Cristina Collins | Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT) Couples Specialist​​

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At a Glance

• Nearly fifteen years with her life partner — including seasons when finding their way back to each other wasn't easy.

• Survived betrayal in a marriage and eventually rebuilt a peaceful, lighthearted co-parenting relationship through years of difficult work.

• Mother of an 18-year-old son.

• Air Force veteran who learned to stay steady when a room fills with pressure.

• Raised between cultures by a Filipino immigrant mother and a Native American father — a lifelong translator between worlds.

• Neurodivergent herself, with specialized understanding of how different nervous systems can shape communication, conflict, intimacy, and connection.

• Lifelong scholar — degrees in psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, and clinical psychology, with a doctorate in progress.

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In Our Work Together

Therapy with me isn't about deciding who's right and who's wrong. I'm not here to take sides — I'm here to get curious about the relationship.

 

We may work together to:

 

• Make sense of your cycle — the pattern that keeps pulling you into the same argument, shutdown, or disconnection, even when neither of you wants to be there

• Understand each other's internal worlds — how history, attachment, stress, and temperament shape what each of you needs to feel safe

• Recognize dysregulation before it takes over, and build practical ways to pause rather than push

• Communicate needs and boundaries clearly without over-explaining, shutting down, or expecting your partner to simply know

• Learn how to repair. Conflict is inevitable; finding your way back afterward is a skill we can build

• Rebuild trust and emotional safety after betrayal, hurt, or years of accumulated distance

• Reconnect physically and emotionally when intimacy has quietly gone missing

• Identify what's already working — the strengths, humor, affection, and resilience that brought you together in the first place

 

The goal isn't a relationship without differences or conflict. It's a relationship where both people have enough understanding and safety to navigate those differences without losing each other — or themselves — in the process.

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How I Work

My approach is relational, trauma-informed, neurodiversity-affirming, culturally responsive, and deeply strengths-based.

I lean most heavily on Emotionally Focused Therapy and Family Systems Theory, drawing from other approaches when they're useful.

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With couples, I pay close attention to what happens underneath the conflict — the need beneath the reaction, the vulnerability underneath the defensiveness, and the places where two people are reaching for one another and continually missing.

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I'm warm, curious, and compassionate — and I'm also direct.

I'll ask questions. I'll notice patterns. I'll gently challenge you when there's something worth looking at, and I'll celebrate the moments when something finally clicks.

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I don't need either partner to be wrong for the other person's experience to be real.

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There is room in our work for two truths at once.

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When You Keep Having the Same Argument

Most couples who come to see me aren't necessarily in crisis.

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They're tired.

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Tired of the argument that starts about the dishes and somehow ends somewhere neither of you meant to go.

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Tired of the silence afterward.

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Tired of feeling like roommates who have become very good at logistics.

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Tired of the small hurts that never quite got addressed and have quietly stacked into something heavier.

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Maybe nothing catastrophic happened. That's part of what makes it confusing — and sometimes part of why it's gone on this long.

You love each other.

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You just can't seem to find each other anymore.

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I believe growth happens when two people become curious about themselves and one another. Some of the strongest relationships aren't the ones without challenges; they're the ones where two people learn how to understand each other through them.

 

What I've Learned About Love the Hard Way

It was spring break 2012, on the island of Puerto Rico, when I met my life partner.

 

People say, "When you know, you just know." There was something about meeting him that felt soul-changing. I couldn't have known then what the next fifteen years would hold, how much life we'd live together, or how profoundly we'd shape one another.

 

He's a reconnaissance Marine Corps veteran with multiple combat deployments behind him. In many ways we understood parts of each other that didn't need words. But we were also two people carrying our own histories and very different nervous systems into the same relationship.

 

We loved each other deeply and entirely.

 

But loving each other and knowing how to love each other turned out to be two very different things.

 

For a long time, I struggled to understand and advocate for my own needs. Boundaries didn't come naturally to me. I over-functioned, over-explained, and gave until I was depleted, believing that if I just loved harder or tried enough, everything would eventually work itself out.

 

At the same time, he was making sense of what he'd carried home from war. In difficult moments between us, his instinct was to create distance — because he was afraid of making things worse. Meanwhile, I experienced that distance as disconnection and reached harder for reassurance. Other times, our roles reversed completely.

 

We were two people trying to find safety in each other while inadvertently making it harder for the other person to feel safe.

 

We got things wrong. We hurt each other. We've had seasons when finding our way back to one another wasn't easy.

 

But we kept learning.

 

Over the years we've learned when to move closer and when to give each other space. That dysregulation isn't the same as not caring. That repair matters more than winning an argument. And that understanding what's happening inside someone can completely change the meaning of what they just did.

 

I learned that boundaries don't push love away.

 

They give love somewhere safe to live.

 

Today there's a rhythm between us that people notice in a room. We've been tested, we've been tried, and we somehow always made it back to one another. And underneath it all, there's still something wonderfully childlike between us. We laugh. We still dream. And sometimes, in the middle of the night, when the rest of the world is asleep, we dance under the stars to the songs that carried us through our hardest seasons.

 

Maybe that's what growing old together really is: not holding on to who you were when you first fell in love, but creating enough safety for both of you to keep becoming.

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After Betrayal

Sometimes arrive carrying something much sharper than distance or recurring conflict.

 

I've been there too.

 

I was married to my son's father when, six months into our marriage, I learned that he had been unfaithful and another woman was pregnant.

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I still remember the day I found out like it was yesterday — curled into the fetal position on the black-and-white tiled floor of my bathroom, crying for what felt like hours.

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I questioned everything.

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Was it my fault? What had I missed? Why wasn't I enough?

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Slowly and painfully, I had to reconstruct who I was. Eventually, I understood that healing wasn't only about whether I could trust another person again.

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I had to learn how to trust myself again.

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But our story didn't end there.

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What followed were years of learning how to become something entirely different to one another:

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Co-parents.

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It took years in and out of court, hours-long conversations, difficult truths, an enormous amount of unpacking, and forgiveness that sometimes felt forged through fire.

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Today, we remain separate and distinct anchors in our son's life. We can laugh together. We can be lighthearted. We can exist peacefully in one another's lives with the well-being of the person we created at the center.

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I never imagined we'd get here.

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And that taught me something important about relationships:

Healing doesn't always mean restoring what was. Sometimes it means discovering what the relationship can become next.

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So when someone sits across from me wondering whether to stay or leave, questioning their own reality, replaying every detail, or simply trying to make it through the day in one piece, I understand that pacing matters.

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Sometimes the first step isn't making a decision.

Sometimes it's getting steady enough to hear yourself again.

And whether healing eventually happens together or apart, I know that the person lying shattered on the bathroom floor is not where the story ends.

 

The Thing Most Couples Don't Know to Ask About

Here's something that surprises a lot of the couples I work with.

 

A meaningful number of recurring conflicts aren't about values, effort, or love at all. They're about processing differences — two people whose brains genuinely handle information, emotion, and overwhelm in different ways.

 

One partner says, "I need space," meaning, "I'm overwhelmed, and I need time to regulate." The other hears, "You don't care enough to stay and work this out."

 

One asks question after question because details help them feel safe. The other experiences those questions as pressure. One needs predictability; the other needs flexibility. One processes internally and needs time before responding; the other processes out loud and needs connection to make sense of what they're feeling.

 

Both people can be trying desperately to make the relationship work while unintentionally making the other person feel less safe.

 

Sometimes this comes down to temperament. Sometimes there's undiagnosed ADHD, autism, or trauma shaping it. Sometimes it's as simple as one partner's nervous system taking in far more sensory input than the other's — I know that one from the inside. You don't need a diagnosis for any of this to be useful, but I know how to spot it, and I know how much relief couples feel when the pattern finally has a name.

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What to Expect in Session

I'm warm, curious, and direct. I'll ask a lot of questions, and if I notice a pattern, I'll most likely name it.

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You won't have to sit there wondering what I'm thinking.

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If one partner shuts down, I don't automatically read that as a lack of care.

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If the other keeps reaching, asking questions, or needing reassurance, I don't automatically see them as asking for too much.

I'm interested in what's happening underneath both responses.

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Sometimes we'll slow things down. Sometimes I'll help translate what I think you're trying to say to one another. Sometimes I'll gently interrupt a familiar pattern before it carries you both somewhere you didn't mean to go.

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And sometimes we'll laugh.

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Therapy can hold grief, anger, betrayal, trauma, and some incredibly painful conversations. But it can also hold humor, relief, playfulness, and those beautiful moments when you finally look at each other and think:

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"Oh. That's what you've been trying to tell me."

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Love doesn't require two people to experience the world in the same way. It asks us to become lifelong learners of one another. When understanding grows, connection follows.

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License, Education, & More

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• Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT) — AMFT #156870

• All sessions are virtual. I coach clients worldwide and provide therapy to clients in California.

• Supervised by Dr. Harry Motro, LMFT #53452

• Employed by New Path Family of Therapy Centers

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Education:

• Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) in International and Multicultural Education, Racial Equity and Justice concentration — University of San Francisco (in progress)

• M.A. in Clinical Psychology, Marriage and Family Therapy — University of San Francisco

• M.S. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology — Carlos Albizu University, Miami

• A.A. in Emergency Management — Community College of the Air Force

• B.A. in Psychology — San Francisco State University

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Clinical Training & Modalities:

• Associate Marriage and Family Therapist, USF Center for Community Counseling and Wellness, providing therapy to adults across San Francisco's diverse communities. Earlier work as a Behavioral Intervention Specialist with Seneca Family of Agencies and a Family Advocate with the Family Mosaic Project.

• Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), Family Systems Theory, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), crisis intervention, and neurodiversity-affirming psychoeducation