About Suzan Grey

Suzan Grey, MA, MFA, RDT, REAT, RSME/T is John’s partner at Healing Couples Retreats and a specialist in experiential, attachment-based, trauma-informed relationship work.

For more than two decades, Suzan has helped individuals, couples, and groups navigate the challenges of connection, communication, trust, and emotional healing. Her work integrates psychobiology, attachment science, somatic awareness, expressive arts, and experiential learning.

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As a result, Suzan has created a powerful intensive program that helps couples move beyond insight to create lasting change through direct experience and practice.

Suzan holds a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and a Master of Fine Arts in music, movement, and theater. She is a Registered Drama Therapist (RDT), Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT), and Registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (RSME/T).

Throughout her career, Suzan has applied drama therapy, expressive arts, somatic approaches, and relationship-focused interventions in psychiatric, community, correctional, and cross-cultural settings, including Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute, the Center for Empowering Refugees, San Quentin Prison, community mental health programs, and international educational settings.

Having lived in five countries on three continents, she brings a deep appreciation for cultural differences, diverse life experiences, and the many ways relationships are shaped by family, history, and identity.

Advanced Couples & Attachment Training

Suzan specializes in helping couples understand and transform the reactive patterns that create recurring conflict, disconnection, and emotional distress. Her work is grounded in the Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT), one of the most sophisticated and effective attachment-based models for helping partners build secure-functioning relationships.

In addition to extensive PACT training, Suzan has advanced training in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), the Gottman Method, Relational Life Therapy (RLT), and the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy. Rather than adhering to a single school of thought, she integrates the most effective elements of these approaches into a practical and highly individualized process.

Trauma-Informed & Somatic Expertise

A central focus of Suzan’s work is helping couples recognize how nervous system reactivity, attachment injuries, developmental experiences, and unresolved relational patterns influence present-day interactions.

She has extensive training in Somatic Experiencing (SE), Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (SP), and is certified in the Neuro-Affective Relational Model (NARM), an advanced approach to working with developmental trauma and relational patterns formed early in life. Her unique integration of somatic, experiential, and attachment-based methods helps couples move beyond intellectual understanding and develop new relational experiences that can be practiced and sustained in everyday life.

At Healing Couples Retreats, Suzan partners with couples in an intensive, focused format designed to help them interrupt painful cycles, strengthen secure connection, develop practical relational skills, and create a foundation for lasting growth together.

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Suzan’s Approach

Suzan’s approach is informed by current neuroscience and attachment research, as applied to how partners in intimate relationship can function securely and maintain lasting happiness and satisfaction.

She brings warmth, embodiment, and playfulness into her work.

Suzan’s methololgy produces rapid major positive shifts for over 90% of couples. Partners experience renewed good feelings, emotional reconnection, hopefulness, and confidence in moving forward together.

Her work with couples and individuals is based on the principle that we all want to be seen, heard and understood, especially by the ones we love the most. Whether we fight over small things, or big issues — if we become stuck, entangled or estranged from our partner, it impacts our entire quality of life.

With Suzan’s help, many clients discover how within minutes of getting in a fight — or even seconds — that what’s really driving their distress boils down to a some very basic yet unspoken questions, like: “Do I matter to you?” “If I hurt, do you care?” “Do you accept me just as I am?” or “Can I depend on you?”

The tools Suzan gives couples help them overcome reactive cycles and resolve issues, large and small. Instead of escalating into emotional upset or shutting down, with her guidance partners repair ruptures, speak from their hearts, and express what they need in effective ways that let them to feel loved, respected, and connected.

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Re-Wiring for Sustained Happiness and Love

Partners can struggle with relationships for a long time. Happiness seems almost impossible to sustain long term, as they find themselves reacting more and more over time. Little things turn into big fights, in ways that make no rational sense.

Resulting emotional wounds create walls between partners, as they fall under the spell of primitive parts of their brains that act out increasingly destructive patterns. Couples fall into states of fight, flight or freeze, even blowing up or shutting down.

Such upsets and reactive patterns are operate unconsciously. They get triggered without our permission or understanding, and they originate in our earliest wiring.

Early emotional attachment wiring can distort the way we see, think about, and act in our relationships for the rest of our lives.

To change such negative patterns we need to become more aware of how they operate and get the right tools to overcome them.

You are not doomed to repeat debilitating early attachment programming throughout your adult life. You can transform such old wiring with your partner today.

By understanding how our wiring shapes the way we unconsciously interact, we gain the possibility for new growth. Literally, we can create new neural pathways in our brains. This is called neuroplasticity, or the ability of the brain to change its wiring when it receives the right inputs.

And there is no stronger impact than partners can have on each other. This is shown in negative form in how they can trigger each other. But on the positive side of the same coin, this puts them in a unique position to rewire each other. If they know how. This is what Suzan teaches.

With compassionate and skillful guidance from Suzan, you will develop awareness of the underlying mechanics in how you engage in relating so that you can grow a healthy relationship. You will discover new tools for communicating that naturally promotes safety, connection, trust, and freedom. You will learn proven strategies to maximize shared happiness and to quickly repair the bumps in the road all couples encounter.

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