A therapist's reflection on over a decade of LGBTQ+ affirming work — what the transgender and queer community has taught her about courage, identity, and what it means to truly be known.

On anxiety, confronting fear, and summoning the courage to become real.

Spoiler heavy blog

I don't watch sports. I never have. So nobody was more surprised than me when Ted Lasso became one of the most therapeutically rich shows I've watched in years. A look at defenses, transformance, and why the hardest choice is sometimes the most right one.

I grew up minimally verbal. Sandtray gives me the opportunity to revisit that wordless world, and to guide those I work with who find themselves there too. Not everything that shifts in a session arrives in words. That's often the first real sign something has moved.

Complicated feelings toward a parent, like love, anger, disgust, longing, don't resolve through logic. As a trauma therapist, I've seen what actually happens when adults stop trying to figure it out and start letting themselves feel it instead.

I've been burnt out more times than I knew — and I didn't have a name for it until I was out the other side. The anger. The dread. The 2 AM anxiety. The slow erosion of everything that made you choose this work in the first place.

Here's what I know for certain now: it was never my fault. And it isn't yours either.

Burnout isn't a personal failure. It's a system problem. And the system is getting worse.

On my countless rewatch, I caught something in Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away I hadn’t before. Here I reflect on what had changed in me that allowed me to see this classic film through new eyes, and explore the implications of the film’s main themes through the lens of emotional neglect, parentification and attachment.

Empathy is a mirror. It’s a necessity to self-development. And growing up in childhood emotional neglect can result in some long-lasting behavioral and emotional patterns with implications on attachment in adulthood. Here’s how trauma and attachment therapies can help.

Some thoughts on the Apple TV “Shrinking”: What it gets wrong, and the magic of being a therapist that it happens to capture just right.

Learning to draft my own clothing has taught me that the most crucial work is often the hidden construction. Read more to hear about how my sewing realizations have contributed to my philosophy on growth and the nature of change.

The invisible patient is the unspoken emotional residue that follows you home. Here’s how to identify it.

In sewing there’s this delicate balance called tension. If it’s too tight, the thread snaps. If it’s too loose, the threads bunch into a “bird’s nest.” When the tension in your life is wrong, it can create a sense of “warped peace.”