Special Focus Areas
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.
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 untangling the sensitivity from the shame that got layered over it. We focus on building capacity to be with your own sensitivity without being swept away by it, and we also look at the ways you learned to make yourself and your emotions smaller. 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.
Feeling Unseen in Your Family of Origin
Some of the deepest wounds come from feeling unseen by the people we needed to feel seen by the most. As children our sense of who we are comes from what is reflected back to us by those closest to us. We yearn to feel seen for the fullness of who we are and to be truly accepted as ourselves. Unfortunately this often does not happen. When a parent lacks capacity, for any multitude of different reasons, they often cannot see who their child truly is. A child who is not seen often learns to question their own worth or disconnects from their own sense of self.
While some forms of being unseen are blatant, others are more subtle. A child may feel unseen when a parent’s mood set the temperature for the whole household, when a parent regularly depended on emotional support from their child, or when a parent couldn’t tolerate their child’s healthy process of separation and individuation. These dynamics can lead a child to take on a parentified role that disrupts their own healthy development. Many children in these situations grow into adults who are still holding onto hope that if they continue to be understanding enough, successful enough, or loving enough, they will eventually get the parent they needed. Acknowledging these dynamics can sometimes feel like betrayal, which can lead to this pain being carried for decades without a name for it.
In this work we move at a pace your system can hold, and we do not require you to reach any particular conclusion about your parents. We allow space for the complexity of relationships that are real and messy. What we are after is a clearer, steadier sense of who you are apart from that dynamic, and the capacity to stay in contact with yourself, and to feel seen, even when someone you love cannot meet you there.