You Deserve Care That Gets What You're Carrying

Complex PTSD develops from prolonged, repeated trauma — childhood neglect or abuse, years in a controlling relationship, or sustained exposure to unsafe environments. Unlike single-incident PTSD, C-PTSD shapes how you see yourself, how you relate to others, and how your nervous system responds to everyday life.

Symptoms often include difficulty trusting others, a persistent sense of shame or worthlessness, emotional flashbacks, and feeling fundamentally different from other people. Many people with C-PTSD have spent years wondering what's wrong with them. Nothing is wrong with you. Your nervous system adapted to survive something hard.

Treatment for C-PTSD is paced and relational. We build safety first, work with the parts of you that developed to cope, and process the underlying wounds at a pace your system can tolerate.

Anxiety can look like constant worry, racing thoughts, physical tension, avoidance, perfectionism, or a persistent sense that something bad is about to happen. It can be exhausting and isolating, because it often doesn't make logical sense even to the person experiencing it.

In therapy, we work on two levels: the practical (tools to interrupt anxious patterns in the moment) and the deeper (understanding where the anxiety comes from and what it's trying to protect you from). Both matter. Anxiety is almost always a signal, not a flaw — and learning to work with it rather than against it changes everything.

Anxiety doesn't have to run your life. With the right support, most people experience significant relief and develop a new relationship with their own nervous system.

Grief is one of the most universal human experiences, and one of the loneliest. It doesn't only follow death — it follows divorce, estrangement, miscarriage, the loss of a version of yourself, the end of a dream. And it doesn't always look like sadness. It can look like numbness, anger, exhaustion, or a strange inability to feel anything at all.

There's no right way to grieve, and no timeline you're supposed to be on. Therapy isn't about moving you through stages or getting you to acceptance faster. It's about creating space for what's actually here — including the grief that doesn't look like grief.

I work with people in acute grief and those carrying losses from years ago that never fully healed. Both are welcome here.

If you feel chronically on edge, easily overwhelmed, or like you're always bracing for something — your nervous system may be stuck in a state of protection. This isn't a character flaw. It's a physiological response, often rooted in past experiences that taught your body the world wasn't safe.

Nervous system regulation work helps you understand your own patterns — what triggers a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, what your window of tolerance looks like, and how to expand it over time. We use somatic (body-based) approaches alongside talk therapy to work with the nervous system directly, not just the thinking mind.

The goal isn't to eliminate your stress response. It's to give you more choice in how you respond — so you're not at the mercy of your own nervous system every day.

We all carry relational blueprints. Patterns of connecting, trusting, pushing away, or clinging that were shaped by our earliest experiences. These patterns show up in romantic relationships, friendships, family dynamics, and even at work.

Therapy helps you see these patterns clearly — not to assign blame, but to understand them. Once you understand where a pattern came from and what it's doing for you, you have real choice about whether to keep it. This includes patterns like attracting the same kinds of relationships, people-pleasing, shutting down emotionally, or struggling to trust.

This work can be some of the most transformative therapy there is. It touches everything: how you feel about yourself, how you show up for others, and what you're willing to accept.

Many people come to therapy not because of one specific event, but because of a persistent, grinding sense that they're not enough — not smart enough, not lovable enough, not doing enough. This often lives alongside a relentless inner critic that narrates every mistake and anticipates every failure.

In IFS (Internal Family Systems), we understand the inner critic not as an enemy but as a part of you that developed for a reason — usually to protect you from something painful. When we get curious about it rather than fighting it, something shifts. The critic softens. The shame underneath it becomes workable.

Building genuine self-worth isn't about positive affirmations. It's about understanding the roots of self-doubt and developing a different relationship with the parts of yourself you've been at war with.

Some people feel emotions more intensely than others. Rage, grief, shame, love, fear. When these feelings arrive, they can feel all-consuming, hard to control, and sometimes frightening. This can strain relationships, interfere with work, and leave you feeling like you're always one step away from falling apart.

DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) was specifically designed for this. It teaches concrete skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness. These are skills that create real change in how you experience and respond to intense emotions.

You don't have to white-knuckle your way through your own feelings. There are skills for this, and they work.

Addiction is rarely just about the substance or behavior. It's almost always about pain — pain that needed somewhere to go, and found a temporary solution that eventually created its own problems. I approach addiction with compassion, not judgment.

As a Licensed Addiction Counselor, I bring specialized training to this work. I use Motivational Interviewing to meet you where you are in your readiness to change, and I help you understand the underlying drivers of your use so that recovery becomes sustainable, not just white-knuckling through cravings.

Whether you're in early recovery, struggling with relapse, or just starting to question your relationship with a substance or behavior, there's no wrong time to reach out.

Life transitions can be expected or sudden, chosen or forced. A new job, a breakup, a loss, a move, a diagnosis, becoming a parent, leaving a relationship, retiring. Even positive changes can bring grief, disorientation, and a loss of identity.

Therapy during a transition isn't about fixing you. It's about helping you find your footing — understanding what you're grieving, what you're building, and who you're becoming in the process.

You don't have to navigate this alone. Sometimes the most important thing is having a space to think out loud with someone who isn't in the middle of it with you.