We believe relationships belong in the health conversation.

How this began.

I am a Medical Family Therapist. That means I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist trained to work inside medical settings, right alongside physicians, nurses, and care teams. For nearly fifteen years, my work has sat exactly where mental health and physical health meet. They meet far more often than most people expect.

Over those years, one pattern kept showing up. I worked with people carrying deep emotional trauma — the kind that eventually shows up in the body. The ones who got better usually had something in common. Someone was in their corner. Sometimes that was a marriage. Sometimes a friendship, a sibling, a parent, or a family they chose. The shape mattered less than the presence.

One client has stayed with me all these years — a survivor of serious childhood trauma. When I asked what carried them through, they did not name a treatment. They named their people. Then they said something I have never forgotten:

So I went looking to see whether the research agreed. It did, again and again.

Two books helped me put words to it. Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, named something I had been circling for years. Our modern world keeps pulling relationships apart — and at the very same time, it keeps handing us new ways to build them. Both things are true at once.

Then Sisterhood Heals: The Transformative Power of Healing in Community, by Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, showed me the other half of it. Healing does not only happen one-to-one in a quiet office. It happens in community, among people who hold one another up. Many families and cultures have known that for a very long time.

That is why Upside exists. We are here to show, clearly and with evidence, how much relationships shape our health — and to help people protect those relationships in a modern age.

Why "Upside"?

When I think about what clients have told me over the years, relationships are the upside. They are the good part. The part that makes a life feel like a life. When people feel truly connected and truly supported, something turns vivid. Life gets colorful.

That is the upside — and it is what we are here to protect. You will see that in our logo, too. The tree in our shield is full of color on purpose.

Connection travels.

Relationships are human, which makes this work global. Care looks different from place to place — who counts as family, how respect is shown, what is said out loud and what is understood without words. Time spent in other countries has shaped how we see this, and it keeps us humble about assuming one way is the way.