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Individual therapy for adults.
For adults who already know what they do, and want to understand why it keeps winning. Online, anywhere in New York State.
Focus
People-pleasing
Saying yes and resenting it afterwards. Knowing what everyone in your life needs and being unsure what you want for dinner. Apologizing for things that are not yours.
Accommodating people was, at some point, a reasonable strategy. The work is understanding what it protected, so that generosity becomes a choice again rather than a reflex.
Focus
C-PTSD and insecure attachment
When difficulty was ongoing rather than a single event, the effects tend to show up in relationships rather than in flashbacks: difficulty trusting, a pull between wanting closeness and needing distance, a sense that you are too much or not enough.
This work is slow on purpose. We go at a pace your nervous system can actually use.
Focus
Highly sensitive people
Taking in more than most people do, noticing more, feeling it longer, and being told all your life that it is too much.
Therapy here is not about becoming less sensitive. It is about what to do with the amount of information you receive, and how to stop treating a real trait as a defect.
Focus
Life transitions
A move, a loss, a role that ends, a role that begins. Transitions tend to disturb the arrangements you had made without noticing you had made them.
They are often when long-standing patterns become visible, which makes them a good moment to look at them.
Questions
Things people ask about this.
- What is complex PTSD, and how is it different from PTSD?
- PTSD usually follows a discrete event. Complex PTSD describes what happens when the difficulty was ongoing and relational, often early, so the effects show up less as flashbacks and more in how you relate: difficulty trusting, a pull between wanting closeness and needing distance, a sense of being too much or not enough. It appears in the ICD-11 and not in the DSM-5, which is part of why most people meet it first as a description that fits rather than as a diagnosis.
- Is being a highly sensitive person a diagnosis?
- No. It is a temperament trait, studied as sensory processing sensitivity, and it appears in no diagnostic manual. Therapy here is not about becoming less sensitive. It is about what to do with the volume of information you take in, and about no longer treating a trait as a defect.
- I can already describe my pattern. Why has that not changed it?
- Because insight and change run on different tracks. Understanding where something came from rarely dislodges it. Having a different experience of it, with another person, more often does, and that is most of what the therapy relationship is for.
- Is people-pleasing actually a problem?
- Only when it costs you something you did not choose to spend. Accommodating people was, at some point, a reasonable strategy. It becomes worth looking at when the yes arrives before your own preference does and the resentment arrives afterwards.
You can know exactly what you do and still watch yourself do it.
You do not need to know which of these it is.
Most people arrive with something small and slightly embarrassing that will not stop bothering them. That is a good place to start.
Focus
Social anxiety
Often it is not really the fear of speaking. It is the constant, low-level reading of a room: who is annoyed, who has gone quiet, what you might have done. It is exhausting, and it is usually invisible to everyone else.
We look at where that vigilance was learned and what it was for, rather than treating it as a confidence problem to be drilled away.