Even if you were gaining insight into your patterns or learning coping skills, something still felt emotionally distant in the work itself. Or maybe you’ve wanted therapy for a long time but felt intimidated by it. You’re interested in understanding yourself more deeply, but you’re also afraid of opening things up, unsure what might surface, or unclear about how therapy is even supposed to work.
Maybe you’ve been to therapy before and felt frustrated that you could only get so far.
They've often learned that other people become overwhelmed, reactive, dismissive, uncomfortable, or distant in response to their emotions, needs, or complexity.
Over time, many begin to adapt. They over-function. They minimize their needs. They monitor how they come across. They learn to take up as little space as possible in relationships.
These strategies often made sense. They may have helped preserve important relationships or keep them emotionally safe. But the very things that once helped them stay connected can also make it difficult to feel fully known, emotionally close, or at ease with other people.
You Don't Have to Make Yourself Smaller
Many of the people I work with have spent years carrying the intensity of their inner world on their own.
I think meaningful therapy happens through relationship. It happens gradually, as enough trust develops that you no longer feel like you need to sound insightful, package your pain neatly, rehearse before sessions, or pretend you're doing better than you are just to keep someone engaged.
My hope is that therapy becomes one of the few places where you don't have to manage someone else's comfort before you can pay attention to your own experience.
A Place Where You Can Exhale
I don't think therapy works through shame, performance, forced vulnerability, or rigid formulas.
I tend to be active in sessions. I ask questions, make connections, notice patterns, offer observations, and stay emotionally present in the work with you.
We don’t have to start with the hardest thing that’s ever happened to you. In fact, I generally don’t think it’s emotionally safe or trauma-informed to immediately push people into the most painful parts of their lives before enough trust and safety have been built in the relationship.
A lot of the work we do together centers around relationships: attachment patterns, conflict, people-pleasing, emotional over-responsibility, fear of needs, intimacy, boundaries, grief, and the exhausting feeling of always having to manage yourself carefully around other people.
Warm, direct, collaborative therapy that stays emotionally engaged with you.
My Approach
Therapy isn't only about feeling less anxious or overwhelmed. It's also about reconnecting with the parts of yourself that survival required you to set aside.
Maybe you laugh more easily. Rest without guilt. Feel more at home in your body. Return to the things that make you feel most like yourself. Trust your own reactions. Build relationships where you don't feel like you're performing just to belong.
Often, the changes are quieter than people expect. You simply find yourself living your life more fully, and spending less of it in survival mode.
When you're no longer spending all your energy surviving, more of your life becomes available to you.
Life Beyond Survival
Your pain exists within relationships, families, communities, systems, and a world that often asks people to carry more than any one person should have to carry alone.
Sometimes therapy makes space for grief that isn't only personal. Grief about violence, injustice, climate change, political realities, loneliness, or simply the exhaustion of trying to keep functioning through all of it.
You don't have to minimize those realities, explain them away, or worry that they're "too much" for me to hold.
I believe meaningful therapy considers both your inner world and the world you've had to survive within.
Your Pain Makes Sense in Context
Emotional suffering doesn't happen in a vacuum.
BODY SHAME, DIET CULTURE & SELF-WORTH
Many people have spent years believing their bodies are problems to solve. They've learned to monitor, criticize, compare, and police themselves in ways that feel almost automatic.
Together, we'll untangle the shame, self-surveillance, and messages you've absorbed from diet culture, fatphobia, and the world around you. My goal isn't to convince you to love your body overnight. It's to help you build a relationship with yourself that's grounded in curiosity, compassion, and care.
Because life gets a whole lot bigger when you spend less time evaluating your body and more time living in it.
A HAES-informed, anti-diet approach to healing your relationship with your body.
For autistic, ADHD, and otherwise neurodivergent adults who are tired of feeling like they have to translate themselves to be understood. Together we can explore masking, burnout, sensory experiences, identity, relationships, self-understanding, and building a life that fits you, not one that asks you to constantly adapt.
A formal diagnosis isn't required. Many of the people I work with are simply exploring whether neurodivergence helps explain their experiences.
Neurodivergent-Affirming Therapy
Some of the Reasons People Find Their Way Here
For people who've spent years feeling "too sensitive," emotionally intense, difficult, or like they need to shrink themselves to stay connected. Therapy becomes a place where you no longer have to make yourself smaller to belong.
Therapy for People Who Feel "Too Much"
If you've never been to therapy before- or you're worried you'll do it wrong- you're not alone. My approach is collaborative, relational, and conversational. You don't need to know what to say or where to begin. We'll figure it out together.
Therapy for First-Timers
Whether your goal is moderation, abstinence, or simply understanding your relationship with substances, we'll explore what's underneath without shame. I practice from a harm reduction perspective, which means therapy starts with curiosity rather than judgment.
Substance Use Therapy
Trauma doesn't only change how you remember the past. It changes how safe your body feels, how you relate to yourself, and what you expect from other people.
Together we'll gently explore those patterns while building a relationship where you don't have to stay hypervigilant, tightly controlled, or alone with what you've been carrying.
Trauma Therapy
I accept Pennsylvania Victims Compensation Assistance Program (VCAP) funding for survivors of sexual assault.
You do not need a police report, and there is no statute of limitations to apply. If you experienced sexual assault in Pennsylvania, you may qualify for fully funded therapy.
VCAP for Sexual Assault Survivors
Schedule a Consultation
Complimentary 20-minute Zoom consultation calls are available for adults in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.