Jake Thiessen

Jake Thiessen is co-founder of Couples at Crossroads, a company dedicated to coaching couples through the challenges of balancing professional life and personal/family life. He has worked with couples for over 35 years.

Jake grew up on the plains of Central Kansas, the product of a farming community. The simple, hard-work ethic of that experience has had the effect of defining his approach to life. For much of his adolescence he worked with his father who managed a small flourmill. The father-son work place bonding that occurred during those years created an appreciation for the overlap that can occur between home life and work life.

After college, Jake spent a year in France for language study followed by two years teaching English as a second language on an oasis in the Algerian Sahara. The shift from rural Kansas to Europe then to North Africa give him a profound appreciation for the differences that occur between individuals and cultures. It created a capacity for empathy that remains a central feature in his work today.

Responding to a long-standing desire to work with couples and families, upon his return to the States, he pursued graduate school eventually earning a doctorate in Family Relations at Texas Tech University. After graduate school he taught marriage and family at the university level for 15 years while maintaining a private practice in marriage and family therapy. With an entrepreneurial spirit, he left academia to work full time helping couples navigate the life cycle from marriage to parenting to, occasionally, divorce and remarriage.

Today, Jake enjoys bringing the simplicity of a Kansas farming community and the complexity of cross-cultural experience to his work with couples and families. His work is rooted in an appreciation for paradox.

Jake lives in Central Pennsylvania with his partner, Nicolee Hiltz. He has three grown children. He enjoys reading, writing, collecting art, walking his dogs and binge watching British crime dramas.