01 / what i help withMental health challenges others have reached out for
Most people who reach out to me have a vague idea of what’s going on internally, and that is a great step one. They know the shape of it, the way a week tends to go, the thought that shows up at two in the morning, and they are hoping that somebody can tell them what it is called specifically.
The most common things I help people with sits below, grouped by how it tends to feel rather than by what it gets called in a classification. You may have arrived here holding the feeling of hope that what you are going through can be helped. Read the group that sounds like the the kind of struggle you are experiencing. If more than one of them does, that is normal, and it usually tells us more than one group would on its own.
Trauma, and What it Comes with
Something happened once, or something happened again and again for years, usually early, and usually at the hands of a person who was supposed to be keeping you safe. Trauma arrives in both of those shapes, the single event and the long slow one, and both of them belong here.
Memories that arrive without being asked for, a body that never fully stands down, and the sense that some part of you is still back in a room you left a long time ago. The single-incident kind and the years-long kind leave different shapes of injury, and the second one is the work I do most.
Losing stretches of time, watching yourself from a few feet outside your own body, or looking at something you did last week and feeling certain that it was not quite you who did it. It made sense once, as a way of getting through something, and it tends to stay long past the events it was built for.
Anxiety and Panic
Your body reacts before you have worked out why, and by the time the thought catches up, the decision has already been made somewhere in the background. You catastrophize, you freeze up, and you turn the small things over until they are worn smooth while the large ones sit untouched in a corner.
The background hum that never switches off, including on the good days, when nothing is wrong but you are braced anyway. It shows up in the body before it shows up in words, which is why talking yourself out of it has never held for long.
Rehearsing a conversation for an hour, having it in four minutes, and then replaying it for three days while finding a new thing wrong with it each time. The fear underneath it is of being seen clearly, which is why the usual advice about confidence lands so badly.
You’re convinced you’re having a medical emergency, the world shrinks around you, and you frantically cling on to whatever you can around you. Afterwards, you spend weeks slowly arranging your life around the chance that it happens again. The arranging is usually the part that costs you the most, and it is also the part that tends to alleviate first.
Mood Disruption
Nothing feels predictable, and the not knowing becomes its own frustration, because you stop being able to plan around yourself when you feel like that keeps moving on you. One hour you are fine, the next you are furious, or flat, or half sure that nobody would notice much if you stopped answering your phone.
When the emotional floor gives way slowly enough that you keep believing you should to be able to stand on it, and the effort of appearing fine becomes a second full-time job. It goes deeper than sadness, it lasts longer, and it also responds to treatment.
When the emotional ceiling moves as well as the floor. The weeks that felt like you were finally becoming the person you were meant to be turn out to have a massive bill attached to them. Knowing which of the two you are experiencing changes what helps, which is why it is worth getting it right.
Personality & Obsessions
There is a wide gap between what you feel, what you see, and what you know, and living inside that gap is tiring in a way that is hard to put into words for anyone who has not. You understand that something is true and real, but the negative feeling still arrives so hard and so fast that knowing it does very little for you.
Feeling everything at full volume, reading abandonment in a short reply, and then watching yourself do the exact thing that makes the abandonment more likely. The disorder carries more stigma than almost any other in the book, but the outcomes are far better than the stigma would have you believe.
Standing at a mirror and seeing something that everybody else tells you is not there, for long enough that what they say has stopped landing anywhere useful. The hours are spent looking into checking, or covering, or avoiding, and getting those hours back is where we start.
Executive Functioning and Performance
You have been told that you are bright but inconsistent for most of your life, by people who meant it kindly and by people who did not. Somewhere along the way you began believing the second group. The distance between what you can do and what you get done has a mechanism behind it, and those mechanisms can be worked with.
Knowing exactly what needs doing, caring a great deal about doing it, and watching the distance between those two things sit exactly where it was yesterday. In adults it gets missed all the time, and it gets called things like laziness by people who haven’t taken the effort to know better.
Training well all week and then becoming a stranger to yourself in the few minutes when it counts, in front of people whose opinion you cannot stop hearing in your head. The problem is rarely the skill and rarely the effort, and both of those ideas are part of what makes it so hard to work with on your own.
02 / How the work happensFour main approaches
Four methods carry most of what I do, and I choose between them based on what you bring in. EMDR is for memories that still carry a charge in the mind and body. NARM works on the patterns that formed early in life, back when going along with them was the only survival move you had. DBT builds the skills for the moments when emotion arrives faster than thought can catch it. Ego-State Therapy is for the parts of you that want different things and have been arguing about it for years.
None of it requires you to tell the whole story in the first hour, or the fifth. It does not work that way, and I would not ask you to.
03 / if none of them fitThat is a completely normal place to be right now, and it is exactly what a first call is for. Fifteen minutes, no charge, no notes taken, and no need to book anything afterward. Tell me what the last few months have been like and I can tell you whether I can help you with it, or point you toward a better fit.