Online therapy for attachment trauma, parent and adult child relationships, and adults with ADHD
Does any of this sound like you?
Fiercely independent: You can do it all and others look on with admiration. But when you really need someone, there is no one you can trust with your vulnerability.
Highly flexible: You are excellent at adapting to others’ wants and needs. But you worry all the time if you said or did the right thing, you question yourself and worry about being alone. Expressing your own needs might feel impossible or even unimaginable.
Chameleon: You have developed highly attuned skills of blending in socially. But maybe you are also protecting yourself from being truly seen and sometimes you can feel a deep feeling of aloneness.
Perfect friend: You always come through for others, plan the parties, remember important dates, keep everyone together. But feel disappointed that there is no one to do the same for you.
High achiever: You are motivated, you can do what it takes to reach your goals and from the outside it looks like you have it all. But the successes have stopped being satisfying, they feel empty.
Good son/daughter: You have done the noble work of caring for your elders. But sometimes you feel stuck, resentful at the burden you have to carry, and the loss of yourself.
Parent: You love your kids. But you’re exhausted and it’s very hard to provide structure; you wonder if your kids are learning bad habits from you. You wonder what happened to the part of you who was an individual.
If you see yourself in any of these descriptions, I would love to help.
Healing happens in relationships.
Experiences of relational trauma can make it especially difficult to connect with others in meaningful ways, or to let your authentic self be seen. When we are young, we are completely reliant on our caregivers to meet all of our needs. We all learn adaptive skills to make sure we can get our needs met as well as possible under the specific circumstances of our childhood. Especially when there is trauma in our early relationships, those adaptive skills that responded brilliantly to the circumstances of early relationships, can actually work against us in adulthood. Therapy can help by offering a supportive, reparative relationship where unmet needs from the past can be attended to and healed, unburdening you from outdated ways of protecting yourself and coping that are no longer serving you.
Relationships are a fundamental part of being human; we need them. They are as important to our wellbeing as safety, rest and nourishment. But building relationships with important others in which we can feel safe, supported and understood isn’t always easy. Dynamics in our family of origin, our social location, individual identities and norms add additional layers to our experiences of connection.
I have tremendous faith in the therapy process and the transformation that is possible in a supportive therapeutic relationship. I work psychodynamically which means I will listen for conscious as well as unconscious beliefs that were formed early in life and reflect the ways in which these frameworks may be reinforcing stuck patterns today. I use Buddhist Psychology and mindfulness to help illuminate the ways in which our inner narratives might be adding to our suffering. And I use Internal Family Systems (IFS) to help move through internal conflicts that come up between allowing authentic self be known, and the legitimate need to protect ourselves when there have been harmful dynamics in relationships in the past or in the present.
