What can you see me for? 

Increased stress levels, feeling like stress has become unmanageable, addressing specific types or sources of stress.

Does your autopilot feel like it’s always set to ‘worry’? Maybe you’d describe yourself as a planner, or an organizer, or the kind of person who is always prepared for any possible outcome. Maybe this has felt like an advantage in life – being prepared always seems to pay off – but lately you’re noticing that you can’t stop worrying, even when you don’t want to.

We all have ‘stuff’ we need to work on when it comes to our parents. 

This ‘stuff’ can be painful, tricky, frustrating, and downright exhausting. 

Maybe you feel some resentment towards your parents, but that resentment is followed by guilt. Maybe you’re angry, or find it hard to spend time with them, or spend much of that time arguing…so you resolve to ‘do better’ next time. Maybe you’ve made it a goal to hold better boundaries with your parents, but it feels impossible to hold those boundaries without feelings getting hurt. Maybe you’re grieving the parent you wanted or needed and couldn’t have, and you’re struggling to come to terms with that grief – even if you think that your parents probably did the best they could. Maybe you’ve been taught that you must love and respect your parents unconditionally, regardless of how they make you feel.

We get a lot of messaging that we have two options – we must either love or hate our parents, that there is no in-between. And when we struggle to love our parents, we can be overcome with shame and guilt. Can we be hurt by the ways they’ve hurt us, without thinking they were bad parents? If they drive us crazy, will it get better if we just try harder?

It’s complicated.

For better or for worse, our parents are our biggest influences. We can work together on contextualizing how your parents affected you – because they did, and still do. Understanding this impact, and navigating this relationship through adulthood, is a lifelong journey. Let’s figure out how to make this relationship work for you.

This work may include recovery from a parent with borderline personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, traits from either (or both), and/or additional diagnosed and undiagnosed mental health issues. 

There are times when it feels like everyone else picked up a life manual before entering the world as a full-fledged grown-up…and it feels like you must have missed manual distribution day. Maybe you feel like there are a lot of expectations you’re supposed to meet – you should have a better job by now, or a better apartment, or should be better at dating, and you’re still just trying to figure out what kind of gas you’re supposed to put in your car…or what a retirement account is…or how the heck taxes work?! Therapy can be a safe place to start figuring out some of the intimidating parts of adulting.

This can show up in different ways. Do you find it really uncomfortable to say ‘no’? Is one of the things you admire about yourself how generous and compassionate you are for the people you care about, but have a hard time taking care of yourself? Do you go out of your way to keep others happy, keep others pleased with you, or just keep things calm around you in general?

This has become a big word, hasn’t it? Many of us learned long ago that ‘trauma’ only applies to a handful of significant one-time events, like military combat or physical assault (sometimes called ‘big T’ trauma). Over time, we have learned more about the origins, development, and effects of trauma, and the term has been expanded to cover more types of experiences and challenges. Any distressing event that falls beyond the scope of the normative human experience, and overwhelms our ability to cope, can be considered traumatic. Even so, we can sometimes feel like the word ‘trauma’ or ‘traumatized’ doesn’t apply to us, because we haven’t been through a major, life-threatening incident. Whether or not you feel like the word ‘trauma’ applies to something you’ve been through, coming to therapy can help you process and heal from some of the lifetime experiences that may be affecting how you live your life today. Some of these experiences might include childhood emotional neglect (CEN), emotional, verbal, or psychological abuse, bullying or harassment, attachment injuries, chronic illness, and/or absence of a parent (sometimes called ‘little t’ trauma). https://www.realsimple.com/health/mind-mood/emotional-health/what-is-little-t-trauma. You may not know if you’ve been through something traumatic – often times our own memory banks will try to protect us – and instead we find that we’re surviving and coping, rather than thriving. Therapy can help.

As an individual with lifelong chronic illness, I have a deeply personal understanding of the challenges faced by individuals on the arduous journey of seeking diagnosis and treatment for complex medical conditions. Perhaps you’ve been told that you must be fine, because your labwork results are normal, when you know that your overwhelming symptoms and unrelenting pain are anything but normal. 

Perhaps you feel like you are at war with your body, no longer able to trust your own symptoms and sensations, constantly questioning whether you should be resting or pushing through. Perhaps you’ve been told by the medical professionals you’re looking to for help, ‘it’s all in your head.’ 

Chronic illness can not only affect your quality of life, it can also be incredibly isolating, difficult for loved ones to understand, and can even be embarrassing to discuss with others.

Chronic illness can involve a lot of grieving - for lost opportunities, lost relationships, cancelled dreams, limited resources and energy, and can be very distressing to feel like you have to settle for a life that looks different than the one you’d imagined.

While therapy isn’t a cure for chronic illness, emotional support can ease the burden of your pain. It’s time to slow down, take a breath, share the weight and learn how to move out of constant survival mode.