Life Transitions Counseling,PLLC

06/14/2026

Our new website is live. Find resources, services, and support for the relationship patterns that have kept you stuck. Visit us at

Therapy, divorce consulting, relational recovery, and The ISLAND Method™ to help you navigate life’s most difficult transitions.

06/07/2026

After years of showing up here, I’m moving my new content to my new page — Debra Alper, LCSW. That’s where you’ll find everything I’m creating on addictive relationships, coercive control, and breaking free from patterns that keep you stuck. I’d love for you to follow me there so we can stay connected. You can find me at facebook.com/DebraAlperRelationships

You're not addicted to them. You're addicted to the hope of who they almost were.

If that sentence stopped you, you're in the right place.

I help people recognize patterns of addictive love, coercive control, and emotional abuse & reclaim their voice

06/07/2026

They rarely walk in saying “I’m in a toxic relationship.”
They say I think I’m the problem.
That’s the tell.
The confusion isn’t a character flaw. It’s a symptom. You’re not failing the relationship — you’re surviving it.
→ I’m moving everything to my new page: facebook.com/DebraAlperRelationships Follow me there, save this post, and share it with someone who needs to see it.

06/07/2026

Twenty six years ago, this practice opened its doors with a name that said almost everything I needed to know about the work I’d be doing.

Life transitions.

Not the easy ones. Not the planned ones. The ones nobody saw coming, or the ones people saw coming for years and still didn’t know how to walk into. The end of a marriage. The end of a relationship that should have ended sooner. The slow realization that the person you’ve been loving has been hurting you all along, and that recognizing it is its own kind of grief.

Most of the people who find their way to this practice aren’t in transition because something simple happened. They’re in transition because they’ve finally named something complicated. Addictive love. Coercive control. Emotional abuse. Three patterns that almost never get named together, even though they almost always travel together.

The work we do here is not about fixing you. You were never broken. The work is about helping you recognize the pattern, interrupt it, and find your way back to the version of yourself that existed before someone taught you to doubt her.

I’m Debra Alper, LCSW. I founded Life Transitions Counseling in Chicago twenty six years ago, and I still believe what I believed then. That the people who walk through hard things deserve someone who can walk through them with skill, with steadiness, and without flinching.

Scroll through to learn more about how this practice works and who we serve. And if you know someone who’s quietly in their own life transition right now, share this with her. She doesn’t have to do it alone.

The relationship ended. The pattern can too.

06/05/2026

It wasn’t bad luck. It was a pattern you didn’t know you were running. Seeing it is the whole game.

06/03/2026

Learning that love had conditions wasn’t your fault. Spending years meeting those conditions without noticing — that’s what these relationships exploit.

06/01/2026

This wasn’t bad judgment. It was two attachment wounds finding each other in the dark and mistaking it for love.

05/31/2026

The woman you used to be didn’t leave. You just stopped looking for her. That changes today.

05/29/2026

You wouldn’t have recognized that version of yourself two years ago. That’s not a character flaw. That’s evidence of what you survived.

05/28/2026