Additional Areas of Focus
Life Transitions & Personal Identity
Turning points, new chapters, and the work of becoming who you choose to be.
Not everyone who comes here has a diagnosis, and not everyone needs one. Some people come because something in their life has changed, or needs to, and the way they have always operated has stopped working.
A transition takes away the structure that was quietly telling you who you are. The role, the routine, the relationship, the plan. What is left is a question most people have never had to answer directly: what do I actually want, now that it is up to me?
The Kinds of Change People Bring
Personal and Relationships
Separation or divorce. The start of a serious relationship, or the realization that the one you are in keeps repeating an old pattern. Becoming a parent. Children leaving home. Caring for a parent. Grief.
Education and Career
Starting or leaving college. Choosing a direction when none of them feels like yours. A career that looks successful and no longer fits. Burnout. A promotion that changed what is asked of you. Job loss. Retirement.
Health and Environment
A new diagnosis. Living with a chronic illness. Recovering from an injury or a serious illness. A move to a new city. Leaving a community, a culture, or a way of life you grew up in.
Identity and Meaning
Questioning the beliefs you were raised with. Changes in faith or spirituality. Losing a role that defined you, as a partner, a parent, or a professional. Feeling like a stranger in your own life. Wanting to live by your own values rather than other people's expectations.
Why Change Can Be This Disorienting
Most of what you believe about yourself was in place before you were old enough to examine it. It came from your family, your schooling, your culture, and whatever earned approval when you were young. For a long time it works well enough that you never have to look at it.
Those beliefs shape more than your opinions. They shape what you notice, how you interpret it, what you feel, and what you do. Over years, what you do becomes who you take yourself to be, and that becomes the life you have. It also runs the other way: acting differently changes what you believe.
A transition interrupts all of that. It is uncomfortable. It is also one of the few points in adult life when the whole arrangement is open to revision. Sometimes the change is sudden. More often the old arrangement unravels gradually, and for a while the old answers are gone before new ones have arrived. That in-between stretch is disorienting, and it is normal. Part of the work is getting back the parts of yourself you set aside along the way.
What Treatment Looks Like Here
A transition can be hard without anything being wrong with you. It can also produce something that needs treating. Part of a thorough evaluation is working out which one you are dealing with, and often it is both.
When symptoms are part of the picture, we treat them directly. Trouble sleeping, changes in appetite, difficulty concentrating, rising anxiety, and shifts in mood are all addressed. Sometimes this is an adjustment disorder, which is a real diagnosis involving a reaction to a specific change that is either more intense than the situation would ordinarily produce or that is getting in the way of your life. Sometimes it is a depression or an anxiety disorder that the transition uncovered rather than caused. And sometimes it is grief. Grief is not a disorder, but when it stays intense and disabling long after a loss, it can become one. This is known as prolonged grief disorder, and it responds to treatment.
Medication is available when it would help, and understanding what is actually going on guides whether and how it is used. Used well, medication can restore sleep, steady mood, and quiet anxiety enough that you can think clearly about what comes next. This matters more than it might seem. Transitions are when people make large choices, and you want to make them from a rested, settled state rather than an exhausted one.
Alongside any treatment of symptoms, therapy offers space for the deeper question a transition often raises: not only how to get through it, but what it is asking of you, and who you want to be on the other side of it.
How the work unfolds is described on the Insights page.
Who This Work Suits
This work suits people who are curious about themselves and willing to be changed by what they find. Many are doing well by outside measures. Some have a history of trauma, anxiety, or depression, and some do not. What they share is that they would rather understand their life and direct it than wait for it to settle on its own.
Adolescents and Young Adults
The transitions of adolescence and early adulthood are some of the largest anyone goes through. High school, leaving home, college, first serious relationships, first real decisions about direction. I work with adolescents age 14 and older and with young adults.
If you are in the middle of a change and want to come out of it more yourself rather than less, reach out.