Banu Ibaoglu Vaughn (She/Her)

I work with couples and individuals who are curious about their relationships. I am interested not only in what feels difficult, but in what those struggles may be revealing about who you are and how you want to live. I focus on how we love, how we defend against love, and what we long for when we cannot find our way back to each other. These patterns shape both our partnerships and our way of being in the world. Most conflicts that bring people to therapy nearly always point toward something that needs attention, a place where growth is trying to happen. Relationships are living fields. They carry our histories, our cultural inheritances, and our unfinished emotional stories, but they also carry possibility. This is true of the relationships we have with others and the relationship we have with ourselves. Many of the individuals I work with feel a gap between their current reality and the life they sense is possible but have not yet been able to inhabit. I do not see this as pathology. It often signals that your development is asking for attention. I am a clinical trainer and supervisor in Imago Relationship Therapy and have over twenty years of experience working across cultures and contexts. My orientation is dialogical, experiential, and psychodynamic. In sessions, I integrate somatic awareness and close attention to what unfolds in real time, such as shifts in tone, subtle contractions, or moments of distance. We slow these down so that reactions can become meaningful rather than automatic. We also make plenty of room for laughter. I find that humor is often the first sign of a pattern breaking, a way to hold the absurdity of the human experience while moving toward something more vital. I work online with U.S. and international clients, including cross-cultural couples and expats navigating identity shifts and displacement. Culture, migration, and family history leave deep imprints on how we attach and how we imagine intimacy. These layers are always part of our conversation. Therapy with me is steady, engaged, and deeply reflective. I trust that individuals and relationships carry an inner movement toward aliveness. My role is to help you recognize it, support it, and allow it to shape how you live, both together and individually. If this resonates with you, I invite you to reach out to schedule an initial consultation.