Therapy for adults who are ready to look at what's running their lives and change it.
In person in Lake Tahoe and online throughout California
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You've already run the math on whether your reasons are serious enough to take up a therapist's hour.
They are. Wanting your life to feel like yours counts, and so does not knowing what you want at all.
What brings you here probably isn't dramatic. Your life got built out of other people's expectations, one reasonable decision at a time.
You have a private list of rules. Break one, and you're a bad daughter, a bad partner, a bad friend.
Nobody handed you that list. You worked it out young, in a house where being easy to live with was the safest thing you could be.
You read a room before you walk into it. It holds up fine, right up until something ends.
A marriage ends, and the arrangement that organized your whole sense of yourself goes with it.
Everyone helps with the paperwork. Nobody knows what to say about the part where you don't recognize your own life.
That question is the work. I treat it that way from the first session.
Three things got fused together a long time ago: what you did, what happened to you, and who you are.
Detangling those is the first real turn in this work, and it’s where people start recognizing themselves again.
You’ll notice it on an ordinary Tuesday, when you catch yourself about to apologize for something that was never yours. Getting there takes somebody willing to say what they see out loud.
Half this hour is mine, whether you come in on your own or with your partner. I use it to tell you what I’m seeing while I’m seeing it and to hand you something to do about it.
You’ll hear my own stories when they’re useful. I’d rather be a person in the room with you than an audience for it.
When you tell me the work is hard, I’ll agree with you, and then I’ll tell you to keep doing it.
Homework is standard here. Something to read, something to listen to, or something to practice out loud before I see you again.
For memories that still set your body off, I’m EMDR trained, and we’ll work them directly rather than talking around them.
Other times, I’ll ask you to say the hard thing straight to an empty chair, because saying it out loud does something that describing it never does.
Bring me the hard thing.
More About MeMy favorite day in your therapy is the day you tell me you don’t need me anymore. I’m aiming at it from the first session.
You’ll get a therapist who says the hard thing instead of waiting for you to find it yourself. What I ask back is short, and none of it is easy.
Do that, and you get to find out which parts of this life you’d pick.
