Therapy for individuals
If you’re struggling, you’re human. You don’t have to struggle alone.
As people, we naturally desire authentic connection with others and a trusting, loving relationship with our own self. Many things can get in the way or make this difficult. For example, you might feel afraid of disappointing, burdening, or upsetting others, and so you stay self sufficient and highly attuned to others’ opinions, judgments, and needs. This might keep the boat you’re in from rocking, but it can also leave you feeling censored, bottled up, lonely, and exhausted from playing a role.
Sometimes, thoughts and beliefs are a part of this experience. They could sound like:
“I should just be able to handle this. I’m making too big a deal of things.”
“If I stop worrying or pushing myself so hard, things will fall apart.”
“I’m too much. I shouldn’t burden others with my feelings and needs.”
“I can’t reveal my real self to others.”
If these feelings are familiar to you, you might also recognize certain experiences that can underpin or accompany them. These sometimes include:
Anxiety, stress, a tight chest, a racing heart, and negative thought loops.
Flashes of shame or waves of painful memories.
Feeling a lack of self-regard or confidence.
Finding it difficult to communicate or set boundaries.
Feeling lonely and disconnected in relationships.
A childhood where your caregivers couldn’t give you the emotional connection, warmth, or understanding that you needed, even if your material needs were met.
My approach
I treat you as the driver in your therapy and trust your intuition and ultimate expertise on yourself and what’s best for you. I accompany you as a partner who witnesses you and brings questions, observations, and ideas that encourage exploration, reflection, awareness, and self-knowledge.
My approach as a therapist is informed by my training in existential therapy and also weaves together aspects of various theoretical sensibilities, including:
Person-centered and relational, meaning I believe wholeheartedly in your worthiness and your innate capacity to understand yourself and grow. I view therapy as a collaborative experience where our relationship is a key ingredient for change. I will bring curiosity to what is happening in the moment within you and between us, and will support you to use your own intuition to drive discussion and uncover insights.
Psychodynamic, meaning I find it valuable to understand present challenges in light of past experiences. We will discover feelings, beliefs, fears, wishes, and thought processes that live in unconscious parts of you, and work to understand how they drive present challenges, patterns, and cycles of stuckness. This involves, among other things, exploring impactful experiences, particularly from early in life. We may also explore dreams, imagination, imagery, and metaphor.
Internal family systems, meaning we may explore the various "parts" of you that developed and exist to serve different purposes for you: they may hold and remember wounds; manage you based on certain beliefs, fears, or perspectives; or protect and defend you. We'll approach these parts with compassion and will also explore whether they function how you most want today.
Existential, meaning I believe there are core concerns that underpin the experience of being human, including our relationship to freedom, responsibility, and choice; awareness of death; and a need for belonging, purpose, and meaning. We will consider how your current experience may be bound up with these themes and how you can find meaning and thrive despite the anxiety and struggle they provoke.
How can therapy help?
Being in healthy, meaningful relationship with others, our world, and our own self is a core human need. Therapy is a space and a process that can support you to better meet this need.
This could mean having a clearer sense of what’s true and authentic for you; feeling more freedom to be who you are and to connect with others as you are; feeling more trust and positive regard towards yourself; and understanding your needs and having a greater sense of agency in meeting them.
My hope is that working together can offer you:
A space to breathe and find relief from the intense culture of productivity, achievement, perfectionism, and judgment in our world. I care deeply about you having a place where you don’t have to perform. We’ll loosen the grips of paradigms like right-wrong, achieve-fail, broken-fixed, true-false, and good-bad, and discover pathways for greater freedom, self-acceptance, meaning, and choice for you.
A process that holds you as human. We won’t treat what’s “wrong with you.” Distress isn’t a mere function of individual pathology; it’s always connected to the world it emerges from. We’ll understand experiences like anxiety through a lens of what it means to be a person in this world, both holding this as a natural part of being alive and discovering ways to thrive despite it.
An opportunity to more deeply know yourself. We can understand what you value and what has influenced and shaped you, helping you have more trust and confidence in yourself, feel more grounded in the face of anxiety and life challenges, and find more connection in relationships
Getting started
Reach out for a consult
I offer a free, 15-20 minute consult call (request one here) so we can get a sense of whether we’re a fit. I’ll answer any questions you have and will also want to understand a bit about what you’re looking for.
Sessions
We’ll find a time that works for meeting weekly either by video or in person in the Madison Valley neighborhood in Seattle.
Beginning a process of discovery, healing, and growth
As we meet, we’ll work to better understand what is stuck, distressing, or in the way for you. This can involve exploring a number of things, including:
Impactful events and relationships that have shaped your beliefs, your perceptions of yourself and the world, and patterns in how you think and relate with others.
The influence of the world you live in. For many, being in this world means experiencing judgment, oppression, constraints, and various threats. If you find yourself wondering “what’s wrong with me,” therapy might be a space where you identify the illness in the ecosystem around you and how your own distress may be an appropriate, understandable result of that rather than simply a pathology within you.
Fears, anxieties, or needs that are a natural part of the human condition. It’s not unusual to experience concerns related to having a sense of purpose, struggling with choice, or anticipating eventual death and finding meaning in the face of it.
In exploring what’s difficult or painful for you, we’ll especially try to shed light on influences that operate in more unconscious, automatic, or hidden ways. With greater awareness of what affects you, we can also:
Discover what you want to be different.
Hear from wounded parts of yourself that have lacked a non-judgmental, patient, and compassionate space in which to speak and receive care.
Cultivate beliefs and ways of relating that reflect how you wish to be and to live.
Nurture and harness your innate strength and agency towards living how you wish to.