her career writing about desire in long-term partnerships from a clinical perspective.
The Jealousy Workbook by Kathy Labriola
Kathy Labriola is a Berkeley-based relationship counselor who has been polyamorous for over 50 years and has spent decades providing care to poly, queer, and kink communities. The Jealousy Workbook contains 42 exercises she refined across hundreds of clients.
Labriola's framing is one Michelle uses directly in session: jealousy is information, not evidence that the structure isn't working. The workbook is useful between sessions when a specific jealousy reaction surfaces and you want a structured way to work with it. Michelle will often suggest specific exercises tied to what's been coming up in your sessions.
Building Open Relationships by Liz Powell (2018)
Building Open Relationships by Dr. Liz Powell is the practical structural complement to Fern's attachment framework. Powell walks through what specific agreements, communication practices, and ongoing maintenance look like in different open-relationship structures. Her work is especially useful for couples who are opening up after a long monogamous partnership, because she names what shifts when the existing relationship stops being the only one.
Powell is also clear about something many introductory books skip: opening up takes significantly more relationship maintenance time than monogamy. Useful for the practical-logistics layer of the work.
Optional but useful: The Ethical Slut and the Multiamory podcast
The Ethical Slut by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton (originally 1997, updated 2017) is the foundational text of the modern polyamory community. The updated edition gives cultural and historical context. It's less clinical than Fern or Labriola, so it works as background reading rather than as a manual.
The Multiamory podcast is the most consistently useful audio resource for ongoing learning. The hosts (one of whom is a therapist) work through specific scenarios and structures across hundreds of episodes. Couples often listen together as a way to surface differences in how each of them thinks about specific situations without having to manufacture the conversation themselves.
What Michelle actually looks at in the first conversation
1. Why each of you is considering this
The most important question, almost always, is the one that takes the longest to answer honestly: what is each of you hoping opening the relationship will give you?
Different motivations lead to different structures. "I want more sex" tends toward swinging or sexually-focused open arrangements. "I want emotional connection with more than one person" tends toward polyamory. "I want to explore an identity I've been holding back" can lead either direction depending on the specifics. "Our chosen family is bigger than us" points toward kitchen-table polyamory. "We're growing apart and trying to save the marriage" is the motivation that does not, in our clinical experience, produce good outcomes from opening up.
Liz Powell is direct about this in her work: opening up doesn't repair a struggling relationship. If the foundation is unstable, adding partners adds load to the foundation rather than reinforcing it. Esther Perel makes a similar point throughout Mating in Captivity: the work of rebuilding desire and aliveness in a long partnership is mostly internal to the partnership itself.
Part of the first conversation is helping each of you articulate what you're actually hoping for, separately, before you start negotiating with each other. Michelle often finds couples discover in this conversation that they thought they wanted the same thing and find they wanted significantly different things.
2. Your attachment patterns to each other
This is where Fern's framework comes in directly. Michelle looks at how each of you handles closeness, distance, conflict, and reassurance in the current relationship.
If one of you is anxiously attached (reaches for reassurance, reads distance as rejection, tends to escalate when worried about the connection), and the other is avoidantly attached (pulls back under pressure, needs space to regulate, finds reassurance-seeking exhausting), the existing dynamic is already running a pursue-withdraw cycle. Adding partners to that cycle usually intensifies it before it resolves it. The anxious partner becomes more vigilant, the avoidant partner has another exit available, and the cycle gets faster and louder.
This doesn't mean insecurely attached couples can't open up. It means the attachment work has to happen alongside the structural work, not after it. Michelle typically spends several sessions on the attachment piece before moving into operational decisions about the open relationship.
3. Whether the existing relationship is solid enough
Honest assessment of the current relationship. Is there active conflict that hasn't been addressed? Resentment that's been building? Sexual disconnection? A mismatched understanding of what the partnership is for? Are there practical pressures (kids, finances, work stress) that are already stretching your bandwidth?
If yes to several of these, opening up is probably not the next move. The next move is addressing what's already pressing. Michelle will be honest with you about this even if it isn't what you came in hoping to hear, which I think is one of her clinical strengths.
There's a version of this conversation where the couple decides to address the existing material first and revisit the question of opening up in six months. That's often the most productive outcome of the first few sessions, and it's not a failure of the consult, it's the consult doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
4. How each of you thinks about jealousy
Jealousy will come up. Pretending it won't is the most common way couples opening up for the first time get caught off guard.
Michelle brings in Labriola's framing here: jealousy is information, not failure. Sessions cover what jealousy has done in the relationship historically, what each of you fears most about jealousy in an opened-up structure, and what early-warning signs you'd want to watch for. The work also covers compersion (the experience some poly people describe of feeling joy when a partner has joy with someone else) as a real but not mandatory experience. The cultural pressure to perform compersion you don't actually feel is its own clinical problem, which Fern, Labriola, and Powell all address directly.
The pre-work on jealousy isn't about eliminating it. It's about being prepared to work with it skillfully when it shows up.
5. Structure and logistics
The operational layer. Michelle will walk you through:
- Hierarchy or not. Will the existing relationship be the primary, with new partners explicitly secondary, or are you moving toward a non-hierarchical structure? Each has tradeoffs. Most couples opening up for the first time start with a hierarchical structure even if they intend to move away from it later.
- Veto power. Will either of you have the ability to end a partner's other relationship? Most experienced poly practitioners (Fern, Powell, Labriola) are skeptical of veto power because it tends to produce instability for the new partner and resentment in the existing partnership. The conversation matters either way.
- Disclosure agreements. What do you tell each other about new relationships, when, and in how much detail? Different couples land in very different places.
- Time and bandwidth. What's the realistic time budget for additional relationships given your current lives? Powell's work is helpful here.
- Sexual-health agreements. Testing schedules, barrier use, what's on and off the table. Functional infrastructure.
- Out-disclosure. Who in your lives will know? Family, friends, kids, work? This determines what your social context will hold and what it won't.
None of this gets decided in the first session. The first session maps what you'd want to decide before opening, what can be revisited later, and what should be ongoing rather than fixed.
Why ENM-affirming therapy specifically matters
The Bay Area has more polyamory and ENM-affirming clinicians than most regions of the country, but most of them are concentrated in San Francisco or Oakland. Walnut Creek and the East Bay corridor have very few practices that name ENM explicitly as a specialty. The result is that many East Bay couples either commute to SF, work with a therapist who is "open to" non-monogamy without actually being trained in it, or try to do the work without therapy at all.
"Open to" is not the same as ENM-affirming. A therapist who has not done specific reading and training in non-monogamy may default to monogamous framing even with good intentions. Common patterns: framing jealousy as evidence the structure isn't working, treating difficulty in an opened-up relationship as the fault of the structure rather than as material to work with, recommending closing the relationship as the default solution when things get hard.
Michelle has done the specific clinical training. She works from Fern's attachment framework directly, integrates EFT-informed couples work as the spine of the relational piece, and treats difficulty as material to work with rather than as evidence the relationship structure is wrong.
I'd also be honest that affirming care is a stance, not omniscience. Michelle keeps reading and learning. She doesn't assume she already knows what your particular configuration looks like in your particular life. Part of the first session is you teaching her what your relationship is and what you want from it. The clinical training is the framework for the work; the specifics are yours.
What this looks like at My Mental Climb
Michelle is the clinician on our team most focused on ENM, polyamory, kink, and BDSM-affirming work. She uses EFT-informed approaches grounded in attachment theory (Fern's framework directly), works with the actual structures couples are considering rather than just abstract education, and brings the kind of direct, accountable, non-pathologizing presence that this work needs.
I'm Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093, founder of the practice and Michelle's supervisor. I hold Comprehensive Sexology certification through the Buehler Institute. When the work has a sex-therapy layer (mismatched desire, sexual identity exploration, recovery from infidelity, postpartum or perimenopausal shifts), I'll often work that layer either in parallel with Michelle's couples work, or it gets integrated directly into your sessions depending on what makes sense clinically. We coordinate inside the team.
If you're a Walnut Creek or East Bay couple considering opening your relationship, Walnut Creek couples therapy and our sex therapy specialty page both go deeper into what the work looks like.
What the first consult looks like
The consult is 15 minutes, free, and held over secure video. Bring whatever you want to bring. Both of you ideally, but if one of you is more ready than the other to talk to a therapist about this, that's also useful information. You don't need to have read anything. You don't need to know what kind of structure you're considering. The consult is the right place to start the conversation.
What Michelle will do in the consult: ask what's bringing you in, what each of you is hoping for, and what you're worried about. What she won't do: tell you whether to open your relationship. That's not what consults are for, and it's not what therapy is for either. What she can tell you is whether she thinks she's the right clinical fit for the work, and if she thinks someone else in the Bay Area ENM-affirming community would be a better fit, she'll point you there.
Book a free 15-minute consult with Michelle. If you do end up wanting reading material alongside the work, the four books above are where I'd point you, in your own time.
Further reading. Jessica Fern, Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy (Thornapple Press, 2020). Tristan Taormino, Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships (Cleis Press, 2008). Kathy Labriola, The Jealousy Workbook (Greenery Press). Liz Powell, Building Open Relationships (2018). Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton, The Ethical Slut (Ten Speed Press, third edition 2017). Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity (Harper, 2006). Multiamory podcast.
Tagged
Last clinically reviewed: by Christina Mathieson, LMFT #115093.
