My name is Lily Manné and I grew up in New York City. I was a city girl who believed the world began and ended there. I loved playing soccer, art, studying philosophy and observing the intricacies of people, which eventually led me to the study of culture and psychology.
I received my bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and my Master’s in Psychology and Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. I began my career blending social work and psychology, working with prisoners in an arts project, families in conflict and recovering addicts.
Before this work, I was inside harder places. Prisons, needle exchanges, homeless family shelters, families on the edge of losing their children to the state, men living with HIV and depression, parents fighting addiction while trying to hold everything together. I've sat with people in real crisis and real darkness, and that experience as a social worker shaped everything about how I listen and what I can hold.
In 2002, I went to India. I was feeling somewhat burned out by the New York City bureaucracies that underlie all social work and I was frustrated and angered by the corruption and lack of care that my clients were receiving. I wanted to understand how this work existed in a completely different context.
My nine months in India changed the course of my life… things would never be the same. I was always carried by my convictions. Looking for right or wrong. Truth. Purity. India taught me about grey areas and perspective. I learned that “right” was always missing some element of truth and there is my truth and your truth. Both can be right.
I met Niels in San Marcos La Laguna on beautiful Lake Atitlan, Guatemala in 2003. I was supposed to stay four days and then go back to graduate school. We built and ran a small hotel in a tiny Mayan village and immersed ourselves in our culturally diverse community. Our children were born in 2008, 2012, and 2014. Each one arrived with their own way of being in the world, and each one asked something new of me: more flexibility, more presence, more willingness to let go of the script I had been following.
What surprised me most was discovering that happiness didn't require the life I had planned. It required flexibility. The willingness to be changed by what you encounter rather than insisting on what you expected.
In 2023, our family moved to Portugal, another adventure, another version of expansion and change, reorienting ourselves after twenty years in Guatemala. We now live between a small village near Coimbra and our home overlooking Lake Atitlan. Each move has asked the same thing of me: to stay curious rather than certain, to expand rather than contract. That, more than anything, is what I bring into the room with my clients.
I BELIEVE
Light cursing is a form of authentic expression.
Board games help us express our competitiveness and sharpen our intellect.
Curiosity matters more than certainty.
THINGS I TRY TO AVOID
Getting too attached to expectations and perfection. Operating on autopilot.
Letting old patterns run without questioning them.
YOU CAN FIND ME
Living between a little village near Coimbra, Portugal and our lakefront home overlooking three volcanoes in Guatemala.
Raising three children across cultures. Continuing to build a life that evolves rather than settles.
DAILY RITUALS
Writing in my gratitude journal. My morning tea. Hiking. Spaces that allow me to slow down and pay attention.
ADVANCED TRAINING
American Psychological Association International Affiliate
Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology and Education from Columbia University (2002)
Master Life Coach (2021)
ACC Credentials from The International Coaching Federation (2022)
Gottman Method Couples Therapy (Level 3, 2022)
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT Externship & EFIT Level 2, 2023)
Gottman Treating Affairs & Trauma (2023)
NICABM: How To Work with Anxiety (2023)
NeuroMindfulness Senior Practitioner Certification (2025)
Terry Real’s Relational Life Institute: Working with Men (2026)
Over time I gravitated toward a different kind of work. Not because the other wasn't meaningful, but because what I do best is helping people who aren't in emergency mode but are living on automatic. Individuals who can see their patterns but cannot stop them. Couples who keep hitting the same wall without understanding why, who are longing for something they cannot quite name..
As a psychotherapist and relationship coach, what I track constantly is the pattern underneath: the stories people carry, the things they want to hear and aren't hearing, the old loops that keep appearing in new situations.
Part of what I bring into the room is the capacity to sit with whatever comes up. Whatever the feeling, the conflict, and the darkness. Most people want to smooth it over or shrink back from it. I don't. And when a client sees that I'm not shrinking, that I can be fully present with what they're carrying, something shifts. Slowly, they learn they don't need to shrink from it either
Living in Guatemala changed the way I see the world. Watching people find meaning and joy with very little made me reconsider everything I thought I knew about happiness. In New York, choices are often buried under layers of expectation and consumption. You can live a long time without realizing you are on automatic. That shift in context stripped a lot away. I began dropping pretenses, one by one, and moving closer to what actually fit.
That process, moving out of the automatic and into real choice, out of who you're supposed to be and into who you actually are, is at the heart of everything I do with my clients.
Living in a partnership, sharing my most vulnerable thoughts, my life goals, my disappointments, compromising every day, and coparenting three children has been my other great teacher. Marriage and parenting don't let you stay comfortable for long. They ask for the same things I ask of my clients: flexibility, honesty, the willingness to be changed by someone else's reality.
Running a business and genuinely caring about the people who worked for me taught me something I hadn't expected: that being a businesswoman didn't ask me to be a different person. I could lead, make hard decisions, and still show up with care for the humans in front of me. None of that had to be in conflict.
Most of us were never taught how to make relationships work. We would never let someone drive a car without a license, yet people navigate the complex currents of partnership every day without any real training or tools.
Relationship work is not only about your relationships in the outer world. It's about the internal patterns of relating that you keep reliving, the blueprint you carry inside you that shapes every connection you make. That's where the real work happens.
If you're ready to look at your part in what isn't working, that's already something. Most people never get there.
For more about my credentials and training, read this blog.
I work with couples to understand the cycle that has taken over their relationship and find their way back to each other.
