About Us
About Dr. Conrad
Dr. Carol Ann Conrad is the co‑creator of the Healing Together program and the Integrative Relational Transformation (IRT) method. Her focus is on the “Between” element of change. For nearly 30 years she has helped individuals and couples build greater emotional security, deepen connection, and move out of stuck relational patterns.
Dr. Conrad is a Relationship Coach, a Licensed Psychologist and a Certified Emotionally Focused Therapist and Supervisor. Her work is grounded in attachment theory and emotionally focused principles of relationships. Drawing from decades of research on adult attachment and the science of love, she brings a deep understanding of how relationships function, why they break down, and how they can be repaired.
She has extensive experience teaching, supervising, and leading in the field of relationships, including serving as an adjunct professor at the undergraduate and graduate levels where she taught marriage and family courses. Dr. Conrad has also offered ethics and continuing education training courses specific to marriage and family therapy for professionals.
At the heart of her approach is a simple belief: secure connection is a birthright. She understands relational distress as emerging from disconnection — within ourselves and between us and others — and focuses on helping people experience emotionally corrective moments that restore safety, clarity, and responsiveness. In the Healing Together Program, Dr. Conrad serves in the role of a relationship coach and educator, offering guidance that is relational, experiential, and growth‑oriented.
“We came in unsure if anything could really change. Now we are closer and more connected than we thought possible—and it’s changed our entire family.”
— Couple
“Understanding the pattern we were caught in changed everything. We finally know how to step out of it and let each other in.”
— Client
“This gave us a second chance. We were able to come back to each other in
a completely different way.”
— Couple
“We felt safe enough to finally open up and do work we hadn’t been able to do before.”
— Client
“I experienced healing in ways I didn’t think were possible.”
— Client
About Alissa Wakefield
Alissa Wakefield is the co-creator of the Healing Together program and the Integrative Relational Transformation (IRT) method. Her work focuses on the within dimension of change – helping individuals release subconscious emotional blocks that interfere with connection, regulation, and relational safety.
She specializes in resolving trauma imprints, attachment injuries, inherited relational beliefs, and protective survival patterns that continue to shape behavior long after the original experiences have passed. While many couples can identify their negative cycle, Alissa works with the emotional drivers beneath it – allowing change to occur at a deeper and more sustainable level.
Her work is informed not only by professional training, but also by lived experience. As a foster parent and adoptive mother of children with specialneeds, she has navigated complex trauma, attachment disruption, and long-term relational repair within her own family. This has shaped her deep respect for protective adaptations and the steady pace of true integration. Her approach is compassionate, grounded, and focused on transformation that is not just understood, but fully integrated and lived.
Within the Between and Within model, Alissa facilitates emotional integration within each partner while Dr. Conrad strengthens the attachment bond between them. Together, they address both the relational system and the individual nervous system simultaneously, creating movement where couples have often felt stuck.
“After years of trying to work through things, this was the first time I was able to move past patterns I couldn’t break before.”
Kim C., WA
“This work created the kind of deep and lasting change I had been looking for for years.”
— Eshe Boyette
“When we started, our relationship was in serious trouble. As we addressed the deeper patterns driving our reactions, everything began to change. We are now more connected than we’ve ever been.”
— Dan Higgs
“I’ve been able to release old trauma, shift long-standing beliefs, and feel a level of emotional freedom I didn’t think was possible.”
— Amanda Kemp
Why We Created Healing Together by Dr. Conrad
We created Healing Together because we kept seeing the same challenge in
relationship work: couples could calm their conflicts and understand their patterns, but
they still stayed stuck. Often the deeper issue was relational trauma or unresolved
emotional wounds in one or both partners’ histories.
In my work with couples, I rarely had the time or space to address those deeper
individual issues while also working with the relationship itself. Like many couple
therapists, I would refer one or both partners to individual therapy. Unfortunately, that was often difficult to coordinate and didn’t always produce the results we hoped for. Not all individual therapists collaborated as a team, and without hearing the full relational context, some unintentionally encouraged disconnection—or even divorce. Over time, I became increasingly reluctant to refer clients out. Without coordinated support, couples therapy could become prolonged or stagnant.
It became clear that a unified approach was needed—one that could address both the
relationship and the individual work at the same time.
Two years ago I met Alissa Wakefield, and her approach proved to be not only
compatible with my attachment-based work, but powerfully effective. As we began
collaborating, we saw couples move forward more quickly because the individual and relational work were happening in coordination. Our approaches strengthened each other, and clients began making deeper, more lasting progress.
Healing Together: Between and Within grew out of that collaboration. It was created to help couples transform their relationship while also working through the individual issues that influence it.
Our shared goal is simple: to create connection and transformational healing for bot the individuals and the relationship.
We believe relationships heal most effectively when attachment bonds are
strengthened, relational patterns are understood, and subconscious emotional blocks are released—within a coordinated and supportive process.
By combining the power of secure attachment with emotional-resolution work that engages the subconscious mind, Healing Together creates movement where other models often plateau. Couples can stay connected while each partner does meaningful internal work, shortening the path to lasting change.
Healing Together is not about fixing people or assigning blame. It is about creating the
conditions where safety, connection, and transformation can emerge—together, from
the inside out.
Between and Within
Real relationship change happens when we work between partners and within each individual at the same time. We collaborate together to make sure the ratio of couple to individual work is balanced at all times.
Healing Together was created to bring these two pieces together — strengthening attachment while releasing the emotional blocks that keep couples stuck.