About Us
The Chicago Center for Relationship Counseling is dedicated to helping individuals, couples, and families grow through exploring barriers.
Our Mission
Chicago Center for Relationship Counseling (CCRC) works to help clients, therapists, supervisors, administrative staff, and students move towards wellbeing by understanding their strengths, resources, and constraints. CCRC works closely with community partners to actualize the possibilities for healthy and just solutions to complex problems.
Our practice strives for equitable change, working towards dismantling and challenging systems that oppress human identities, such as white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, anti semitism, islamophobia, and ableist ideologies. We support cultivating strengths and resources to find internal and relational transformation.
We endeavor to be anti-racist, diversity inclusive, and encouraging in our clinical and professional pursuits. We create brave spaces to discuss mental health and relational challenges, identities, trauma, neurodiversity and internalized biases, amongst other clinical topics.
At CCRC, we actively establish ourselves as agents for and allies to positive change.
Our Integrative Approach to Therapy
Sometimes we get bogged down in unhelpful patterns. Couples struggle with conflict or infidelity. Individuals become trapped by internal conflicts. Families get caught up in old resentments. Others suffer from specific disorders like ADHD, anxiety, depression, or anger management issues. At CCRC we provide relationship counseling, which helps clients understand what is blocking them from being able to use all of their strengths and resources to solve problems and achieve goals. After developing an understanding of these blocks, we collaborate with clients on plans for removing their blocks and solving their problems.
In addition to couples counseling and family therapy, we provide individual therapy to people looking to understand and explore the blocks that are keeping them from being able to access all of their strengths.
We pride ourselves on valuing culture, race, orientation, religion, and gender as key aspects of identity for individuals, couples, and families. We honor that the intersectionality of such identities impact the way one walks in the world, and experiences life as a whole. We are also an LGBTQIA affirming practice, welcoming sexual, gender, and relationship diversity in the work that we do. All identities are welcome here.
We are a dynamic and diverse group of therapists, and our practice is continually growing and expanding. We currently have five offices in Chicagoland and one office in Michigan. We also provide online counseling options.
We Are a Worker-Owned Cooperative
CCRC is owned by the therapists who work here. When our founder, Josh Hetherington, began thinking about the future of the practice, he chose a different path than the one many therapy practices take. Rather than selling to a private equity firm, he sold the practice to its employees, working with the nonprofit Project Equity to design a cooperative model built on equity, collaboration, and trust.
This matters for you as a client. The people sitting across from you are not employees of a distant corporation. They are co-owners with a real stake in the quality of care you receive, the health of our community, and the long-term wellbeing of this practice. Decisions about how we work are made by the people who do the work, which keeps us grounded in what we have always believed: when therapists are supported, trusted, and invested in, clients get better care.
Worker ownership is also a natural extension of our values. We talk often about helping clients remove the blocks that keep them from accessing their own strengths and resources. Our cooperative structure does the same thing for our team, giving every therapist a voice in shaping the practice and room to grow. We are proud to model this approach for other therapy practices, and we hope it offers the field an alternative worth considering.