Frequently asked questions

How long does therapy take?

It depends! It depends on what your goals are, what your sticking points are, and how much integration and practice is done outside of session.

If you were to break your finger versus your arm, the healing time would look different. That length of time would also depend on whether you were looking for the pain to go away, or to be able to exercise that part of your body the same way you did pre-injury. Also, two people who break their arm in the same place in the same way would have different healing times and journeys.

I’ll cut to the chase. Probably not.

I remember feeling devastated when my own therapist told me this. It felt like a gut punch to hear that my work in therapy would be about learning how to live alongside it and manage it, rather than get rid of it.

Over the years I have grown to not just accept difficult emotions when they arise, but to befriend and even appreciate them for their relentless efforts to protect me. I see anxiety not as a pest to eliminate, but as well-intended energy that aims to warn. To lose those warning signals would mean harm to me.

Searching for a therapist can be a really difficult, timely, and discouraging process. Because of how important and unique this relationship is, I understand how daunting and risky it can feel to start working with a stranger who may or may not see you the way that you need.

In general, I believe in looking for someone with whom you feel deeply heard and have some energetic chemistry with. Especially if you are coming to therapy for interpersonal or attachment issues, I believe that it’s important that you feel safe bringing up uncomfortable topics to the therapist you work with. Like all relationships, conflict is to be expected. The healing is in the reconnection and repair. Find someone with whom you can reconnect and repair after inevitable moments of misattunement.

That would only make sense. What are the odds that you’d enjoy every single thing about the way I show up as a therapist? I welcome feelings of annoyance, dissent, or dissatisfaction. If there’s a specific technique I use that is not landing well with you, I would love if you’d let me know so that I can pivot toward trying something different.

If it’s something else bothering you about me or my style, let’s get curious about it together! Let’s name it, sit in the discomfort, and see what happens to the feeling when we bring it out into the open.

No. Therapy is your time and space to explore what feels relevant and necessary for your growth, and there is so much to learn from the present (the here-and-now). If ever I ask a question that you don’t want to talk about, you can feel free to let me know. Deciding together what avenues to explore is part of what makes our work collaborative.

Rather than talking about the content of a part of your life you don’t want to discuss, I may steer us toward looking at what happens emotionally for you when you consider talking about it (i.e. the process). A lot of my work involves prioritizing process over content.

So much of our patterning stems from situations or circumstances in childhood that naturally prompted certain behaviors to develop. For example, maybe you still struggle to resist overeating because you were instructed countless times as a child to finish what was on your plate. Or perhaps you downplay your need for rest when you feel under the weather because you were chastised as a kid for “exaggerating” or “being lazy.”

Inner child work is an internal process of reparenting yourself, based on the idea that we all still carry past versions of ourselves within our hearts and psyches. In theory, by now offering those younger parts of ourselves the care, support, and accuracy they so badly needed then, the weight of the burdens they’ve been carrying for so long may begin to shift and transform.