Therapy for Therapists

Therapists are often very good at understanding other people.

We can recognize patterns, name emotions, notice the shift in a room, and make sense of why someone might be responding the way they are.

It can be much harder to turn that same curiosity toward ourselves.

Therapy can be a place where you don't have to be the one who understands.

You can come in tired. Confused. Overwhelmed. Irritated. Grieving. Stuck. You can bring the part of you that already has a beautifully articulated explanation and the part that has absolutely no idea what is going on.

You don't have to make yourself easy to understand.

I am interested in you beyond your clinical role, while also understanding that being a therapist shapes how you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world around you.

Sometimes that means exploring the ways you have learned to take care of everyone else while losing track of yourself.

Sometimes it means noticing how quickly you move to understand, anticipate, fix, or hold everything together.

Sometimes it means making room for needs that have been much easier to recognize in your clients than in yourself.

And sometimes it means sitting with something that doesn't need an interpretation yet.

You don't have to perform insight here.

I don't expect you to come to therapy with a perfect formulation of your own experience.

We can be curious together.

Sometimes I'll have a thought about what I'm noticing. Sometimes I'll ask a question because I genuinely don't know. Sometimes we'll follow something that seems small and discover that it wasn't small at all.

There may be tears.

There may be silence.

There may also be laughter and the occasional strange metaphor.

I don't believe depth has to feel heavy all the time.

I want therapy to feel like a place where your whole self can exist, including the parts of you that are competent, uncertain, playful, angry, exhausted, protective, needy, independent, and still figuring things out.

A place where you don't have to hold everything.

You spend a lot of your life holding other people's experiences.

You don't have to do that here.

You can be the person who doesn't know.

The person who needs.

The person who wants.

The person who is tired of being the one who notices everything.

We can slow down enough to notice what happens when you don't immediately have to do something about what you feel.

Not because every feeling needs to be regulated away.

Not because every pattern needs to be explained.

But because sometimes the most important thing is discovering that you can experience yourself fully and remain connected: to yourself and to someone else.

You get to be a whole person in the room, not just a therapist.