Sioux Falls therapist gains national following with relationship-focused approach

The car payment was overdue.

The rent was about to be too.

He was out drinking with his buddies, not going to work, while saying he wanted to be successful.

Then, Jason VanRuler literally looked in the mirror.

“I don’t like that guy at all,” he remembers thinking. “It just hit me. What you’re saying and what you’re doing are different.”

It was far from an overnight transformation, but the commitment reflected back at him began to take root. It led the recruiter living in Minneapolis home to Sioux Falls, where he ultimately became a therapist helping the very people he once saw looking back at him in that mirror.

From his Sioux Falls office, he sees clients struggling with relationships, addiction and other trauma. As he travels nationwide or logs in from home, he does the same therapy and coaching for well-known athletes and other celebrity clients — “the ones who are really invested in growing and changing,” he said.

From his Instagram account, he reaches 138,000 followers with quick snippets of relationship-driven content like this:

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A post shared by Jason VanRuler, Licensed Therapist (@jason.vanruler)

“Everything is relational, but for me, coming from a business background and being really interested in business, I find myself doing a lot of work with people who are founders or executives or leaders,” he said. “That’s a thing I speak to well because I understand some of their unique challenges.”

VanRuler’s own story starts with a childhood that saw his parents divorce when he was 8 years old.

“I went from a lot of stability to a lot of instability, and that was really hard for me,” he said. “I just had never really dealt with that, and it really impacted me.”

He tried to do the opposite of what he felt he’d been modeled, “and that didn’t work so hot,” he said. “I was not a good partner. I didn’t know what I was doing and wasn’t doing the right thing. Wasn’t being responsible. Wasn’t being an adult. I had run from this stuff.”

When he met his future wife, suddenly “there was really a good reason to do some work because she was a super strong, stable person in my life,” he said.

It led him to invest in his education and ultimately to a role in therapy that has seen him work with people just released from prison to “people who have everything,” he said. “We are all so similar.”

He often asks clients: “What’s that thing from your past that keeps showing up and holds you back?” he said. “And we all have a thing. When we make peace with it … it really does open up doors that were previously closed.”

The philosophy forms the focus of a book VanRuler released this month. “Get Past Your Past” was promoted by his experience helping people make peace with whatever is holding them back, “using it as a springboard to something better,” he said.

“It’s the book I wish I’d had when I really needed it, but also a practical guide because in the therapy world we say things like, ‘Do the work’ or ‘Lean into it,’ and I’m kind of literal and have always thought, well what does that mean? What is doing the work? So I wanted to write a book to explain what that looks like.”

In his day-to-day practice, he hears a lot about communication, he said.

“How do we do vulnerability well? How do we do empathy well and be a good listener? I think those are things people are struggling with,” he said. “Vulnerability is really a buzzword, but nobody explains the nuances. To be vulnerable is more than sharing every thought or feeling. And some people come to me wanting to learn to do that better.”

Post-pandemic, the relationship landscape has changed for many, he added.

“A lot of people are struggling with, what do I really want? What is my purpose, and where am I finding joy?” he said. “I’m seeing a lot of couples saying, ‘Just going through COVID really exacerbated some problems we’ve had for a long time ,and now we’re in a place where we could have not dealt with them for a while, but we really need to deal with them.'”

Dating is a whole other issue, he said.

“It’s so cool for me to see the younger generation — they want to do it well — but it also works against them because they don’t know how to do that,” VanRuler said. “I talk to a lot of people about how to show up for a healthy relationship, what does it look like to date when I’m using apps to form connections? And it’s really hard.”

When he’s not writing, creating content or seeing clients, VanRuler speaks nationally and has done a number of retreats, company workshops and keynote addresses.

“What’s become increasingly important to me is to develop a lot of community here,” he said of Sioux Falls. “That’s something I would teach people to do. We’re our best self when we have community, but also Sioux Falls is really a contender with a lot of cities. Maybe that hasn’t always been the case, but we have some amazing stuff going on.”

To learn more about VanRuler’s new book, click here.