Areas of Focus
People rarely arrive in therapy carrying only one clearly defined problem. Developmental trauma can shape attachment. Neurodivergence can affect how someone experiences relationships, work, identity, and the body. Chronic illness can bring grief, medical trauma, and changing capacity. Emotional abuse can leave behind self-doubt, relational confusion, and ways of surviving that continue long after the relationship ends.
My work focuses on how these experiences intersect. Rather than separating symptoms from the life that shaped them, we look at the whole person and build an understanding of why certain patterns developed, what they have protected, and what may need to happen for something to change.
Developmental, Attachment, and Relational Trauma
From Healing Alone to Healing in Relationship
Some people become very good at surviving on their own. You may understand your patterns, know where they came from, and have done years of work to become more self-aware. You may also still struggle to trust closeness, receive care, express need, remain present during conflict, or believe that another person will stay emotionally available when things become difficult.
Developmental and attachment trauma can grow out of emotional neglect, inconsistent caregiving, abandonment, chronic invalidation, role reversal, or environments where love and safety felt unpredictable. These experiences often shape what you expect from relationships long before you have words for them.
Therapy can become a place to notice how those expectations still organize closeness, distance, conflict, longing, and self-protection. The goal is not to make you dependent or take away the strength you developed on your own. It is to help you experience that need, difference, vulnerability, and repair do not always have to end in rejection, shame, or loss.
Healing alone can take you far. Some wounds begin to change only when they are met differently in relationship.
AuDHD and Neurodivergence
Neurodiversity-Affirming Therapy
Many neurodivergent adults arrive in therapy after years of being misunderstood, overextended, or expected to function in ways that were never sustainable. You may have learned to mask, overprepare, overexplain, or push past your limits because being yourself did not feel safe, legible, or acceptable.
I work with adults navigating ADHD, autism, AuDHD, late identification, burnout, sensory needs, executive dysfunction, rejection sensitivity, perfectionism, and the relational impact of being repeatedly misread. I am especially interested in the places where neurodivergence and trauma overlap, because not every difficulty is a symptom and not every adaptation needs to be removed.
Therapy can help you understand how your mind actually works, separate shame from difference, and notice where you have been forcing yourself through environments, relationships, or expectations that ask too much. It can also help you build more honest ways of communicating, resting, asking for support, and organizing your life around your real capacity.
The goal is not to make you appear more typical. It is to help you live with less self-abandonment and more room for the way your mind, body, and relationships actually function.
Therapy That Does Not Dismiss the Body
Chronic illness can change nearly every part of a life. It can affect your work, relationships, independence, identity, finances, sense of safety, and ability to imagine the future. It can also leave you moving through systems that demand proof, patience, and persistence when you are already exhausted.
I work with adults living with chronic pain, fatigue, disability, dysautonomia, changing capacity, diagnostic uncertainty, and trauma related to medical care. This can include being dismissed, misdiagnosed, disbelieved, repeatedly tested, or treated as though emotional distress explains away physical symptoms.
Therapy can make room for the grief, anger, fear, helplessness, and identity disruption that often come with illness. It can also help with the relational strain of needing more support, losing access to parts of your former life, or feeling misunderstood by people who cannot see what it takes to get through an ordinary day.
Your physical symptoms will not be reduced to anxiety, and your emotional responses will not be treated as evidence that what is happening to your body is not real. The work is not to force acceptance of every loss. It is to help you remain connected to yourself while building a life around the body and capacity you actually have.
Chronic Illness and Medical Trauma
Rebuilding Self-Trust After Relational Harm
Emotional and narcissistic abuse often does not leave behind one clean story. It leaves confusion. You may know something was wrong and still question whether you are being unfair, dramatic, disloyal, or too sensitive. You may understand the pattern intellectually and still feel attached to the person, responsible for their pain, or pulled back into the relationship by moments of tenderness, remorse, or hope.
I work with adults recovering from gaslighting, coercive control, chronic invalidation, scapegoating, trauma bonding, emotional withholding, intermittent reinforcement, and relationships that slowly eroded their trust in their own perceptions. These dynamics can make it difficult to know what happened, what you are allowed to feel, and whether your needs are legitimate.
Therapy is not only about naming the abuse or helping you leave. It is also about understanding why the bond remained powerful, what the relationship asked you to abandon in yourself, and how to rebuild a sense of reality that does not depend on the other person agreeing with it.
Recovery can involve grief, anger, shame, longing, and the painful recognition that loving someone does not make the relationship safe. The work is to help you trust your own mind again, recognize manipulation without losing your capacity for nuance, and build relationships where care does not require confusion, fear, or self-erasure.
Emotional and Narcissistic Abuse
Making a Life Around What Cannot Be Replaced
Grief is not only about death. It can come through estrangement, the end of a relationship, the loss of health or capacity, a family you could not safely remain inside, or the future you once believed you would have.
I work with adults carrying both visible and ambiguous losses, including grief that may not be fully recognized by other people. You may be mourning someone who is still alive, a relationship that never became what you needed, a body that no longer functions the way it once did, or a version of your life that now feels unreachable.
Grief often carries contradiction. You can miss someone and still know distance is necessary. You can feel relief and devastation at the same time. You can understand why something ended and still feel shattered by its absence.
Therapy does not need to rush you toward acceptance, closure, or a cleaner story. It can become a place to stay with what was loved, what was lost, what was never received, and what cannot be repaired. The work is not to stop grieving. It is to help grief become something you can carry without letting it erase the life that is still here.
Grief, Loss, and Estrangement
