Supporting women on their journey of
I love helping women explore who they want to be with a sense of purposefulness and authentic trust in their worth.
Together, we honor past experiences and help integrate them into better relationships and happier living.
Identity in Motherhood
Our relationship with motherhood is complex and can present us with a plethora of emotions, challenges, expectations, and buried triggers. So many clients arrive at therapy after having a baby with a bewildered sharing of “WTF just happened?!”. I believe that that expression returns to us a hundred more times throughout our journey as a parent.
There is MUCH to navigate – whether it be the relational, emotional, and romantic shifts that move around with our partner, the financial challenges that arise with more humans to support, the loss of time for self and personal fulfillment, the stark changes in our new day-to-day, the loss of friendship and familiar support that gradually slinks back with time. We also have a new profound love in our life, new desires, and interests, new possible communities to engage with, and new parts of ourselves to learn about and to learn to love.
-
Additionally, many clients may struggle with infertility, adoption, single motherhood or may purposefully choose not to become a parent. Each of these elements of motherhood activate sources of pain, draw deep insights and learnings about the self, and can be pivotal experiences that alter our life path or calling.
Allow me to walk with you for a season as you navigate pieces of motherhood. You can bring your inner child to therapy – she may be hurting or needing to say something to you, she may be jealous of your new baby, or be completely forgotten after years of you parenting. We can learn about, care for, and heal all the parts of you while fostering the skills and confidence you need to succeed in this parenting season.
Healthy Partnerships
Relationships are ever-evolving and it’s not uncommon to find yourself lost in one where you once felt safe and secure. Our goal through therapy is to help you be awakened into a purposeful, thriving, and intentional place during each season of your partnership.
This can look like the work of individual or marital therapy. It can also, at times, look like the grief work and peaceful resolution of separation. We help you find your way back to you by fostering intimacy, transparency, and authenticity both within you and/or each other.
-
Common partnership issues that arise in therapy:
Systemic patriarchal roots embedded into everyday life (ie. disparity in power, money, labor)
Dissonance in sexual or emotional intimacy
Pain from past or current affairs
Feeling stuck in patterns around conflict resolution, family of origin management, and attachment-based emotions and behaviors
Unresolved trauma from one or more individuals that impacts healthy care and safety in the partnership
Consideration of dissolving the partnership and navigating the financial, emotional, and parental impact of this decision
“Most people are going to have two or three marriages in their adult life. Some of us will have them with the same person.” –Esther Perel, MFT
Ambiguous loss
Have you ever felt alone in your unique loss and loneliness? Oftentimes, when our loss is not associated with a death or tangible loss of someone or something, it is hard to name, describe or vulnerably share with others.
One of the most impactful and powerful moments in therapy for so many is that moment when we can name our complex troubles as ambiguous loss – this loss that may not be understood or experienced by many but is certainly felt so deeply within us. Giving this experience the power it needs allows us to process our pain more authentically, grieve in a way that is necessary, and make meaning of what we desire to recreate or leave behind.
-
Let me share some examples of ambiguous loss that have come up for clients and have become a significant part of their healing and transformative work.
Grieving the loss of a friendship (healthy or otherwise)
Grieving a sibling that you never had
Grieving closeness with a parent as they age and experience cognitive and physical decline
Grieving singleness or the loss of your marriage
Grieving your infertility or purposeful choice to be childless
Grieving a season that was a “sweet spot” as you enter into a more desolate life period
Grieving a close relationship with your teen or adult child as they differentiate from you
Grieving the loss of privilege or ease due to a minority status in ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, body type or ability, neurotypical functioning, etc.
The list can go on, my friends! SO much of our work in therapy involves and centers around ambiguous loss. I offer a client-centered approach to help you make sense of your unique loss, give safe space to feel what is needed to heal, and help you find clarity, peace and a path forward.
Female platonic friendships
In the young school age era, I have watched my children grow and flourish in friendship. This youthful launching pad of having and keeping friends shows up as nothing but goodness. It’s Playful. Consistent. Simple. Abundant.
In our adult years, making and keeping friends becomes so much more complex. We lose touch. They move away. There is a break up. We grow “out of the friendship”. And in those seasons we confront not only grief and loneliness, but also the reality that time and energetic resources may not be as robustly available to us to regenerate, heal and try again.
-
I work with so many lonely women. Women who crave connection, but do not know where to look or do not believe such vitality and deep female to female intimacy can ever be available to them. Consider the deep work of therapy if you desire more – more from yourself in vulnerability and interdependence, and more from others in what they offer you.
Common themes of client work in the realm of female friendship:
Desiring a deeper connection with friends beyond kids’ schedules, shared hobbies or work drama
Grieving the loss of “more connected times” as we adjust into seasons of busyness, servanthood or distraction
Exploring our contributions and offerings in female friendship as well as our emotional and intimate needs from others
Identifying themes of toxicity or fatal red flags in a friendship, and moving through the uncomfortable process of parting ways
Learning and practicing new tools for healthy conflict resolution and boundary setting
Finding meaning in the value of diverse friendships, yet who all share in the critical foundation of emotional safety, accountability to self and actions, and commitment to love self and others.
EMDR
After years of offering talk therapy to many, different and alike, I knew I needed to bring in supportive therapeutic modalities to help support and complete true healing. So many clients were getting close to “being there”, but still felt stuck up on some old, deeply rooted, and wounded final frontiers of resolve.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) focuses on reprocessing damaged or maladaptively stored memories that are often the backbone of trauma, PTSD, depression, anxiety, addiction, grief, and more.
-
This modality is an evidence based practice, meaning it has been deeply studied, researched and proven to be effective in helping our brains get unstuck from distressing emotional and physiological symptoms!
What I love most about EMDR is the report of clarity, relief and unburdening clients experience immediately after treatment. Integrating Internal Family Systems into the work (IFS), I get to see client reconcile and forgive parts of self that held onto painful belief systems out of mere protection or instinct.
Read more about EMDR therapy here
Women and body image
Food noise. Fat phobia. Thin girl privilege. As a therapist to women of all ages, I have been privy to the inner workings of hundreds of women leading to one common theme: we have been primed from the youngest of ages to be discontent in and even loathe our bodies. Though I do not work with severe active eating disorders, our work together can help you with any of the following:
-
Understanding the etiology, the part of self, and the motivations behind past or present eating behaviors
Healing from old family of origin systems that praised thinness and condoned female body criticism implicitly and explicitly in the home
Exploring personal beliefs and experiences with fat phobia and possible bias against body neutrality
Grieving loss of privilege from being in a female body, a handicapped body, a traumatized body, or a non-thin body
Untangling our relationship with the patriarchal system that has taught women to engage in personal warfare with their own body
Embracing the softer feminine archetypes within that promote acceptance, care, forgiveness and integration in relationship with our mind and body.
Are you looking for support with something else?
Get in touch to see how I can help.
