Couples Counsellor & Psychotherapist
Devon McGahey
MSW, Troy University, Alabama
She/her
Your relationship doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You both bring a whole lifetime into the room.
WHO I help
For couples who love each other, but keep hurting each other.
Devon specialises in working with couples where trauma is part of the relationship — whether that’s childhood trauma, difficult attachment experiences, betrayal, loss, sexual trauma, difficult family relationships, or experiences that have changed how safe it feels to depend on another person.
Often, the trauma didn’t happen within the relationship. But it shows up there.
It can look like one partner desperately reaching for reassurance while the other pulls away. Sex becoming complicated. Small disagreements triggering enormous reactions. One person feeling abandoned while the other feels suffocated. Anger, shutdown, defensiveness, resentment or hypervigilance — or simply two people who love each other but no longer seem able to reach one another.
Devon is particularly interested in what happens when one person’s way of protecting themselves accidentally activates the other person’s deepest wound.
Because once we understand why the pattern makes sense, we can stop treating each other like the problem and start working on the pattern itself.
You’re not just arguing about what happened yesterday. Sometimes you’re protecting yourselves from things that happened years ago.
how i work
Trauma-informed couples therapy that goes beneath the argument.
Devon isn’t particularly interested in teaching couples to communicate more politely while the same painful dynamic continues underneath. She wants to understand what happens between you.
What makes you pursue? What makes you withdraw? Why does that particular comment land so hard? What happens when your partner wants more closeness — or more space? What are you protecting yourself from, and what does your partner experience when you do?
Her approach draws on the Gottman Method, Emotionally Focused Therapy, attachment theory, IFS-informed work, ACT and EMDR. This allows her to work with both the relationship happening in the room and the experiences each person carries into it.
Devon is warm, casual and very engaged. She won’t sit silently while the two of you have the same argument you have at home. She’ll help you slow it down, understand what’s actually happening underneath it and interrupt patterns that aren’t working — while making sure both people in the room feel seen.
The goal isn’t to decide who is right. And it isn’t necessarily to keep you together.
Couples therapy isn’t about fixing relationships at all costs. It’s about ending the suffering — helping you understand what’s happening between you, get out of the painful patterns you’ve become stuck in, and work out what comes next.
Sometimes that means finding your way back to each other. Sometimes it means recognising that the relationship needs to end and finding a way to do that with greater clarity, care and understanding.
Devon sometimes describes couples therapy as “grease on the wheels.” Therapy doesn’t manufacture an outcome that wasn’t there. It helps you get to where you were already heading with less time spent stuck in between.
There are no miracle fixes here, and Devon won’t promise to save your relationship. What she will do is help you understand it — and each other — well enough to move forward, together or apart.
When you stop seeing your partner as the threat, you can start seeing the person underneath the protection.
It's nice to meet you!
Builder of things. Breaker of rules.
Devon has always been as interested in building things as she is in understanding people. Before becoming a therapist, she studied business and marketing — and that entrepreneurial side of her never really went away.
She founded The Good Life because she wanted to create the kind of place she wanted to work in herself: independent, collaborative, modern and a little less stuffy than traditional therapy spaces. She loves having an idea, figuring out how to make it work, and bringing good people together to build something bigger than any one person’s practice.
Outside of work, life is full with three boys, an old house that always seems to have another project waiting, and a brain that rarely stops coming up with the next idea.
Her friends would probably describe her as determined, slightly rebellious and happiest when she’s making something better. She’s also notoriously bad at birthdays — hers or yours — so expectations there should remain extremely low.
Specialisms
Relationships
Trauma & PTSD
