HEY, I'M RACHAEL
the founder and dreamer behind The Relational Studio. I'm starting a revolution to make relationships more satisfying. You in?
Twenty years in the therapy room.
Daily Wordle player.
Suspiciously passionate about tennis.
Most of us were never taught how to be in a relationship. Not really. We were taught to be agreeable. To keep the peace. To put everyone else first and call it love.
I did that too. For a long time.
You know how to love people. You're good at showing up, holding space, being there. What's harder is knowing how to be in a relationship with yourself.
That's what The Relational Studio is for. I built it for women who are ready to stop abandoning themselves - and start creating connections that don't require they disappear or perform.
I'm so glad you're here.
- Rachael
LET'S TALK
Rachael Chatham is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor (LCMHC) based in Asheville, North Carolina, with more than 20 years of clinical experience specializing in narcissistic family systems, relational patterns, and attachment wounds.
Her work centers on bringing unconscious relational patterns into conscious awareness and helping women see the inherited beliefs, defenses, and survival strategies that quietly run their relationships long before they're ever named.
She is the founder of The Relational Studio, a relational wellness and education platform for women worldwide working to break self-abandonment, self-betrayal, and self-sacrifice patterns rooted in childhood and family-of-origin dynamics.
Her clinical approach integrates schema therapy, attachment theory, and somatic and depth-oriented work, with a focus on helping women move beyond insight into lasting behavioral and relational change.
Rachael is the creator of The Reckoning, a six-week guided course for women ready to change the relational patterns they inherited, and she maintains an active private practice in Asheville along with a regular newsletter on Substack exploring relational psychology and self-abandonment recovery.
I'm one of those people who's had to learn everything the hard way...
I never had role models for healthy relating. My parents divorced when I was in elementary school and basically never spoke again. Nobody taught me how to resolve conflict, sustain long-term friendships, or settle a disagreement without setting fire to the whole connection. I wasn't taught how to have a healthy sense of self-interest or assert my needs. I was taught to be agreeable. It took me a while to figure out those weren't the same thing. I spent the first half of my life learning about relationships through a dense fog of heartache and confusion.
So by the time I got to college I threw myself into learning everything I could about people and how we work. I got a couple of psychology degrees and became a devoted student of the human experience. Eventually I realized that silence wasn't a strategy and self-sacrifice wasn't a love-language. Twenty years of clinical work later, and I'm still learning. And every person I've sat with has wanted the same thing: to experience love and feel deeply connected. To themselves. To the people they're closest to. That's what it comes down to. Every time.
What I started noticing, year after year in my therapist's chair, was a pattern.
The women who landed in front of me weren't broken. They were tired in a particular way. A way that was hard to name and painful to feel. They had built careers and households and reputations on the strength of being the one who handled it all. They were big feelers who loved hard and protected everyone. And they made it look easy. By all visible measures, their lives were a huge success. Privately though, they were coming apart at the seams.
I recognized it because I had been there myself.
I spent a long stretch of my life confusing being compliant with being lovable, and managing other people's feelings instead of being in touch with my own. Untangling those threads took years of my personal depth-work: therapy, self-reflection, grieving, hard conversations, and the slow, unflattering project of coming up against my own internal criticism and negative self-talk. I know the inside of that self-abandonment cage because I lived in it.
The Relational Studio grew out of all of it: the clinical years, and the harder-earned personal ones.
I call this space a studio on purpose. A studio is a place where you learn and practice. Where you get to be creative and try new things. In this studio, the craft is in the returning. Here, we treat relating - to ourselves, to the people we love, to the lives we're actually living - as a real practice, because that's what it is. Nobody is born knowing how to do this. Most of us were not taught. And yet returning to your own sense of things, developing a sense of self-trust and self-compassion are some of the most meaningful practices you can cultivate.
The work I do is shaped by four bodies of thought I have trained in deeply: Jungian and transpersonal psychology for the depth and the unconscious soul layer, schema therapy and attachment theory for the developmental architecture and life-patterns, Buddhist contemplative practice for the ground of self-compassion, and yoga and somatic work for the energy that lives beyond language.
If you've been the one holding it all together, and something inside of you has begun to fray, you're not alone.
If you find yourself depleted rather than nourished by your relationships and wondering if there's a more aligned and authentic way to show up for yourself and others - I think there is. I've watched women find their way toward it. Including, slowly, myself.
I'm crafting a revolution
I want to live in a world where midlife women stop apologizing for outgrowing the lives they built. Where the inner work of relating is treated as the serious craft it is. I want the second half of your life to be more yours than the first half got to be.
So much of whether a life feels good - things like connection, ease, and the texture of your ordinary Tuesday comes down to the quality of your relationships. The one you have with yourself. The ones you have with everyone else. Let's treat them like the creative opportunity they are.
That's what The Relational Studio is for.
"You have a right to experiment with your life... I think we have a right to change course. " - Anais Nin
I'm all about
Five mile walks, shelf bras, gallery walls, bamboo sheets, and musky, earthy fragrances.
I'm not about
Double standards, clutter, shifty people, and subscriptions that are as hard to get out of as cult-membership.
SOMETHING BROUGHT YOU HERE
It might be this...
- You're somewhere in the middle of your life and have achieved everything you thought you wanted at 20... but you're somehow not as satisfied as you thought you'd be
- You've spent years being hyper-responsible and you're starting to feel the cost of it
- You know something needs to change but you can't quite name what
- You keep repeating the same over-giving and then feeling resentful pattern in your relationships
- You don't want to blow up your marriage or the life you've built - but you do want to feel better
- Everyone around you seems entitled to a piece of you, but your tolerance for self-betrayal has hit an all-time low and you're just not having it anymore
WANT TO KNOW HOW WE CAN WORK TOGETHER?
Here's how I can help
Right now, the only way to work with me is inside my course, The Reckoning.
I say the only way like it's a limitation, but I don't experience it that way. The Reckoning is where I've put my full body of work: over twenty years of clinical practice, my own long reckoning, and everything I've learned about how this kind of growing-up actually moves. It's also where the women in it get to do something that they can't do alone: connect with other women who are inside the same brave, unglamorous work, and stop feeling like the only one.
If you've read this far and something in you is leaning in, this is where I'd send you next.
LEARN ABOUT THE RECKONING
