Special Focus Areas
Many of these focus areas have a tendency to overlap. Also, while these are some areas of special focus for me, you don’t need to fit these to be a good fit for working with me.
Complex Trauma
Complex trauma does not usually come from a single event. It comes from painful dynamics that repeated over years, usually inside of relationships you depended on. Because it is woven into the day to day experiences of childhood, it frequently goes unnamed. Many people arrive in therapy certain that nothing bad enough ever happened to them to account for how they feel. Being able to name the impacts of these experiences is an important first step in healing.
Some dynamics of complex (or developmental) trauma include growing up with a parent’s moods dominating the household, having a parent who regularly depended on their child for emotional support, or having a parent who could not tolerate their child’s healthy process of separating and becoming their own person. These dynamics often push a child into a parentified role that interrupts their own development. Some areas of complex trauma that I work with are growing up with an emotionally immature parent, a parent with narcissistic or borderline traits, and/or religious or spiritual trauma from childhood.
One consequence of complex trauma is in the relationship to emotions. You may feel overtaken by feelings like anxiety, hurt, depression, sadness, and anger in a way that feels dysregulating and embarrassing. Or you may feel numb or unable to identify what you feel at all. Both sides of this come from having a nervous system that learned at an early age that emotions were either dangerous to feel fully or unsafe to show.
There is also often a deep and familiar feeling of shame, a sense of being too much, not enough, broken, or unworthy. You may feel compelled to please others, to constantly strive to take responsibility or to be perfect, and have a hard time upholding healthy boundaries in your life. In ongoing developmental trauma, a child often finds it safer to conclude that there is something wrong with them than with the people they depend on.
For people with complex trauma, interpersonal relationships bring particular challenges. You may long for intimacy but also have difficulty trusting others or taking in their love. You may feel that you lose yourself in closeness with others and feel ambivalent about how close you truly want to be. Conflict can feel especially overwhelming and difficult to navigate. Even in relationships that are good and healthy, there can be a persistent sense of aloneness or separateness.
Many people in these situations grow into adults still holding some hope that if they can be understanding enough, successful enough, or loving enough, they will eventually get the parent or the belonging they needed. Naming these dynamics can feel like betrayal, which is part of why the pain often goes decades without a name. In this work we move at a pace your system can actually hold, and we do not require you to reach any particular conclusion about your family or your history. We make room for the complexity of relationships that are real and messy. What we are after is a steadier sense of who you are apart from what shaped you, more room for the full range of what you feel, and the capacity to stay in contact with yourself even when someone you love cannot meet you there.
Deeply Feeling or Highly Sensitive People
While 15 to 20% of the population is thought to have traits of high sensitivity, these traits can feel like a difficult match for the world around us. Sadly, many sensitive people have been told their sensitivity is a flaw when actually it can be a tremendous gift. Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) have nervous systems that take in more and notice subtleties of emotion that other people miss. This can lead to feeling overstimulated by crowds, noise, or other people’s distress, but it can also lead to people who have the capacity for tremendous empathy and attunement to other people, connection with nature, children, and animals, deep care for our world, and wonderful creative gifts.
If you have spent your life feeling like you are too sensitive, that you feel too deeply, or that the world is too much for you, you may have come to believe that there is something wrong with you. Unfortunately our world is not designed to support deep feelings. It can be challenging to navigate this world with a nervous system that is more sensitive. But in my experience, the deepest suffering rarely comes from the sensitivity itself. It often comes from internalizing that something is broken in you, that you are too much, and that you have to carefully manage yourself so everyone else stays comfortable. Those conclusions usually formed early in life in environments where your responses were treated as a problem rather than as a difference in need of understanding and support.
Our work is about honoring your sensitivity while untangling any negative self-worth you carry about it. We focus on building capacity to be with and to care for your own sensitivity. As the shame loosens its grip, there is more space to savor and express the real gifts that sensitivity brings: depth, empathy, and a kind of perceptiveness that the world really needs.
Chronic Pain / Illness
As someone who has experience with chronic pain, I understand the incredible toll it can take on all areas of life. In addition to the pain itself and the time taken up with searching for answers and pursuing treatment, it can have major impacts on relationships, sense of security, sense of self, and so much more. It is often also lonely in a particular way because, even with the best support, no one else is experiencing the pain you carry in your body and the way it feels to live with that the way you are.
With chronic pain and illness there can be a tremendous amount of grief, for the experience of your body that you once had, the visions you held for your future, and the sense of identity and security that has been lost. Sadly there can also be a lot of shame that people carry, about feeling responsible for their pain, believing they should be able to fix it, or that their worth is tied to how their body functions.
Emotional support for chronic pain and illness can be about navigating all of these complexities. It can also be about exploring the ways a dysregulated nervous system can both lead to and perpetuate pain pathways in the body. A body that has spent years under threat, from illness itself, from medical encounters that dismissed you, or from a childhood that required constant vigilance, can settle into a protective state that amplifies pain signals and makes it harder to recover. For many of the people I work with, the conditions of their childhood shaped patterns of tension, vigilance, and self-judgment that can play a significant role in chronic pain and illness.
My work is not focused on eliminating symptoms. It is focused on helping you meet your life as it actually is, with more self-compassion and less internal war, and on finding room for freedom, meaning, and aliveness inside the real limitations of your body.
Perfectionism, People Pleasing, & Codependency
These are usually discussed as bad habits to break, but I don’t see them that way. I see them as survival strategies that at some point worked for you.
Perfectionism often comes from growing up in a family where mistakes were met with criticism, ridicule, or emotional distance. People pleasing and codependency are adaptive strategies in a family where a child learns they have to be attuned to someone else’s mood to feel safe. These strategies were likely the best way that child could get some of their needs met and avoid further pain. For a person growing up with these strategies, there is often a deep fear that if they stopped performing or pleasing others they would find that they are ultimately unlovable as themselves.
While survival strategies are inherent to most experiences of childhood, they also come with a cost. Primarily this cost has to do with focusing so much on the needs and expectations of others that a person loses connection with themselves. This disconnection is often fueled by self-judgment, self-rejection, shame, and minimizing one’s own needs and feelings. Perfectionists and people pleasers often lose sight of who they truly are and what they deeply want. That need for self connection doesn’t disappear, however. It shows up as resentment, exhaustion, and depression, which are all ways our psyche tries to tell us that something is out of balance.
In this work we honor the survival strategies by recognizing the important role they have played. We also allow space for the emotions that come from self-disconnection. We explore the relationship to healthy anger and grief and the way these emotions can support self-value and self-connection. We also recognize the complexity of having times in life when old survival strategies are still useful and important.