What does Christian speak about?

Three signature talks: why therapeutic frameworks produce fluency without change, the sequence couples actually repair in, and the structure that predicts whether a change will hold. Each one adapts to the audience in front of it.

What formats are available?

A 45-minute keynote, a half-day workshop, a full-day intensive, or a moderated fireside conversation. Virtual and in person.

Who are these talks for?

Mental health associations, corporate learning and development teams, executive coaches, employee assistance programs, psychology and relationship conferences, and faith communities in transition.

Send the inquiry form on this page with your audience, date, and format. Christian reads every inquiry himself and replies within two business days.

Speaking

Helping audiences move from framework fluency to felt change

Audiences today are more psychologically literate than any generation before them. They can name the attachment style, the nervous system state, the part that is protecting them. And they are still stuck in the pattern they can now describe perfectly. That gap is what Christian speaks into.

Check availability See the talks

Two decades

Inside the clinical work

5,000+

People across the room

MAPSS™

The framework he built

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Clinical Fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). Trained in Gottman Method Couples Therapy and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT).

Signature talks

Four talks, each built to leave a room different than it arrived

The Map Is Not the Territory: Culture, Certainty, and the Cost of Losing Curiosity

Keynote · Conference mainstage, civic and leadership audiences, faith communities in transition

A culture is a map held in common. That is its use and its danger. When enough people mistake the shared map for the ground, disagreement stops being information and starts being threat. From the inside, certainty feels like conviction. From the outside it is a map nobody is reading anymore. This talk traces what happens to a marriage, a congregation, and a country when curiosity leaves the room, and what it takes to get it back. Curiosity is the cure. It is also the first thing a frightened system gives up.

What the room leaves with

→Why certainty is a nervous system state before it is a position

→What a culture loses the moment disagreement reads as danger

→Curiosity as a practice that can be built, not a temperament some people happen to have

The False Intimacy of Uniformity: Why Diversity Is Crucial to Closeness

Keynote or workshop · Conference mainstage, leadership teams, couples, and congregations

We have started confusing sameness with closeness. A couple quietly erases its differences to keep the peace and calls the quiet intimacy. A culture rewards agreement, punishes difference, and calls the conformity belonging. Both are trading the real thing for its counterfeit. Symmetry feels safe. It is not intimacy. It is fusion, two people or a whole society collapsing their differences to avoid the discomfort of being genuinely other.

Here is the part nobody wants to hear. You cannot be close to someone you are not allowed to differ from. Intimacy is not the absence of difference. It is difference held without threat. To be known, you have to be permitted to be unlike the person knowing you, and they have to survive it. Diversity is not the enemy of connection. It is the precondition for it, and it works the same way at the scale of a marriage and the scale of a country.

What makes difference survivable is psychological safety, the container where you can say the true and unmatching thing without being punished for it. Without it, people perform sameness to stay safe and call the performance love. With it, difference becomes the most intimate thing two people can offer each other.

This talk traces one pattern at both scales, the couple and the culture, and shows why curiosity about difference, not the erasure of it, is what closeness actually requires.

What the room leaves with

→Why sameness feels like safety but is actually fusion

→The line between differentiation and distance, and why couples mistake one for the other

→How psychological safety turns difference from a threat into the doorway to intimacy

→The same mechanism in a marriage, a team, and a polarized country

The Map Is Not the Territory: Why Every Therapeutic Framework Eventually Fails Its Own Clients

Keynote, 45 minutes · Mental health associations, clinicians, executive coaches

Attachment Theory, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Polyvagal Theory, and the NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) all work. That is the problem. They work well enough to produce audiences fluent in the language of healing while they stay stuck in the patterns they can now name. Every framework is a map. The trouble starts when a good map gets mistaken for the ground.

What the room leaves with

→Where framework fluency stops and felt change begins

→The question no model asks of itself

→What to do with a client who understands everything and has changed nothing

The Order of Conversation: How Couples Actually Repair

Keynote or workshop · Corporate learning teams, couples, employee assistance programs

Most couples are not failing to talk. They are talking in the wrong order. Repair has a sequence, and running it out of sequence produces the argument again with better vocabulary. Four moves, held inside a frame of intention: speak with ownership, listen with curiosity, validate with empathy, respond with intention.

What the room leaves with

→Why validation before curiosity backfires every time

→The four moves, in the order that makes them work

→How the same sequence carries into a team, not only a marriage

Formats

→Keynote, 45 minutes

→Half-day workshop

→Full-day intensive

→Fireside or moderated conversation

In person or virtual. Fees depend on audience size, travel, and format. Ask and he will tell you plainly.

Audiences

→Mental health professional associations

→Corporate learning and development

→Executive coaches and coaching schools

→Employee assistance and workplace wellbeing teams

→Psychology and relationship conferences

→Faith communities in transition

Booking

Tell him about the room

Who the audience is, what you want them carrying out of it, and when. He reads these himself and answers within two business days.

If a talk on this page is close but not quite the fit, say so. Most engagements start that way.