Therapy for the
driven and disillusioned
yearning for joy.
You’ve worked hard your whole life...
... for your beautifully crafted home with modern fixtures via rejuvenation hardware, even down to the cute Goldendoodle included in the family pictures. You checked off your life goals like the star student who set the curve, yet you feel untethered and less fulfilled than you would have imagined.
You followed all the rules to get to here...
... but more and more frequently when your anxiety bubbles up, it’s easier to break some of the smaller rules with yourself. What’s a glass or two of red wine here and there? And will finishing that sleeve of double stuff Oreos--okay two sleeves--really matter? You just need to unwind and turn off for a bit. It’s been a long day.
But long days have turned into long months, even long years.
Nightly routines of connection with friends or your partner have turned into mindlessly watching the latest show on Bravo. You long to turn off your brain and just stop thinking, even just for a moment.
Except, the worries invade as they always do- you start to run through an upcoming work presentation, feeling pressure mixed with dread. Lately, you’ve been so much more on edge at work and home, now that even a simple task or presentation that you have done a thousand times has become your personal Mount Everest.
You try to shift your attention back to the latest cat-fight on Bravo, but instead, you find yourself feeling your resentment rise, remembering how even though you texted, DMed, AND emailed your partner, they still managed to forget to stop by Trader Joe’s to grab the lemons you needed for tonight.
Instead, dinner--originally meant to be tilapia over creamy lemon asparagus--became kraft macaroni for you and the kids, with a side dish of irritation for your whole family.
When it’s finally time to turn in, you find yourself unable to fall asleep. Your partner gently snores, and you find yourself wondering if you’re having enough sex with them. Are they really content? Are your kids getting what they need? Are you starting to fall behind at work? Are you a happy person? What does that even mean, anyway?
Sleep is elusive, but you finally manage to doze off, waking up determined to do better, to be more than just good, you’ll be great. You show up, a smile on your face, whipping up a batch of eggs and pancakes for the whole family. You remind yourself that no one can complain that you aren’t a team player, after all, don’t you always say “Absolutely!” to new projects?
You meet every deadline, show up for every heartbroken friend, and do it all with seemingly ease. Yet, you still find yourself googling vacation spots while you sit in the never-ending Zoom meeting. Sometimes, you catch yourself daydreaming about a new patio set as your friend agonizes over a snide remark made by her mother-in-law.
Your life feels like the most beautifully photographed illusion. It should be a life you can relax and revel in, yet underneath the gloss of perfection, you can feel yourself unraveling like the threads on your favorite cashmere sweater.
Brene and Glennon inspire you, but you can’t figure out how to connect their wisdom from your head to your heart.
You’re nothing if not resourceful.
You know that self-care is the solution. Literally, every self-help book you’ve ever read encourages it in some form (though they’re not always clear how to implement it in your tightly packed juggle of all the “things” you're trying to keep afloat).
You stack up self-care activities like the dishes do during the holidays, but neither the latest self-help audiobook nor the beautifully color-coded bullet journal, seem to offer relief for your exhaustion. If anything, they just add to it.
You have started and stopped your monthly subscription for that meditation app your coworkers talk about at work but can’t seem to get past the first minute. You feel bored, yet your mind wanders to every to-do list and worry that you already think about at 3 AM, as well as on the one lunch break you remember to take.
You booked that week-long vacation in a dreamy place, thinking a break is what you really need. Thinking it would bring you back to “normal” and “rested”. By the end of Friday, your weekend to-do is so full, you feel edgy, tense with a full inbox again, and can’t remember the last time you washed your hair, dry shampoo carrying you into the weekend again.
You can’t shake the feeling that no matter what you do, things only feel heavier and tighter inside. Self-care doesn’t really help, it just amplifies how much pain you're ignoring inside.
Therapy is:
Unsettling, particularly for you the perpetual A+ student, to raise your hand and admit, “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
Choosing to feel uncomfortable so you can learn to feel joy, instead of staying comfortably unhappy.
An all-in bet, risking your bluff of a “perfect life” or “playing it safe” and buying another self-help book, signing up for another meditation app, that you may look at on your shelf or phone but has no impact on your life.
An investment in deeper change, showing up for yourself in a radical act of self-care. The weekly time is sacred, for the first time feeling you are a priority. It’s not a Diet Coke or knock-off designer bag; it’s authentic change, designed through your endowment of time, money, and - most importantly - your heart.
Therapy isn't:
A carefully crafted presentation with three easy-to-follow bullet points that magically change your behavior and lead to immediate success. Change is essential, but it takes time to learn how to label your feelings and unwind the stories you’ve been holding onto for so, so long.
New armor that enables you to fight the daily battles, while endlessly losing the war. It’s more about removing the armor to understand what you’re protecting.
Easy peasy: it’s all about rocking the boat, facing your fear of what it might be like to get in the waters that make up you. In order to know yourself, you gotta dive deep and be curious about all of what hides under the surface.
Because - come close so I can whisper this to you - here's the secret:
You are worth so much more than your relationships, your successful career, and your ability to escape. You deserve to have a relationship with someone who will help name what is happening and together make meaning of what is happening so that you can get close to what you desire.
When you share that you don’t understand the intense fear and immense grief welling in your chest, we will retract your steps and discover where it began.
When you’re tempted to play it safe and fear the all-in-bet, even when your gut tells you it’s the right move, I will sit with you through the pain of uncertainty and ride out of the storm within you.
If you are willing to get emotionally naked, I’ll champion you with love as you find self-acceptance and the freedom it offers not only to you, but your life.
You are the real thing. The designer bag that deserves the investment, the time, and consistency. By going all-in for yourself, you’ll discover that the real you will last so much longer than the book version of yourself.
Because the presentation of you is way more than just three parts. Your life is rich and full of deep meaning. And really, that new armor isn’t as useful as you’d thought it would be because authenticity keeps you safer than you expected. As vacation has taught you, swimming is sometimes better than being in the boat or staying onshore. And it turns out...
Messy = connection.
Rest comes when we listen to the internal whispers inside and what our body tells us what we need. Let’s get quiet and hear how rare and beautiful you truly are in your existence.
We begin with the logistics.
You book a consultation “here” with my assistant for the initial screening call, and they aid you in setting up an appointment.
Halfway through filling out paperwork that feels generic you find yourself fighting the urge to be really honest, you begin to feel nervous:
What if I don’t understand you?
What if I don’t see through your polished, presentable self to the messy parts underneath?
What if this is a total waste of time?
But then, before you even know it, we’re finally sitting in front of each other and you find your nerves show up in the form of unexpected tears as we slowly start to peel back the layers of you.
Unsettle
Even as you start to feel self-conscious that you are word vomiting all over the place, you find that you’re surprisingly comfortable. We begin to unwind all the reasons you came to therapy in the first place, starting with the feelings that create agitation in your life. As we dig into the stories of the past and present, we begin to stir up the sediment that has built up inside of you.
We unsettle the story, wake it up, and bring it back to life. Somewhere along the way, you realize that I hear and see you, in a way that feels new and unusual. If you had to name it, you’d call it being understood, but saying that out loud seems kind of silly or childish. So you keep it to yourself.
Understand
Before all this, you considered yourself fairly emotionally literate. You could read a room with ease, knowing how to act, but you’re finding that you didn’t know nearly as much as you thought you did about yourself. You used to just feel the inkling of a feeling and put them away neatly, labeled, and organized in the closet of your heart, on a shelf to return to for later.
Together, we begin to connect these emotions to your unsettled life. As we link your feelings to how you respond at work, in your relationships, and life as a whole, you start to see hints of the pattern. You begin to create the plot points on the map of your life, seeing where things were once rocky and growing curious where your rivers of passion could lead.
The map of you expands, and you appreciate the sign: “you are here” with more compassion than the old, narrow routes of shame and blame had once allowed.
Unravel
The map isn’t as clear as you had hoped it would be, after the initial therapy epiphanies. We work together to unravel the why, peeling back to the origin of the difficult feelings in your life. The why is rarely simple.
You’ve worked hard to get where you are, and while we honor that, together we acknowledge that it’s protection has begun to fail you, leaving you unsatisfied and living a life that feels more like it belongs to someone else or a low level of throbbing pain is there that you have ignored for so long.
By unraveling the tightness inside, you feel less stable than you have in a long while. It’s scary. But also freeing. And then the plot points on the map of your life start to connect, and you begin to grasp the bigger picture. The trends show you that what you have felt, how you have acted, are natural responses to hurt, pain, and fear. Even more, they are part of what makes you so beautifully human. It’s strange, but the more you unravel, the more you understand. And the more you understand, the more you learn how to respond to these insights with love and compassion.
before therapy:
You feel on edge, irritable, and frustrated with how many roles and responsibilities you have to juggle with little to no appreciation.
You find that whenever you try to relax it feels more like numbing out however you can. You find yourself daydreaming of a life you wished you were living, instead of the daily obsession of small, likely inconsequential decisions.
Regular, consistent, blissful sleep is a fantasy. One you miss with every single bone in your body. But instead of counting sheep, you find yourself listing worry after worry, making imaginary to-do lists instead of enjoying the bliss of dreamless sleep.
after therapy:
Peace feels less mysterious, filled with calm, and a solid sense of self. You don’t try to wear all the hats anymore, you’re content with your own crown composed of your self-worth.
Relaxation is no longer a luxury, it’s an everyday reality. You’ve learned to really take the night off, and to just be without the guilt.
Self-care is no longer just a Buzzfeed article you scrolled past. You find that rest is so much easier when you work through the guilt and shame, and when those frenemies show up, you have tried and true methods to relinquish their hold on you.
Hi! I’m Holly.
Therapist, plant lover, design appreciator, and cultivator of the hidden desires germinating in the hearts of clients and friends alike.
I know that you wrestle with perfectionism, people-pleasing, and anxiety. Not to mention how hard it has been to feel safe, and really let yourself rest and relax. And while you’re hesitant to share it with very many people, you are willing to admit that you really don’t have it all together and you are tired of white-knuckling your way through life.
It’s not like you haven’t tried to conquer it. I know that you are a tight-rope walker, persevering when things are thin. The trouble is, books appeal to your head and not your heart and you can feel like a failure fast if you feel what you're doing isn’t clicking. If only you had a guide that granted you the peace and joy you have been working so hard for.
What you need is a therapist who will help you uncover the blocked, unnamed emotions that you are holding inside of you. When you have someone who knows how to help unveil your heart’s desire, you begin to discover joy in the process of becoming you. The twists and turns of discovering yourself are a lot less scary because you start to trust yourself more.
I work from an emotionally focused, experiential, psychodynamic lens, which translates into my being able to detect the nuances of your emotional world. Like a psychologically-tuned GPS, I guide you in mapping the ways your feelings move through your body.
We work together so that you can make meaning of what your emotions are saying about the here and now.
By exploring the roots that have contributed to the ache inside that says, ‘I am scared to stop acting and if I am vulnerable it won’t be okay, and all will see how I don’t feel that I am enough,’ we uncover that fear is a part of bravery. If you're vulnerable, you feel more connected and you are more than enough as you already are.
You’re ready if….
You long for change
Many of us can have mixed feelings about change, but underneath we can long for it, especially with long-standing patterns. Moving from anxiety to change is not a linear journey.
You’re ready to commit to investing in yourself
This means more than a handful of sessions and short term solutions. I want to see change for you but not at the price of you feeling like a failure since it will take some time to learn about yourself.
You suspect that unlocking your feelings is the key to understanding yourself
Often we want to spend time in the doing, and so figuring out the human-being part of you is essential. I ask you to be willing to explore your being, which means the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors that comprise you.
You’re not ready if….
You can't tolerate change.
Each journey is unique, and not easily quantifiable into a series of quick fixes. Depth-oriented psychotherapy is not ideal for those who need a step-by-step action plan focused on fixing versus insight. The process to unwind and ground your inner story will take time.
You are not ready to make a weekly commitment for 45 minutes.
I work from a weekly frame in order to have intensive and consistent work to help peel back the layers. It is like working out or building a strong foundation in a house; shortcuts last briefly but long-term change takes consistency.
If you feel certain that knowing your feelings won’t help.
I won’t throw you in the deep end of the feelings ocean but therapy is uncomfortable because we are waking up old feelings and parts of you to find your true self.
frequently asked questions
Steps to follow to your first session:
step one
Schedule consult with my assistant: via this link.
step two
Complete a consultation with my assistant.
step three
Set up an initial appointment & fill out your paperwork.
step four
We meet for our scheduled session!