Healing Trauma, Shame & Relational Patterns
Virtual individual therapy for adults throughout California.
“Shrinking is a protection strategy. Expansion is your destiny.”
-Dr. Nicole Strauss
You've always felt things more deeply than others.
Not as a character flaw. Not as a weakness. Just as a fact of who you are. You feel everything, and you always have. The joy, yes. But also the hurt. The rejection. The slow accumulation of moments where you made yourself smaller so others could feel more comfortable. Where you gave more than you received and told yourself that was fine. Where you wondered, quietly and then not so quietly, whether something about you was just fundamentally too much.
Maybe you grew up in a home where your emotional needs weren't quite met, not necessarily through cruelty, but through mismatch. Your inner world was rich and complex and the environment around you didn't have space for it. So you learned to manage. To suppress. To be the one who held it together, who showed up for everyone else, who didn't ask for too much. And you got very good at it. So good that most people looking at your life from the outside would never guess what's actually happening on the inside.
What's happening on the inside is this: you're tired. You're tired of relationships that feel one-sided or emotionally unsafe. Tired of the anxiety that flares when someone doesn't text back quickly enough. Tired of replaying conversations, analyzing tone shifts, wondering if you said the wrong thing or asked for too much or revealed too much of yourself. Tired of giving everything and still feeling unseen.
Somewhere underneath all of it is a belief you probably didn't choose: that you are too much, not enough, or somehow fundamentally unworthy of the steady, mutual, genuinely loving connection you've been aching for your whole life.
That belief is not the truth. But it lives in your body like it is. And that's what we're here to change.
What becomes possible:
When the work goes deep enough, something shifts inside that no amount of coping strategy can touch.
It's not just that you feel better. It's that you understand yourself (your patterns, your history, your emotional landscape) with a clarity and compassion that changes how you move through the world.
You stop abandoning yourself to keep the peace. You trust your instincts and intuition. You speak up for your needs without the guilt that used to follow. The relationships in your life start to feel steadier, more mutual, and more real, because you're showing up in them more fully and more honestly than you ever have before.
The parts of you that once felt like your greatest liability—your depth, your sensitivity, your capacity to feel—begin to feel like exactly what they are: your greatest strength.
How we will work:
My approach is psychodynamic at its core, meaning we go beneath the surface. We don't just address symptoms; we understand where they came from, what they're protecting, and what needs to shift at the root for real change to happen.
This depth-oriented foundation is woven together with compassion-focused therapy, somatic approaches, mindfulness, spirituality-based work, and DBT/CBT tools as applicable.
Every client gets an approach that is genuinely tailored to them. Not a protocol applied uniformly, but a living, evolving therapeutic relationship built around who you specifically are and what you specifically need. This is longer-term work. Real change at this depth doesn't happen in eight sessions, and I won't pretend otherwise. What it does do, when you're ready and willing to go there, is change things that have up until now felt entirely unchangeable.
Who this type of therapy is for:
This work tends to resonate with adults who:
✦ Feel deeply and have often been told they're too sensitive, too emotional, or too much
✦ Carry shame, self-judgment, or a persistentfeeling that they are somehow unlovable
✦ Grew up in homes where their emotional needs weren't consistently met and are still untangling those early patterns
✦ Keep finding themselves in painful, confusing, or one-sided relationship dynamics and want something genuinely different
✦ Have tried therapy before but felt like something never fully clicked, and are ready to go deeper
I want to be honest with you about something.
I know what it is to feel like your emotional needs are too big for the room. To grow up as a highly sensitive person in an environment that didn't quite have space for you. To learn, early and thoroughly, to suppress what you felt and manage what others needed instead. To go looking for love and safety in relationships that ultimately couldn't give it, and to keep going back anyway, because that was the only map you had.
I also know what it is to do the work. To begin, slowly and sometimes painfully, to understand your own patterns and uncover the traumas stored inside of you. To learn your needs as an adult and then face the harder task of actually meeting them, even when every part of you wishes someone else would do it for you. And to find, on the other side of that, something that genuinely surprised me: real self-love. Real boundaries. Real connection. A life that feels authentic and right.
I share this not to center myself, but because I think you deserve to know that the person sitting across from you isn't observing your experience from a clinical distance. I understand it from the inside. And I can say with complete honesty: the belief that you are unworthy of love is not the truth. I know that because I once lived inside that belief too, and I found my way out. I can help you find yours.
I bring a direct, warm, and laidback presence to the work. My clients tell me they feel genuinely seen and not judged, and I work hard every session to make that true.
The logistics
We meet individually, weekly or bi-weekly. This is longer-term therapy for adults throughout California, conducted virtually.
My practice is private pay. Sessions are $275, and superbills are provided for potential out-of-network reimbursement.
The first step is a free 15-minute phone consultation: a real conversation about what you're carrying and whether we're a good fit for each other.
