Individual Therapy

Learn how to understand your relational style, nurture yourself and self-sooth in moments of distress, understand your feelings and connect to the messages you carry in your body, heal your inner child, set kind and clear boundaries that allow for self-respect, transform the internalized “rules” you have about yourself and others, explore your identities and the meaning they each give you, embrace your needs, stand in your own integrity, and join in closeness to the vibrancy, vitality, and humanity of others in moments of deep intimacy.

Everyone goes through life picking up burdens—whether these are in the form of rules about how the world should be, narratives about who you are, unhelpful thoughts, difficult emotions, challenging experiences, or anything else. How we respond to these burdens often changes over time, with strategies that once worked to keep us safe no longer serving us. We can’t avoid pain, but we can learn how to live meaningfully, fully, vigorously, powerfully, vibrantly, unabashedly in a way that allows us to embrace ourselves and others.

You work hard and try to do everything right, but something feels…wrong. You can’t get rid of a nagging feeling of emptiness or aimlessness. On paper, everything seems like it’s fine, but you don’t feel happy…

You feel lost

You feel overwhelmed

You can’t stop your mind from spiraling to all the things you know will go wrong, or all the things you’ve done wrong in your life. The more you think about these things, the smaller you feel, but the more you try to stop these thoughts, the stronger they become. You can’t stop the worry or let go of the past, but your life hasn’t stopped while you feel stuck in the worry. So you feel you are drowning in stress with no good tools to help you weather the storm.

You feel exploited and envious

You feel stuck and broken

Nothing you try seems to help. You can see yourself making choices that don’t make you feel good about yourself and don’t get you what you want, but you can’t stop. You don’t know why you’re doing these things. You find yourself thinking something must be wrong with you. That you’re broken, damaged.

You feel empty and ashamed

You don’t know who you are anymore. Identities that felt so important to you before are coming crashing down on you…Being the perfect partner, the most efficient employee, a doting mother, a level-headed person, healthy, smart, capable, special… Identities and roles that felt so integral to who you are, but you are now questioning how you can keep holding them so tightly. You believe if you are just a little more doting, a little more efficient, and little more calm then everything will work out…but it’s not working and you don’t know what this means about you…

You are an expert at taking care of other people, but don’t know anything about how to take care of yourself. You struggle to identify your feelings without reading into what other people expect from you; you can’t even begin to know what you want or need. You’re very good at noticing when people are disappointed in you and you go into overdrive trying to fix everything to make things better. You feel angry, resentful, and envious of the entitlement of others—the way they let themselves off the hook, depend on you, and don’t even recognize the efforts you go to in order to please them. When you try to set boundaries, it never works and you somehow get convinced that you’re being selfish or are overreacting…so you quietly withdraw, but your frustration comes out in passive aggressive ways.

You feel numb

You’ve just lost someone or something important to you and you’re not sure how to handle your feelings. People tell you it’s ok to cry—and part of you believes that—but you can’t make the tears come. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly, the tears erupt in moments that don’t feel appropriate. You don’t know how you will ever get past these feelings of grief and despair.

What is individual therapy?

During therapy sessions, I tend to be quite active. I’m not the type of therapist that will nod by head and say to you, “oh, that sound so rough…tell me more.” Instead, I will help you look at yourself with compassion and curiosity. I will help you observe patterns in your thinking, feeling, and acting to deepen your understanding of yourself. We’ll discuss actionable tools to help you navigate tough moments in more effective ways. Perhaps most important, we will use our relationship—what happens between you and me—to more clearly understand and explore who you are, how you relate to others, and how others relate to you. I view the relationship between us as a microcosm of your relationship to the larger world. By observing what happens in the moment-to-moment interactions we have together, we have real-time ways of seeing how you think, feel, and act and can more effectively work to transform and heal these parts of you. Even as I say this, I want to make it very clear that I firmly believe everything that happens in relationships (including therapy) is co-created. We each bring our own humanity into the room, our own histories, experiences, and burdens. It is when we can connect through our humanity that I believe true healing can begin.

We will meet for an initial intake assessment that can take anywhere between 1-4 sessions where we will discuss what brings you in today, what you're hoping to accomplish together, and your background. After this, we will work together to come up with a treatment plan that will address your needs. We will then typically meet once a week for 50-55 minutes for ongoing treatment and support, that can either be done in a time-limited or open-ended way. Together we will work to nurture your strengths, identify and transform your blocks, learn specific skills to help you practically navigate the current stuck points in your life, and help you experience deep self-understanding so you can make more intentioned choices and live your most meaningful and fulfilling life. What we do together is uniquely tailored to your individual needs. In my work, I draw on Internal Family Systems (IFS), relational psychodynamic therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), body-based practices, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). Like in most things, therapy works best when you engage meaningfully and consistently in the process.

    • Relationship challenges

    • Marital discord

    • Life transitions

    • Identity loss/change and role transitions

    • Self-esteem

    • Anxiety and stress

    • Aging and navigating aging in others

    • Caregivers (of aging parents, of sick partners)

    • Sex/sexuality

    • Developmental trauma (difficult childhood experiences)

    • Emotional neglect

    • Feelings of emptiness or meaninglessness

    • People-pleasing

    • Imposter syndrome

    • Perfectionism

    • Grief and loss

    • LGBTQIA

    • Navigating religion and sexual identity

Reach out to see how I can help you.