Therapy for Women Alexandria, VA
Therapy
Is Therapy Right For You?
Do you question whether it is safe to prioritize your own healing? Maybe you’ve been feeling caught in the undertow of people pleasing patterns in your relationships, unsure of how to find your way to shore. Perhaps the negative load you carry around feels heavy, while trying to keep your head above water. You seek a sense of self-empowerment and confidence to make decisions, without consulting several friends first. You want to be familiar with ways to soothe anxiety. You’d like to be able to offer yourself that darn self-compassion without cringing or feeling discomfort in the process.
Our brains and bodies tell us important stories about our lived experiences, and this shapes how we view ourselves, and the inner narrative we carry around about who we are and our place in the world. I specialize in working with trauma of all kinds, and understand how layers of stress impact our functioning, both in the small and large picture. I’m here to help you heal as we work together to witness the essence of who you are. Your beautiful, glorious self needs a safe place to land.
If you are reading along thinking that this feels like you even the slightest bit, I’d love to chat. While you are here, send me a message, and we can set up a consultation. You may be thinking, “my stuff isn’t so bad really, I’ll be fine.” But, I am here to tell you that your anxiety, disconnection, and loneliness are all painful. And guess what? You deserve healing. You deserve to feel at home within yourself.
Areas Of Focus
Trauma & PTSD
While trauma has often been defined as an extreme of events that happened to someone, such as going away to war or enduring a natural disaster, there is so much more that applies and defines the range of what a person can experience as a traumatic event. Just because what you went through in your individual life may not seem as bad or as big a deal compared to someone else’s story, it doesn’t mean you aren’t going through difficult times with challenges related to anxiety, hypervigilance, sensitivity to triggers or emotional reminders, struggles with insomnia, just to name a few examples of possible after effects or symptoms.
As a clinician and trauma informed therapist, I make space for the ranges of trauma, big, medium, and small, in sessions with my clients. We cannot underestimate the impact that trauma has on our functioning and sense of safety. You deserve to have a therapist you can trust, who you can build a healing and safe space to work through trauma with, to find an increased sense of peace and healing in the world. I specialize in working particularly with survivors of sexual trauma, relational and familial trauma, and traumatic grief if that helps prospective clients to know, though I approach trauma treatment through a holistic, somatic, and person in environment lens regardless of the particular event and set of circumstances.
Anxiety & Perfectionism
As Brene Brown would say, I am a recovering perfectionist, and aspiring “good enough-ist.” I was that high school, college, and graduate school student (yep–all three!) who was so focused on performing well, getting top notch performance marks and grades, ultimately terrified of failing. I was often incredibly hard on myself, and put my mind and body through so much self-inflicted pain through the rush of anxiety to keep pushing forward and upward. I did not want to slow down to stop and feel what I was avoiding, what it would really mean if I were to fail.
I know that there are a lot of us who may feel we have acted this way in the busy culture of today’s world, especially in the Northern Virginia/DC area, being a native of having grown up here. But I am here to tell you that we often form these anxious and intense inner critic thoughts, plus associated behaviors, often as a survival tool to adapt and navigate our worlds, regardless of the extent of trauma present or not. I can help you build awareness of just how these anxious patterns with performance, relationships, and people pleasing, operate within your mind and body. We will keep building this phase, eventually working towards adjusting your narrative and view of yourself, welcoming in a little bit more ease, peace, and self-compassion overtime, with a little bit of trust and faith.
Women’s Identity, Self-Esteem, & Empowerment
While we are breaking the barriers, and maybe even the ceilings, as women today in our modern western world, achieving more than ever before through education and career, there are still a lot of burdens that we carry in this world, unique to our own individual journeys. So much about the socialization of becoming a woman in society is still teaching women to play it safe with their self-expression, ambition, drive, determination, goals… the list goes on, y’all.
This is backed from sociological studies! I will never forget sitting in a sociology class in college, and learning that as young as ages 4 and 5, young girls are dressed in dresses, skirts, etc. with tights, learning constrictive moments to keep themselves smaller and taking up less space from such an early age! Whereas boys are often treated with the “boys will be boys” mentality, running around the classroom and behaving less quietly and politely. My point of bringing that data anecdote up is this: The conditioning that we go through totally has an impact on our sense of self, confidence, presence, and purpose in the world. Sure, some of us may have had upbringings encouraging us to keep reaching for more, and not stopping short. But that doesn’t mean that air of caution isn’t still lingering in the air, that we are hyper-aware of on a daily or weekly basis.
Let’s work together to start stripping that away from your foundational walls. Because guess what? Being a woman, having feminine qualities and traits– it is a strength, and a superpower at the end of the day. I am here to help you lean into finding your true feminine essence, understanding where your fears and places that you hold back lie, and lean into harnessing the energy that you want to move with, with conviction and confidence in the world.
Family of Origin Challenges & Multigenerational Trauma
Feeling a sense of anger, pain, sadness, loss, confusion, frustration– one, some, or all of the above– about your home and family life growing up, is not all that uncommon in our world, and yet, we don’t highlight that enough in our daily lives. While many conversations around relational or emotional trauma within families are becoming more common in the therapy world, and particularly amongst millennials and Gen-z generations lately, we still have quite the road ahead to re-pave and walk along. I truly believe that it is part of my mission and purpose as both a healer and therapist to support individuals through finding their voice to speak about the difficulties they experienced growing up. It takes a heck of a lot of support, time, and unconditional positive regard to do this work together: to peel back the layers of your familial conditioning, to better understand the role you may have played, never mind setting boundaries and finding new ways of operating with family members, while trying to heal within your own child self! I understand this from firsthand experience, having begun therapy for myself as a teenager to begin working through the ways I took on heavy emotional burden and responsibility at such a young age.
Through many years of inner work from teen years and beyond, I have come to see the multigenerational trauma within my mother and father’s families both. It can be staggering to look at the multiple lines and streams of trauma bleeding through the family, impacting your parents, and thereby impacting you, once it really hits your line of vision clearly. Further research through epigenetics backs that we are literally impacted biologically by family lines of trauma. Evidence has shown that a grandparent’s traumatic events and life experiences of severe stress alter their own DNA or genetic expression, thereby passing on genes adapted for that level of stress to subsequent generations. While that may sound seriously awful and depressing with no shred of hope, I am here to tell you that while we do need space to feel the reality, we also have the ability to start altering our own present gene expression of the traumatic stress: through therapy, healing work, personal change, and forming new habits.