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Family estrangement has been having a cultural moment. It is showing up in major publications, podcasts, social media, Oprah, and, certainly, in therapy rooms. Like so many conversations about relationships and mental health, it can quickly become polarized. Are adult children finally protecting themselves from harmful family systems? Have we become too quick to cut people off? Are boundaries healthy, or have we taken individualism too far? And now another question has entered the conversation: are therapists and “therapy culture” partly to blame? I’m not particularly interested in choosing a side. I’m much more interested in what is happening underneath the estrangement, what has already been tried, what kind of relationship is actually possible, and what our choices are trying to protect. Family estrangement also isn't particularly rare. In sociologist Karl Pillemer's national survey of more than 1,300 American adults, 27% reported being estranged from at least one family member, including 10% who were estranged from a parent or child. Another nationally representative study found that about 26% of adult children experienced a period of estrangement from their fathers and about 6% from their mothers. Those numbers are significant, but they don't necessarily tell us that estrangement is suddenly exploding. Sociologist Rin Reczek has pointed out that we don't yet have the kind of longitudinal prevalence data that would allow us to make that claim. What we certainly have is a much more public conversation about it. My Own Complicated Relationship With “Family” I grew up as a child of divorce in the 1980s, when divorce still felt relatively nouveau. I remember being in the divorce-kids group and carrying shame about being different. I wanted what I imagined was a normal family. My family would become increasingly complicated. There were step-parents and siblings, different homes, substance abuse, and varying degrees of access and connection to my parents. There were periods in my own adulthood when low or no contact became part of how I navigated those relationships while prioritizing my healing and the family I was building. So I don’t come to the subject of estrangement believing there is a universally right answer. I come to it personally and professionally understanding how complicated family relationships can be, and how much shame, grief, guilt, anger, loyalty, and love can coexist within them. There Are Times When Safety Comes First I want to make one distinction abundantly clear. I am not suggesting that someone remain in an actively abusive relationship in the name of family, forgiveness, distress tolerance, or repair. When there is ongoing abuse, coercion, manipulation, violence, or another threat to safety, the work is different. We cannot ask someone to become more skillful at tolerating being harmed. The territory becomes murkier when we move into relationships that are emotionally harmful, chronically disappointing, or shaped by emotional immaturity. This is often where I find people struggling with the question of what they owe their family and what they owe themselves. “I Did the Best I Could” Can Be True Many of the adults I work with were raised by parents who had limitations around emotional availability, accountability, apology, or repair. Some of those parents may genuinely have done the best they could. They may have given their children significantly more than they themselves received. They may have loved deeply and had good intentions. And their children may still have needed something different. Increasingly, I see adult children wanting something beyond an explanation of intention. They are looking for a parent who can tolerate hearing about impact. Tell me how I hurt you. I’m here. I wasn’t able to be there for you then, but I want to understand now. This requires a particular kind of emotional capacity. It means being able to tolerate discomfort without immediately becoming defensive, explaining, minimizing, shutting down, or collapsing into shame. Family Estrangement and a Kinship Culture Clash Sociologist Rin Reczek uses the idea of a kinship culture clash to describe something I think is particularly useful in understanding estrangement: competing ideas about what makes someone family and what family relationships require. One understanding of family places significant value on biological connection, loyalty, obligation, hierarchy, and the idea that family relationships endure because family is family. Another places greater emphasis on the quality of the relationship itself: mutual respect, reciprocity, emotional safety, accountability, and a willingness to grow. Neither set of values is entirely new. But when two people in the same family are operating from very different definitions of what family requires, there can be an enormous relational collision. One person may be saying, I am your mother. After everything I've done for you, how could you walk away? The other may be asking, But how are we actually treating each other now? This is one reason I find the comparison to divorce interesting. There was a time when remaining married carried tremendous cultural weight regardless of the quality of the marriage. As our expectations of marriage changed, we increasingly began asking not only whether a marriage existed, but whether the relationship itself was working. Perhaps some of that same cultural questioning is now happening around family of origin. Is “Therapy Culture” Contributing to Family Estrangement? There has been growing criticism that therapists, therapeutic language, and social media have contributed to family estrangement. I think this deserves more consideration than either immediately dismissing the criticism or accepting it completely. I don't believe my role as a therapist is to decide who someone should have a relationship with. I also don't think therapy should simply affirm every interpretation a client brings into the room without curiosity. My work is to help someone understand what is happening inside them and around them. Is this relationship unsafe? What happens when you communicate your needs? What have you tried? What happens when someone disagrees with you? Is distance creating safety and clarity, or are there places where avoidance is operating? What are your values? What are you hoping will happen? What has this person actually demonstrated that they are capable of? Sometimes therapy helps someone find the courage to create distance. Sometimes it helps someone develop enough capacity to stay in a difficult conversation instead of leaving it. Sometimes it helps someone soften a boundary, and sometimes it helps them strengthen one. The goal, at least as I understand it, isn't estrangement or reconciliation. It is greater clarity and greater choice. Repair Requires Skill These are vulnerable conversations, and vulnerability requires skill from everyone involved. Adult children have work here, too. Sometimes we believe our family should simply know what is wrong. We may think, They should know what they did. They should know why I stopped calling. They should know what I need. If there is enough safety and a potentially willing participant, I think it is worth asking whether our wants, needs, and experiences have actually been communicated. Therapy can be a place to develop the skills to have those conversations. We can learn how to name hurt, make requests, tolerate someone else’s response, and invite another person into repair without abandoning ourselves in the process. Then we have to notice what happens next. An Invitation to Repair Is Not a Guarantee of Repair You can invite someone into repair. You cannot repair a relationship by yourself. You might communicate clearly and find that your parent becomes curious. They may struggle at first but keep trying. There can be defensiveness followed by reflection, an apology, or actual changes in behavior. Those things matter. But the response can also be continued denial, blame, minimization, or refusal. The same conversation may happen repeatedly without any meaningful change. At some point, there is an important distinction between hoped-for capacity and demonstrated capacity. We can continue wishing for someone to become the parent, sibling, grandparent, or family member we need. But when there is no demonstrated effort toward change, that wishing can become another place where we hurt. What Kind of Relationship Is Actually Possible? Family estrangement does not always have to begin with the question, Do I stay or do I go? Sometimes a more useful question is: What kind of relationship is actually possible here? Spending an entire weekend together might consistently leave me overwhelmed, while breakfast in a public place feels much more accessible. Holidays might be too loaded, while shorter visits allow for connection in a way that feels manageable. I might maintain a relationship with a parent while recognizing that providing childcare for my children is simply not something they can reliably offer. There can be a lot of territory between closeness and complete estrangement. Part of discernment is getting curious about that territory. What happens when the amount of contact changes? What happens when the environment changes? Are there parts of the relationship that work and others that consistently cause harm? Is there a version of this relationship that allows for connection without requiring me to repeatedly abandon myself? The answer may still be that no contact is what is needed. But it may also be a different kind of contact, a different frequency, different expectations, or a different understanding of what this person can realistically offer. This is where boundaries become less about controlling another person and more about getting clear about what matters to us and what we need in order to protect it. Boundaries Begin With What Matters When I work with boundaries, I like to begin with values. Boundaries protect what matters to us. And what matters most, or what requires more of our protection, can shift across different seasons of our lives. Someone may have spent years managing a parent’s emotional needs and found ways to tolerate it. Then she becomes a mother herself, and suddenly the energy required to caretake her parent is energy she no longer has available. Someone else may have tolerated manipulation or volatility directed toward himself but feel differently once his children are exposed to it. Parenthood can make these shifts particularly visible. Sometimes becoming a parent helps us understand our own parents with more compassion. Sometimes it brings our childhood pain into sharper focus. Sometimes it changes what we are willing to tolerate because we are no longer making decisions only about ourselves. But parenthood is only one example. Partnerships, caregiving, illness, loss, aging, healing, or simply knowing ourselves differently can change what we need from our relationships and what we have available to give them. A relationship that worked in one season of our life may need different boundaries in another. The question isn’t necessarily, Does this mean I should go no contact? It might be, What matters to me now? What am I trying to protect? And what does this relationship need to look like in this season of my life? Acceptance Isn’t Approval We can communicate, invite repair, change the conditions of the relationship then wait and watch. Sadly, we may discover the other person remains exactly who they have demonstrated themselves to be. Acceptance does not mean deciding that what happened was okay. It does not require forgiveness or continued access. It means becoming more willing to see the person in front of us as they actually are, including their limitations. I’ve heard myself say more than once in the therapy room, at some point, we have to ask whether we are continuing to go to the desert looking for water. The desire for water isn’t the problem. It makes so much sense to long for a parent, sibling, or family member to show up, understand, take accountability, or meet us in the ways we have needed. But if someone has repeatedly demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to do that, there may come a point when continuing to return with the same request becomes harmful to us. This is where radical acceptance can come in. Not as approval, and not as a requirement that we stop longing for something different, but as a willingness to respond to what is actually available. Perhaps my mother isn’t the person I can call when I need emotional support. My father may be someone I can meet for breakfast once a month but not someone with whom I can have the emotionally intimate relationship I’ve wanted. My parents may have a place in my life while not being people I can rely on to care for my children. Sometimes acceptance is recognizing that the longing can remain while we stop returning to the same place expecting it to finally give us what it has repeatedly shown us it cannot. Acceptance Makes Room for Grief This is where family estrangement and grief become deeply intertwined. A new mother may not only be grieving that her mother isn’t available to help with the baby. She may also be encountering the much older grief of never having had a mother she could reliably turn toward for care. Her child may not have the grandmother she imagined either. As long as we are waiting for someone to become different, part of us can remain oriented toward a hoped-for future. People can change, learn, and find their way toward repair, but when there is no demonstrated movement, continuing to build our lives around the possibility of who someone could become can keep us from responding to who they are now. Sometimes accepting the limits of the relationship means finally grieving the relationship we wanted. That grief can exist whether we remain in contact, reduce contact, or end it. And Then We Build If the person we hoped would support us cannot reliably do so, grief matters. But eventually there is another question: Who can? If Grandma cannot be reliable childcare, the work may become less about trying to make Grandma reliable and more about grieving what isn’t available and building support that is. Reczek's research offers an interesting perspective here. In interviews with adults estranged from at least one member of their family of origin, participants often rebuilt the meaning and structure of family around relationships they experienced as safe and trustworthy. Friends, partners, community members, and relatives with whom they remained connected could take on meaningful kinship roles. I think there is something important there. Sometimes the work isn't to stop longing for family. It is to expand our understanding of where family can be found. The imagined support system may need to be grieved so that an actual support system can be built. Family Estrangement Requires Discernment You may be considering low or no contact with a parent or family member and wondering whether you’re allowed. Someone in your family may have stopped speaking to you, leaving you confused and powerless. Or you may be somewhere outside a family estrangement, loving people on both sides and unsure how to navigate it. These relationships are complicated because people are complicated. There isn't a universal formula for determining the correct amount of contact with a family member. There are questions we can ask about safety, values, communication, accountability, willingness to repair, demonstrated capacity, grief, and what forms of relationship allow us to remain connected to ourselves. The work can involve speaking honestly and listening differently. It can involve changing the terms of a relationship, accepting another person's limitations, grieving what isn't possible, or building a broader kinship network around the relationships that are actually available to us. The goal isn't necessarily closeness or estrangement. It is greater clarity about what is actually possible, what matters to us, and how we want to participate in the relationships and the life we are building. Therapy for Family Estrangement in Rhode Island If you’re navigating family estrangement, considering low or no contact with a parent, trying to repair a complicated family relationship, or grieving the relationship you wish you had, therapy can offer a place to slow down and make sense of what is happening. My role isn’t to tell you whether to stay connected or walk away. We can explore the experiences that shaped you, the values and relationships you want to protect, what has and hasn’t been possible within your family, and what kind of relationship feels possible now. I offer individual therapy and EMDR for adults throughout Rhode Island, with in-person therapy in Cranston and North Kingstown and virtual therapy statewide. Learn more about my therapy services and how we might work together. If you have a question, please reach out here.

Some people become very good at noticing. I certianly relate to thsi and maybe you do too? You may notice a shift in someone’s face, a tightening of the jaw, a change in tone, someone becoming quieter, or a subtle change in posture or energy that other people might not register at all. For some of us, this kind of noticing develops for a reason. When the emotional world around us isn’t clearly explained, we may learn to study it instead. We become students of faces, voices, bodies, moods, routines, and rooms, collecting information that might help us understand what is happening and, perhaps more importantly, what is about to happen. Noticing can extend beyond emotional cues, too. A child may become particularly good at noticing what needs to be done without being asked, remembering someone’s preferences, learning their routines, or watching carefully enough to replicate the “right” way of doing something. Paying close attention can become a way of creating some predictability in an environment that doesn’t always feel predictable. There can be real sensitivity in this, real perceptiveness, and sometimes an extraordinary ability to pick up on subtle shifts in other people. The problem isn’t necessarily what we notice. It may be how quickly what we notice becomes what we know. When Noticing Becomes Knowing Imagine a child noticing a scowl on a parent’s face. The child notices the scowl and almost immediately decides, They’re mad. There may be very little space between the observation and the meaning assigned to it. The scowl is real, and the conclusion can feel equally real. If reading the emotional environment accurately once mattered, this kind of certainty makes sense. Knowing whether someone was angry, disappointed, overwhelmed, or about to lose their temper may have helped a child prepare for what was coming next. The body learns alongside the mind. Muscles may brace and attention may sharpen as the nervous system tries to understand what is happening and what might happen next. There can be an internal sense of, Is something about to happen? Is shit about to go down? What do I need to do? Over time, this process can become so practiced that interpretation no longer feels like interpretation. It simply feels like knowing. And sometimes we are right. That feels important to say. Hypervigilance doesn’t mean someone is imagining what they notice. A tone really may have changed. Someone really may be irritated. The energy in the room may actually feel different. The question is whether accurately noticing a shift means we also know exactly what that shift means. I Notice and I Wonder One of my children came home from school with language I found myself thinking about long after she shared it: I notice and I wonder. It is such a simple practice, but I was struck by how different it is from the way hypervigilance can organize information. Instead of I notice the scowl, so they’re mad, there is another possibility: I notice the scowl, and I wonder if they’re mad. They may very well be angry, but they might also be worried, distracted, tired, concentrating, or responding to something that happened before they even walked into the room. Their expression may have very little to do with the person observing it. The shift isn’t from I notice to I’m probably imagining it. It is from I notice and therefore I know to I notice and I wonder. There is more room in wonder. We can trust that we noticed something without assuming we already know what it means. That distinction feels important because healing hypervigilance shouldn’t require us to distrust our own perceptions. Sensitivity Isn’t Necessarily the Problem Many sensitive people have heard some version of you’re too sensitive. They may notice things other people don’t, register changes in tone or expression quickly, or feel their bodies respond strongly to tension in a room. When those experiences are repeatedly dismissed, we can learn not to trust ourselves. We may begin questioning whether we are imagining things, overreacting, or reading too much into something that felt very real. I don’t think the goal is necessarily to become less sensitive. Sensitivity can be a beautiful capacity that supports empathy, connection, creativity, attunement, and the ability to perceive nuance. The question is whether noticing something automatically tells us what that something means. There is a difference between noticing that something changed and knowing why it changed. There is also a difference between recognizing that something changed and deciding it changed because of us. Perhaps most importantly, noticing a change doesn’t automatically mean we are responsible for doing something about it. This is one of the places where sensitivity can become tangled with hypervigilance. Hypervigilance and the Need to Know Hypervigilance isn’t simply noticing a lot. There is often urgency underneath the noticing because the nervous system is trying to determine what is happening so it can decide what to do next. For me, I think some of this is connected to my larger relationship with certainty and uncertainty. I grew up with a lot of unpredictability and confusion, and somewhere along the way, control became one of the ways I learned to manage the anxiety of not knowing. I have a control part, or perhaps a whole squad of them, that would very much like to find the right answer, do the right thing, and know exactly what something means. There can be a rigidity to this, a pull toward right or wrong, black or white, as though there must be one correct answer that I can find if I just think hard enough. Maybe there is one right answer when we’re doing math. Fun fact: I’m the daughter of two math teachers. Relationships, unfortunately for my control parts, are not math problems. If there is one right answer, perhaps I can find it. If I can accurately read someone’s face, perhaps I can predict what happens next. If I know why someone’s energy changed, perhaps I can figure out what I need to do about it. Certainty can offer the illusion, and sometimes the reality, of greater control. This is why I notice and I wonder asks more of us than it might initially appear. Wonder requires tolerating some uncertainty. It asks us to recognize that what we noticed may be entirely real while also acknowledging that there may be more than one possible explanation for it. For a nervous system that once found some safety in correctly predicting what was coming next, I don’t know yet can feel surprisingly vulnerable. We don’t have to remain uncertain forever. We are practicing the possibility that we don’t need an immediate answer in order to be okay. Curiosity Is Relational, Too I think about this often in my work as a therapist. I might notice someone’s jaw tighten while they’re talking or see their shoulders pull inward as their body begins to close. I could decide what that means, or I might say, “I notice your jaw tightened there and your body seemed to close a little. I wonder if there’s some fear there?” The person might respond, “No, actually. I think I feel exposed.” That isn’t a failed guess. In many ways, that is the point. I can notice something accurately without knowing exactly what it means for the person sitting across from me. Curiosity allows me to offer what I notice while leaving room for another person to tell me who they are and what is happening inside them. There is something deeply relational about being able to notice another person without deciding their experience for them. We can make a guess without needing the guess to be right, and we can remain open enough to be corrected. Perhaps we can begin offering ourselves that same kind of curiosity. Practicing the Pause There is another reason this space between observation and meaning-making matters: it can slow down reactivity. When those two things happen almost simultaneously, our bodies may begin responding to our interpretation before we have had a chance to consider whether it is accurate. We may defend, explain, withdraw, fix, appease, become agreeable, seek reassurance, or otherwise react to something we don’t fully understand yet. When we’re activated, it is easy to jump ahead to questions like, What do I do? What do I say? How do I respond differently? We start looking for the right script or the right thing to do with the other person. But before we decide what to do with the other person, there may be something important about catching ourselves. Curiosity gives us an opportunity to practice the pause. What did I actually observe? What meaning did I make from it? What happened in my body? What familiar feeling or belief got activated? This is not always a long, thoughtful process. Sometimes the pause is simply long enough to recognize, Oh. Something in me just got activated. That moment matters. The pause isn’t about ignoring what we notice or talking ourselves out of our instincts. It is about creating enough space between observation, interpretation, and response that we have a little more choice about what happens next. Instead of moving directly from I noticed something to I know what it means to I need to respond, we can stay curious long enough to gather more information. We might ask a question, notice what is happening in our own body, wait to see what unfolds, or decide that no response is needed at all. This is part of what empowerment means to me: having a choice. The familiar response may still be available. We can still explain, defend, accommodate, withdraw, seek reassurance, or react. But it is no longer necessarily the only response available. From Hypervigilance Toward Attunement I’ve written before about the difference between hypervigilance and attunement, and I think this adds another layer to that conversation. The goal isn’t necessarily to shut down the radar. For someone who learned to notice because noticing mattered, sensitivity may remain an important part of who they are. What can change is the place the noticing comes from and what happens next. Hypervigilant noticing may be organized around fear: What does this mean? What is about to happen? What do I need to do to prevent it? Attuned noticing can make more room for care and curiosity: I noticed something changed. I wonder what is happening. This distinction has become meaningful for me personally. For a long time, I noticed from a place of fear. Now, I aim to notice from a place of care. I still notice people’s routines and preferences. I still try to remember the little things that matter to people I love. I still notice a change in someone’s face or tone, and I don’t necessarily want to lose that sensitivity. What has changed is that there is far more room for curiosity than certainty. I can notice the scowl without immediately knowing what it means. I can notice a shift in someone’s energy without assuming it has something to do with me. I can notice what someone might need without automatically making it my responsibility to provide it. From the outside, the noticing may look remarkably similar. Internally, though, its orientation can be very different. Sometimes the answer will still be that something really is wrong. Our perceptions can signal something important. Relationships do become tense, people do get angry, situations can be unsafe, and our bodies sometimes register changes before our thinking minds have fully caught up. The practice isn’t about talking ourselves out of what we notice. It is about allowing ourselves to notice without immediately having to predict, interpret, or act. Self-Trust Doesn’t Require Certainty I think this is where the conversation becomes about something larger than hypervigilance. It becomes a conversation about self-trust. Self-trust doesn’t have to mean believing every interpretation we make is correct. It can mean trusting ourselves enough to take what we notice seriously while also recognizing that our first interpretation may not be the whole story. We can listen to our bodies and perceptions without treating every signal as proof. We can ask a question, reconsider an assumption, tolerate not knowing for a moment, or change our minds without abandoning ourselves. There is something powerful about being able to recognize, Something shifted, and I noticed it. I just don’t know yet what it means. For a nervous system that learned there was safety in knowing, uncertainty can take practice. Developing a different relationship with uncertainty means becoming more able to stay with ourselves when we don’t yet have an answer. Healing doesn’t necessarily require becoming less perceptive, less sensitive, or less affected by the world around us. The movement is from noticing from fear toward noticing from care, with more space between observation and meaning-making and more choice about what we do next. Self-trust isn’t knowing exactly what every shift means. It is trusting that we can notice what we notice, stay with ourselves in the uncertainty, and give ourselves enough space to choose what happens next. Therapy for Hypervigilance, Anxiety, and Attachment in Rhode Island If you recognize yourself in some of these patterns, therapy can offer a place to understand where they came from and begin practicing a different relationship with uncertainty, reactivity, and self-trust. My work integrates EMDR, somatic therapy, parts work, and attachment-focused approaches to help you understand what shaped you, shift what keeps you stuck, and create more choice in how you respond now. I offer therapy for adults in Rhode Island, with in-person offices in Cranston and North Kingstown and telehealth throughout the state. Learn more about individual therapy in Rhode Island here.

A reflection on healing, compassion, and the permission to rest When Life Says Stop Sometimes the body whispers: an ache, a fatigue, a weight that reminds us we’ve been carrying too much. Other times it speaks in a full stop. For me, that moment came partway through a painting project. One small movement, one sharp pull in my mid back, and the weekend’s plans were gone. The brushes, the paint cans, the excitement all paused in an instant. At first, I felt frustrated. I wanted to finish what I started. I told myself I should have known better. I replayed the moment over and over, looking for where I went wrong. But what I learned that week had less to do with my back and more to do with how I meet myself when life says no. This unexpected pause became a classroom for something deeper: learning to rest through stillness. When the Body Becomes the Teacher Sometimes the hardest work is learning to meet ourselves with kindness, right where we are. Our bodies are wise communicators. Pain and exhaustion are not enemies to conquer; they are messages asking for relationship. When we override them, we reinforce the old conditioning that tells us rest must be earned and that our worth is tied to what we produce or how much we can hold. The body’s language is honest. It speaks the truth before our minds catch up. It tells us when we have reached capacity, when we need warmth, when it is time to come home to ourselves. Listening inward, without judgment or urgency, is an act of radical compassion. It is not self-indulgent; it is self-honoring. And yet, slowing down can feel disorienting. Many of us have been taught that stillness equals stagnation or that rest is something we deserve only when everything else is done. But healing, like nature, happens in cycles of movement and stillness, effort and ease. Learning to rest through stillness means trusting that quiet seasons are not wasted ones. When Creative Energy Has Nowhere to Go One of the hardest parts of being forced to stop was the energy that could not move. My mind and body had been alive with creativity, color palettes, layout ideas, and the joyful hum of making something new with my daughter. Suddenly, all of that energy had nowhere to land. It is a strange tension: feeling inspired but physically unable to act on it. Maybe you have felt it too, the frustration of creative momentum meeting an unexpected wall. So I began to experiment with new ways for the energy to move. I wrote. I visualized. I made digital mockups instead of painting real walls. I dreamed from the couch and let my imagination do what my body could not. That is when I realized something important: creativity does not live only in motion. It also lives in reflection, imagination, and rest. When we slow down, our creativity does not disappear. It composts. It transforms beneath the surface, preparing to grow in new ways. Sitting with the Mess spilled paint to symbolize the messy middle As I sat in that stillness, the environment around me told a very different story. The room I had begun to transform was half-finished, with paint cans in corners and piles of books and clothes covering the floor. The order I usually keep in my home and within myself had given way to visible chaos. It was humbling to sit in that space, surrounded by evidence of incompletion, and not try to fix it. Every instinct wanted to tidy, to organize, to restore control. But my body would not let me. In a culture that prizes productivity and composure, living in the messy middle can feel unbearable. We are taught that outer order equals inner peace, that tidiness proves worthiness. But sometimes the healing happens right there, in the piles, in the pause, in the permission to let it be unfinished. So instead of trying to manage the outer chaos, I turned toward the inner one. I noticed how the mess made me feel: the impatience, the shame, the discomfort. And I tended there, with breath, with compassion, with quiet acknowledgment that it was okay for things to be undone, both around me and within me. Meeting the Inner Critic with Compassion Of course, slowing down does not always feel peaceful. The inner critic often has a lot to say. It may tell us we are lazy. It might whispers that we have messed up, that we are falling behind, that we have made things harder for everyone else.These voices usually echo early messages, the cultural, familial, or religious rules that told us who and how to be in order to belong. When we meet these voices with curiosity instead of resistance, something softens. We start to see that the critic is often trying to protect us, to keep us safe from shame or rejection. Compassion does not silence the critic. It changes the conversation .It sounds like: “This isn’t a failure. It’s feedback. My body is showing me what it needs, and I can respond with kindness.” This is the heart of somatic healing, learning to meet inner conflict with warmth instead of willpower. When we meet ourselves with compassion, we create enough safety to let go of the old rules and listen for what we truly need. Receiving Help as a Practice of Love Asking for help has not come easily to me. I am used to being capable, independent, and strong because growing up I had no other option. But this week, I could not even move a paint can. So I asked for help. Painters came to finish the project. My family rearranged what I could not. My clients received reschedules and understanding. Every ask felt vulnerable, but it also felt real and I knew deeply was an opportunity for healing, I reminded myself that allowing others to show up for me is not a failure of strength. It is a deep expression of trust. Sometimes love sounds like “I need help.” Sometimes strength looks like letting someone else carry the brush. This, too, is permission to rest. Writing Your Own Permission Slip One of the most healing things we can do is give ourselves the permission no one else ever gave us. Here is a simple practice: Title it: My Permission Slip Then complete the sentence "I give myself permission to...." Complete this as many times as you need and feel free to borrow from the examples below. I give myself permission to rest. I give myself permission to ask for help. I give myself permission to say no or set a boundary. I give myself permission to feel joy without needing to earn it. I give myself permission to be human. This simple act of writing interrupts the old narratives of worthiness and control. It tells your nervous system, “I am allowed to stop.” You can keep it on your desk, beside your bed, or anywhere you forget that permission is yours to give. Compassion as the Doorway to Permission Stillness is rarely convenient, but it is often sacred. It calls us back to ourselves, back to the truth that we were never meant to perform our way into love. Compassion is the doorway to permission. And permission is the doorway to freedom. When we stop pushing and start listening, when we let the body lead, we remember where strength really comes from. So the next time your body says stop, maybe it is not working against you. Maybe it is showing you the way home. 🪶 Inspired by a personal reflection originally shared in my newsletter.I f you would like more letters like this, filled with reflections on somatic healing, boundaries, and the practice of being human, you can subscribe here at the bottom of my homepage→.

When I think about burnout in high-achieving women, one of the first things I think about is incongruence. From the outside, a high-achieving woman may look capable, productive, dependable, and accomplished. She gets things done. People count on her. She may even be the person others turn to when something needs to be figured out. Her internal experience can look very different. I think of a duck gliding smoothly across the surface of the water while its feet paddle furiously underneath. Other people see competence. She feels the effort required to keep everything moving. Sometimes burnout happens because the demands of life begin to exceed the capacity available to meet them. But sometimes something else is happening, too. The drive itself begins to change. What’Drives High Achievement? There is nothing inherently unhealthy about being ambitious or wanting to do things well. Achievement can be deeply connected to our values. Maybe excellence matters, or there is a genuine love of learning, creating, contributing, leading, or being of service. Perhaps working hard toward something meaningful feels energizing and deeply aligned with who we are. Achievement can also become connected to something deeper. For some women, being capable, helpful, easy, or strong became part of how they found belonging in their family system. They may have been the child who didn’t need much, the daughter who helped care for everyone else, the peacekeeper, the achiever, or simply the person others knew they could rely on. There can be a nervous-system component to this, too. Growing up needing to anticipate what was coming next, monitor other people’s moods, avoid mistakes, or stay one step ahead can make doing feel safer than being. Productivity, preparation, perfectionism, or staying busy may have served a purpose long before achievement became part of an adult identity. This doesn’t mean achievement is inherently a trauma response, or that every ambitious person has an attachment wound. It simply means it can be worthwhile to get curious about what achievement is doing for us. Somewhere along the way, the message may have become: I have value when... I'm self-reliant. I’m helpful. I’m accomplishing something. I don’t burden anyone. I take care of everyone else. I’m strong. I am successful. I reflect well on my family. And often, it isn’t one or the other. Someone can genuinely value achievement while also carrying an older belief that accomplishment helps secure love, belonging, approval, or significance. That’s why one of the questions I find useful in therapy is simply: What’s driving this? When What Drives Us Begins to Change There’s another shift I don’t think we talk about enough in conversations about burnout: sometimes the drive itself changes. A person may still be capable of doing what she has always done. She knows how to push, perform, organize, achieve, and keep things moving. But somewhere along the way, it may stop feeling the way it used to. I think this can become particularly interesting in midlife. It can also happen through therapy, healing, loss, parenthood, relationship changes, hormonal shifts, or simply knowing ourselves more deeply. The things that once motivated us may not carry the same weight. Sometimes healing itself changes the equation. If part of achievement was once connected to proving I’m good enough, useful enough, successful enough, worthy enough, what happens when those things no longer need to be proven? Different questions can begin to emerge. Do I actually want this? Does this still matter to me? What am I working this hard for? Who am I if I’m not proving anything? This can be disorienting, particularly when achievement has been central to identity. here may even be some grief in recognizing that the version of success someone spent years pursuing doesn’t hold the same meaning anymore. But it may also be an invitation to distinguish what we are capable of doing from how we actually want to spend our lives. When Being Capable Becomes Part of an Identity Being capable can become more than something a person does. It can become part of how she understands herself. The dependable one. The organized one. The person who can handle a lot. The one who figures things out. The one people turn to in stress. Adult life can ask a tremendous amount of that person. There may be a career, relationships, friendships, a household, finances, caregiving, health, appointments, pets, community responsibilities, and all of the invisible planning required to keep a life moving. Somewhere in there, there may also be a desire for creativity, movement, rest, pleasure, connection, and an inner life of one’s own. There can be an enormous amount competing for the same finite pool of attention and energy. And when someone accustomed to being capable realizes there’s too much to do, the instinct may be to become even more capable. Ahhh, I can solve this. A better calendar, a new system, another list, a more efficient routine or a ten-step plan. If I can just figure out how to manage all of this better, maybe I won’t feel so overwhelmed. So the response to too much doing becomes more doing. It may provide temporary relief, but it isn’t always sustainable. Capacity Is Not Fixed One of the ideas I return to in conversations about burnout is that capacity isn’t fixed. What a person has available today may be very different from what was available six months ago, or even yesterday. Sleep, nourishment, illness, hormones, grief, caregiving, workload, relationship stress, pregnancy and postpartum, perimenopause and menopause, and simply the season of life we’re in can all affect capacity. And yet, it’s remarkably easy to hold ourselves to a standard based on a completely different season. I used to be able to do this. Why can’t I keep up anymore? What’s wrong with me? I wonder if a more useful question is: Am I holding myself to a standard of capacity that accurately reflects the reality of my life right now? How Stress and Depletion Can Lead to Burnout Sometimes the very signals that indicate depletion become evidence we use against ourselves.Irritability is a good example of this. Someone may notice becoming short-tempered or craving more space. Instead of receiving that as information about depletion, it can quickly become: What’s wrong with me? Why am I acting like this? I need to do better. The same can happen with exhaustion, brain fog, procrastination, resentment, difficulty concentrating, or simply not having the energy we think we should have. There is another piece of this that I find helpful: the stressor and the stress response aren’t necessarily the same thing. A project can be finished. A deadline can be met. A problem can be solved. A difficult conversation can finally happen. The stressful week can end. And the body may still be carrying the physiological effects of stress. This distinction is something Emily and Amelia Nagoski explore in their book Burnout. Addressing what caused the stress doesn’t necessarily mean the body’s stress response has had an opportunity to settle. For someone accustomed to pushing through, the next demand may arrive before there has been much room for recovery. Demand. Activation. Accomplishment. Next demand. Over time, exhaustion, irritability, restlessness, difficulty concentrating, or other signs of depletion may begin to show up. Rather than asking what those experiences are communicating about capacity, it’s easy to interpret them as information about character. I’m lazy. I’m falling behind. I should be able to handle this. Now there is depletion alongside shame and self-criticism. I wonder what would change if we held our capacity with a little more reverence. What if the goal wasn’t to continually extract as much as possible from ourselves, but to become more attentive to what nourishes capacity, what diminishes it, and what allows recovery from the stress already being carried? What If Something Around Us Needs to Change? When overwhelm becomes another problem to solve, even self-care can become another project to succeed at. We’re inundated with messages about how to optimize, biohack, and care for ourselves through meditation, exercise, meal prep, journaling, sleep, hydration, and whatever the latest wellness trend happens to be. Many of these things can genuinely support well-being, but added together they can also become another list of things to do well. The underlying message hasn’t necessarily changed: If I can just get better at managing myself, I’ll finally be able to manage all of this. Sometimes developing new skills really does help. Stronger boundaries, more effective coping strategies, better communication, intentional rest, and greater awareness of what the body needs can all be meaningful. And sometimes the workload needs to change. Responsibility may need to be redistributed. A relationship may need attention. Expectations may need to be lowered. More support may be necessary. Something may need to be done imperfectly, postponed, delegated, or simply said no to. We can’t self-regulate our way out of every unsustainable situation. This is one of the things I appreciate about psychiatrist Pooja Lakshmin’s approach in Real Self-Care. She describes self-care not simply as something we do to recover from our lives, but as a process that can involve making difficult choices about how we actually live them. Sometimes caring for ourselves means setting a boundary rather than getting better at tolerating what is draining us. It might mean reconsidering an expectation rather than developing another strategy for meeting it. And sometimes it isn’t simply that something around us needs to change. Maybe we have changed. Priorities change across differnet seasons of life. Our definition of success may have expanded. Things that once felt worth sacrificing for may no longer feel worth the cost. Instead of only asking, How can I become better at handling this? different questions become possible: Should I actually have to handle all of this? Do I still want what all of this effort is supposed to give me? Why Slowing Down Can Feel Hard for High Achievers For someone who has spent years operating through urgency, productivity, vigilance, or constant mental activity, slowing down can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. Stillness may not immediately feel restorative. It may bring someone into contact with thoughts, emotions, or sensations that staying busy has helped keep at a distance. I see a version of this in therapy, too. High-achieving clients often bring tremendous insight into the room. They may already understand the pattern and be ready to analyze it, find the solution, and develop a plan. And then I might invite them to slow down. Notice your breath. Pay attention to tension in the shoulders. Notice what happens in the throat when imagining saying no. Stay curious about the irritation rather than immediately trying to get rid of it. For someone accustomed to solving problems through thinking and doing, this can almost feel too simple to matter. But the body may have information that another productivity strategy can’t provide. Am I tired? Am I overstimulated? Am I resentful? Do I need help? Have I been saying yes when I want to say no? What am I actually feeling underneath all of this? And perhaps another question: What do I actually want? Sometimes the body has been communicating the problem long before the thinking mind is willing to change the plan. Burnout Is Not Always Asking Us to Try Harder When being capable is part of an identity, reaching a limit can feel like a personal failure. But burnout may not be asking for a better, more efficient version of the person carrying everything. And the goal may not always be to restore enough capacity to return to carrying exactly what was being carried before. Perhaps burnout creates an opportunity to become curious about what is being carried, why it is being carried, and whether it is still worth carrying at all. Which expectations genuinely reflect current values? Which belong to the life someone actually wants to create? Which might belong to an older version of the self who learned that being useful, easy, strong, productive, or accomplished helped secure love, belonging, or significance? What genuinely needs attention in this season? What could be shared, changed, released, simplified, or done differently? And maybe the larger question is: What do I want my capacity to be in service of now? Burnout is not always a call to get back to who we were. Sometimes it may be an invitation to become more honest about who we are now. Resources for Burnout, Mental Load, and Self-Care If these ideas resonate, a few resources that explore related themes are: Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski, PhD, and Amelia Nagoski, DMA. A helpful exploration of stress, burnout, and the stress cycle. Real Self-Care by Pooja Lakshmin, MD. I appreciate its movement away from self-care as another collection of wellness tasks and toward values, boundaries, agency, and the systems surrounding us. Fair Play by Eve Rodsky. A practical framework for identifying visible and invisible labor and creating a more intentional distribution of responsibility. Therapy for Burnout in High-Achieving Women in Rhode Island For people who appear capable on the outside while working incredibly hard underneath the surface, therapy can offer space to explore more than how to cope with everything on the plate. It can also become a place to consider what matters now, what no longer fits, and what may have taught someone to expect so much from themselves in the first place. In my work, I draw from EMDR, somatic therapy, attachment-focused therapy, and parts work to explore these patterns while helping clients reconnect with their needs, values, boundaries, and capacity. I offer in-person therapy in Cranston and North Kingstown, Rhode Island, as well as virtual therapy throughout Rhode Island. If you’re wondering whether we might be a good fit, you can learn more about my services, ask a question, or schedule a free 15-minute consultation.

One of the most frustrating places to find yourself in therapy is this: I know why I do this. So why am I still doing it? Maybe you notice yourself shutting down when you’re overwhelmed, overthinking a decision, becoming reactive with someone you love, avoiding something uncomfortable, or falling back into a familiar habit you thought you had moved beyond. You may understand exactly where the pattern comes from and still find yourself right back in it. Sometimes all of that self-awareness becomes another reason to criticize ourselves: I know better. Why can't I just change this? Insight is valuable, but insight is only part of the work. The other part is integration. Insight and Integration Are Not the Same Thing Insight helps us understand how we got here. We begin making connections between our present-day reactions and earlier experiences, relationships, beliefs, and ways we learned to protect ourselves. But understanding something intellectually doesn't necessarily mean our emotional responses have caught up. I sometimes use the language of our wise mind and our emotional parts with clients. Your wise mind may know you're allowed to say no, but when the moment comes, your throat tightens, your voice gets quieter, or you find yourself saying yes anyway. Your wise mind may know you're lovable, while another part of you still works hard to be helpful or needed in order to feel secure in that love. This is the space between insight and integration. When Self-Awareness Turns Into “I Should Know Better” I work with a lot of thoughtful, highly self-aware people who have spent years trying to understand themselves. Many of us have been doing some version of this since adolescence, starting with personality quizzes and horoscopes and eventually finding our way to attachment styles, Enneagrams, books, podcasts, and other ways of figuring ourselves out. But sometimes insight becomes another thing we use against ourselves. I know this is an old pattern. Why am I still doing it? I know where this comes from. Why can't I let it go? I think of this as the messy middle of healing. You have enough awareness to recognize the pattern, maybe even while it's happening, but knowing something and being able to respond differently are not the same thing. When Your Wise Mind Knows, but Another Part of You Responds Differently I've experienced this distinction in my own life. One of my values as a parent is creating a home where there is room for expression, learning, growth, and mistakes. I want my children to know they are safe when they make them. And yet, when my children were younger and something spilled, I sometimes noticed an immediate response in myself. My body would go into alarm, and what came out could sound like frustration or anger even though underneath it was fear. My wise mind knew I was the adult, I was creating the culture in our home, and a spilled drink wasn't dangerous. But a younger emotional part of me had learned something different: Mistakes aren't safe. I didn't need someone to explain to me that a spilled glass wasn't dangerous. I already knew that. What I needed was for another part of me to begin learning what my wise mind already understood. For me, this became something I worked with through EMDR. Rather than continuing to remind myself that spills were safe, I could work with some of the earlier experiences and associations connected to that automatic response. Over time, there was more space for me to respond in a way that aligned with the culture I wanted to create in my own home. The old belief was mistakes aren't safe. The belief I wanted to live from was mistakes are how we learn. Insight helped me understand why I was reacting. Integration helped me begin to respond differently. Why Understanding Your Patterns Doesn't Always Change Them We don't learn only through words and conscious thought. We also learn through experience, emotion, sensation, relationships, and repetition. That's part of why we can consciously believe one thing while having a very different automatic response. We can know we're allowed to have needs while feeling anxious when we express them. We can know someone can be disappointed with us and still love us while feeling compelled to fix their disappointment. Our thinking mind may understand something that another part of us is still learning. This doesn't mean insight hasn't worked or that we haven't understood ourselves well enough. It may simply mean there is another layer of the work. Moving From Insight to Integration This is one reason I integrate EMDR and somatic therapy into my work. Alongside understanding the story, we can pay attention to the beliefs, emotions, body sensations, and automatic responses connected to it. We can also begin experiencing and practicing something different in the present. Part of integration is moving away from self-criticism and toward acceptance and change. Instead of Why am I still doing this? I should know better, we might begin with: Okay, this is happening. How do I want to meet myself in this moment? Acceptance doesn't mean resigning ourselves to staying stuck. It means acknowledging what is happening without turning it into another reason to criticize ourselves. From there, we can become curious about what we need and open to responding differently. Maybe you notice your throat tighten when you want to say no and stay with yourself as you find your voice. Maybe you recognize the urge to earn someone's love without immediately acting on it. The goal isn't to never have an old response again. It's to have more awareness, flexibility, and choice in what happens next. From Knowing to Living Differently Healing isn't necessarily about accumulating more information about ourselves. Sometimes it's about meeting what we already know with less judgment and more curiosity, while remaining open to something different. Insight helps us make sense of how we got here. Acceptance allows us to meet ourselves where we are, and integration helps us begin to live differently. So if you understand your patterns but still feel stuck, perhaps the next question isn't Why am I still doing this? Maybe it's: This is what's happening right now. How do I want to meet myself here? EMDR and Trauma Therapy in Rhode Island This is much of the work I love doing with clients. Through EMDR, somatic therapy, and attachment-focused therapy, we can explore not only where old patterns came from, but what may help you begin experiencing and responding to things differently. I offer in-person therapy in Cranston and North Kingstown, Rhode Island, as well as virtual therapy throughout the state. If you have questions about therapy or are wondering whether we might be a good fit, you can learn more about my services, ask a question or schedule a free 15-minute consultation to talk about what you're looking for.

I came to perinatal mental health work from two directions: as a clinician and as a mother. In many ways, it was becoming a mother that showed me what was missing. I prepared for birth in many of the ways we are taught to prepare. There were appointments, books to read, things to buy, baby gear to research, and lists of everything we would need. I had a beautiful baby shower and so many of the things that were supposed to help me feel prepared. Looking back, though, there were deeply important parts of preparation that I didn't even know to consider. No one asked me how comfortable I was taking up space, how I related to pain and uncertainty, or how easily I could ask for help. No one asked me what it might be like to make noise during labor or what would happen inside of me if I didn't feel in control. No one helped me think about how comfortable I would feel advocating for myself if something didn't feel right. And no one prepared me for how becoming a mother might change the way I understood my own childhood. Then came postpartum. I remember completing the standard mental health screening at my 6-week postpartum visit. Ten questions about how I was doing. Those questions have value, and screening absolutely matters, but they didn't come close to getting to the heart of what I was experiencing. I struggled more silently than I would have expected, even with clinical training and mental health knowledge. That experience became part of what ultimately drew me more deeply into maternal mental health care and led me to become a Perinatal Mental Health Certified therapist through Postpartum Support International (PSI). Since doing this work, I can't tell you how many times I have heard a woman say some version of, I was prepared for birth. I wasn't prepared for what came after. And “what came after” can mean so many different things. For some women, there were unexpected complications during birth or a much more difficult physical recovery than anticipated. For others, there were concerns about the baby's health, feeding, weight gain, or development. Sometimes there was an unexpected NICU stay, and the postpartum experience a mother had imagined was suddenly replaced by medical equipment, separation, uncertainty, and fear. Sometimes everything appeared medically “fine,” but the transition itself was much harder than expected. Maybe the baby blues didn't seem to lift. Maybe anxiety began creeping into more and more of the day. Maybe she couldn't sleep even when the baby was sleeping, or frightening intrusive thoughts appeared that she was terrified to tell anyone about. Maybe she expected to feel an immediate connection with her baby and instead felt numb, frightened, overwhelmed, or simply unlike herself. She knew something didn't feel right, but she didn't have language for what was happening. And sometimes the people around her didn't have that language either. We often tell new mothers to “ask for help if you need it.” But in order to ask for help, a woman first has to recognize that what she is experiencing may require help. She needs language for it, and ideally, the people closest to her need some of that language, too. A partner needs to know what to notice. Family members need to understand that a perinatal mental health concern doesn't always look like a mother crying all day or saying she feels depressed. Women themselves deserve to know that postpartum anxiety, OCD, trauma responses, and other perinatal mood and anxiety disorders can show up in ways they may never have been taught to recognize. This is one of the reasons I have become so passionate about the idea that postpartum preparation should begin before postpartum. What If Birth Preparation Was About More Than Preparing for a Baby? Our culture has become very good at preparing materially for babies. We make registries, research strollers, decorate nurseries, attend classes, and buy gadgets designed to solve problems we don't even know whether we'll have yet. We have showers and gender reveals, and there seems to be an ever-growing list of things to plan, purchase, and do. Some of these things are joyful and helpful. I had a beautiful baby shower myself. I also remember feeling completely overwhelmed opening gift after gift in front of everyone. Then I felt guilty for feeling overwhelmed because I thought I was supposed to simply feel grateful. It seems like a small moment now, but I think it captured something I would come to understand much more deeply about motherhood. Two things can be true at the same time. You can be grateful and overwhelmed. You can desperately want a baby and struggle through pregnancy. You can love your baby more than you knew was possible and still grieve parts of your old life. You can experience motherhood as an incredible gift and also need somewhere to talk honestly about how hard it is. Those experiences do not cancel each other out. Perhaps preparing for motherhood means making room for that complexity before the baby ever arrives. Emotional Preparation for Birth Over the years, my understanding of birth preparation has expanded considerably. One resource that influenced me was Birthing From Within, which introduced me to ways of thinking about birth that extend beyond understanding the mechanics of labor. Today, when I work with women during pregnancy, we might use traditional talk therapy, expressive arts, somatic therapy, or values-based work to explore what birth brings up emotionally. What is your relationship with pain? What are your fears about birth? How comfortable are you making noise or taking up space? What happens inside of you when you don't feel in control? We might explore how easily you ask for help, whether you trust yourself to say no when something doesn't feel right, and how comfortable you feel advocating for yourself with an authority figure. We can also think about what you need from your partner or birth team in order to feel safe, respected, supported, and heard. These questions can be particularly meaningful for women with histories of trauma, anxiety, people-pleasing, body-image concerns, difficult family relationships, or experiences in which their needs and boundaries weren't always respected. Birth asks quite a lot of us. It asks us to inhabit a rapidly changing body, tolerate uncertainty, receive care, communicate our needs, and trust other people while remaining connected to ourselves. Those are things we can prepare for, too. The goal isn't to create the perfect birth experience. We cannot control birth that way. The goal is to enter the experience knowing yourself a little more deeply. Preparing for Postpartum, Not Just Birth There is another preparation conversation I wish we had more often: What will you actually need after the baby comes? For me, one of the answers was remarkably simple. Food. I needed someone to nourish me (literally and emotionally). In hindsight, I didn't necessarily need more things. I needed care. Since then, I've learned about beautiful ways people are reimagining preparation for postpartum. Friends and family can organize meal trains or gather before birth to prepare freezer meals together. I've also facilitated blessingways, gatherings that focus less on gifts for the baby and more on honoring, nurturing, and supporting the woman who is becoming a mother. There isn't one right way to prepare. That's actually the point. Instead of simply replicating what everyone around us is doing, we can ask what would genuinely support you. Who will feed you? Who can you call when you haven't slept? Who can come over and care for you without expecting you to host them? Who will notice how you are doing rather than only asking about the baby? Does your partner know what changes in your mental health to pay attention to? Do you both know what you will do if you begin feeling unlike yourself? What will you do when you're both exhausted? Who is part of your village, and what will you actually need from them? These are postpartum mental health questions. And I believe they are birth preparation questions, too. Perinatal Mental Health Is More Than Postpartum Depression When people hear “maternal mental health,” they often immediately think about postpartum depression. But perinatal mental health is much broader. The perinatal period generally includes pregnancy through the first year postpartum. During this period, women can experience depression, anxiety, OCD, trauma symptoms, intrusive thoughts, and other perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, often referred to as PMADs. There are also experiences that can increase vulnerability or require more specialized support, including a traumatic birth, pregnancy or infant loss, medical complications, or having a baby admitted to the NICU. This is one reason specialized perinatal mental health care matters. As a Perinatal Mental Health Certified therapist, I have advanced training in recognizing and screening for perinatal mental health concerns and helping women access appropriate support and intervention when needed. But I also want women to know something important. You don't need to have a diagnosis to deserve support during this transition. Therapy can be preventative. It can be preparatory. It can simply be a place to tell the whole truth about what becoming a mother is actually like. Birth Trauma, NICU Experiences, and EMDR Therapy Not every birth feels beautiful or empowering. Sometimes birth is frightening. Sometimes it is medically complicated. Sometimes a woman feels powerless, unheard, frightened for herself or her baby, or disconnected from what is happening to her body. Sometimes a baby requires NICU care, and the beginning a mother imagined is suddenly replaced by medical equipment, separation, uncertainty, and fear. You can be profoundly grateful that you and your baby are okay and still feel traumatized by what happened. Both can be true. This is one area where I may incorporate EMDR therapy into my work with mothers. When an experience remains emotionally or physically “stuck,” EMDR can help process aspects of the experience that the nervous system may still be responding to as though the danger is happening now. We aren't trying to erase what happened. We are helping your mind and body integrate the experience so that the past can begin to feel like the past. Motherhood Can Wake Up Your Own Childhood This is one of the most profound things I see in maternal mental health therapy. Sometimes becoming a mother changes the way you understand being a daughter. A woman may look at her baby and experience a love and protectiveness that feels almost indescribable. And then another thought appears. Why didn't someone protect me like this? Why wasn't my mother more emotionally available to me? Why was I expected to handle so much on my own? If my parents loved me, why did growing up hurt so much? Experiences that we previously minimized, rationalized, or simply learned to live with can look very different when viewed through the eyes of a mother. Motherhood doesn't necessarily create these wounds. Sometimes it gives us new eyes with which to see them. Old attachment wounds, mother wounds, emotional neglect, unmet childhood needs, and what I sometimes think of as frozen grief can begin coming to the surface. That can be painful. It can also become an invitation to heal. When Your Coping Skills No Longer Match Your Stress I sometimes think about mental health as the relationship between what we're carrying and the resources we have available to carry it. Before becoming a mother, perhaps your coping skills adequately matched your stress. You exercised. You slept. You saw friends. You went to therapy. You had routines. You had quiet. You could take a break after a difficult day. Then you had a baby. The coping skills didn't necessarily disappear. The equation changed. Now there may be sleep deprivation, feeding, physical recovery, hormonal changes, relationship adjustments, childcare, work, financial pressures, and the relentless responsibility of meeting another person's needs. And there may be far less time and space available to care for yourself. Suddenly, the things that worked before aren't enough. That doesn't necessarily mean you're failing at coping. It may mean the amount you're carrying has changed. Therapy can help us find that gap and begin asking a more useful question: What do I need now? Pregnancy, Postpartum, Body Image, and Eating Concerns Pregnancy and postpartum also ask women to navigate enormous physical changes in a culture that already places tremendous pressure on women's bodies. For someone with a history of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, restriction, binge eating, compulsive exercise, or body shame, pregnancy and postpartum can be especially complicated. There can be joy about what your body is doing alongside discomfort with how it looks or feels. There can be a desire to nourish your body alongside fear about weight changes or a sense of losing control. Old eating disorder thoughts or behaviors can sometimes resurface during periods of significant change or stress. This is one place where somatic therapy and mind-body awareness can become particularly useful. The goal isn't to demand that you love every change your body goes through. Instead, we can work toward remaining connected to your body, noticing what is happening within it, responding to its needs, and developing a more compassionate relationship with the body carrying you through this transition. Matrescence: You Aren't Just Having a Baby. You're Becoming a Mother. There is another word I wish more women knew: matrescence. Matrescence describes the developmental transition of becoming a mother. I think naming it matters because a baby isn't the only one being born. A mother is emerging, too. Across cultures and throughout history, transitions into motherhood have often been witnessed and supported by community, elders, and other women. Today, many women describe feeling profoundly alone while trying to figure it all out. So we turn to the village available at 2 a.m. We scroll. We search. We compare ourselves to strangers. We look for the right sleep schedule, feeding approach, parenting philosophy, developmental activity, routine, or method that will somehow confirm that we're doing this correctly. We have access to an extraordinary amount of information. But information isn't the same thing as support. Sometimes what we need isn't another answer from the internet. We need a warm, grounded, regulated person in the room with us. Someone who can help us sort through all of the noise and ask a different question. What matters to you? This is where I often incorporate values-based work from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Your values can become your compass as you navigate motherhood. Instead of asking what you are supposed to be doing, we can begin asking who you want to be as a mother. What matters in your family? What do you want your children to experience in relationship with you? What patterns do you want to carry forward, and which patterns might end with you? And perhaps one of the most important questions is this: How can I remain connected to myself while becoming a mother? You Don't Have to Wait Until You're Struggling If there is one thing I wish more women knew, it is that therapy during pregnancy and postpartum does not have to begin when something is wrong. It can be part of the preparation. We can prepare for birth by learning about labor and making decisions about where and how we hope to deliver. We can prepare materially by choosing the car seat, setting up the nursery, and making sure we have the things our baby will need. But we can also prepare emotionally. We can talk about what birth brings up for you before you are in the middle of it. We can explore your relationship with pain, control, vulnerability, asking for help, and self-advocacy. We can think about your mental health history and identify places where you may be more vulnerable during pregnancy or postpartum. We can prepare the people around you, too. We can talk about what support actually feels supportive to you, what your partner should know, what changes you both might pay attention to, and who you will call if you begin to feel unlike yourself. And we can prepare for the transition that happens beyond birth. Because you are not only preparing to care for a baby. You are preparing for a significant transition in your own body, relationships, identity, rhythms, and sense of self. You are becoming a mother. You deserve care in that transition, too. Perinatal and Postpartum Therapy in Rhode Island I offer specialized perinatal and maternal mental health therapy for women during pregnancy, postpartum, and the transition into motherhood. I see clients in person in Cranston, Rhode Island, and virtually throughout the state. As a Perinatal Mental Health Certified therapist, my work may include emotional birth preparation, postpartum anxiety or depression, birth trauma, NICU experiences, pregnancy after loss, body image and eating concerns, relationship changes, matrescence, and the attachment or childhood wounds that motherhood sometimes brings back to the surface. Depending on your needs, I may integrate EMDR, somatic therapy, expressive arts, attachment-focused therapy, and values-based work into our sessions. You do not need to know exactly what you need before reaching out. You also do not need to wait until you are in crisis. If you are pregnant, postpartum, or navigating the transition into motherhood and wondering whether therapy might be supportive, I offer a free 15-minute consultation. We can talk about what is bringing you to therapy, what you are looking for, and whether my approach feels like a good fit. Schedule a Free 15-Minute Consultation Learn More Perinatal & Maternal Mental Health Therapy: Learn more about my specialized approach to supporting women through pregnancy, postpartum, and the transition into motherhood. Explore Perinatal & Maternal Mental Health Therapy EMDR Therapy: Learn more about EMDR and how I use trauma-focused therapy to support healing from experiences that continue to feel unresolved. Explore EMDR Therapy Additional Maternal Mental Health Support Postpartum Support International offers education, support groups, provider resources, and additional support for pregnant and postpartum individuals and their families. Visit Postpartum Support International

I work with a surprising number of people who, for very different reasons, arrive in therapy struggling to trust themselves. They don't always use those words. They might tell me they want to feel more confident or authentic. They want to stop second-guessing themselves, use their voice more, set boundaries without feeling guilty, or make decisions without endlessly wondering if they've gotten something wrong. Underneath many of these goals are questions about self-trust. Can I trust what I feel, remember, and perceive? Can I trust what my body is telling me? Can I know what I want without needing someone else to validate it first? And perhaps most importantly, can I trust myself enough to act on what I know? How Do We Lose Trust in Ourselves? There isn't one path to self-doubt. For someone with OCD, doubt itself can become part of the struggle. OCD can keep a person looping through questions, checking, reviewing, seeking reassurance, or searching for a level of certainty that never quite arrives. For others, the roots of self-doubt may be relational. I work with many adults who grew up in families affected by alcoholism, substance use, personality disorders, emotional immaturity, or other forms of instability. In some of these families, children learn very early that trusting their own experience can be complicated. This can happen in many different ways: A child knows that something is wrong while everyone around them behaves as though everything is fine. They experience gaslighting, secrecy, denial, or minimization and begin to question their own perception of what is happening. They learn that maintaining peace in the family means prioritizing a parent's emotional state over their own. They become highly skilled at sensing what everyone else needs while becoming increasingly disconnected from what they need themselves. They receive messages, directly or indirectly, that certain feelings are too much, inappropriate, or inconvenient. When what we perceive repeatedly conflicts with what we are told, it can become difficult to know what is real or true. Over time, we may begin looking outside of ourselves for confirmation of what we think, feel, want, or need. This process doesn't always happen through significant trauma or obvious family dysfunction. Sometimes the disconnection is much more subtle. Imagine a young child falls down and immediately begins crying. A loving, well-intentioned caregiver responds, “You're fine.” Meanwhile, the child's body is communicating something entirely different: I'm not fine right now. Of course, most parents have said some version of this. The intention is usually reassurance. These small moments aren't inherently harmful. But they illustrate something important about how children develop: we learn about ourselves partly through the people caring for us. If our feelings are repeatedly minimized, explained away, compared to someone else's suffering, or quickly reframed with statements like “It could be worse” or “You have so much to be grateful for,” we may slowly learn to question our own experience. Instead of asking, What am I feeling?, we begin asking, What am I supposed to be feeling? Your Inner World Matters We all have an outer life and an inner life. Our outer lives are full. As children, there is school, family, friendships, activities, learning, expectations and community. As adults, those external demands only multiply through work, relationships, parenting, responsibilities and the many roles we occupy. But alongside that outer world is an incredibly rich inner world. This is the world of sensations and emotions, images and imagination, desires and preferences, creativity and intuition. It is where our emerging sense of self begins to take shape. Ideally, caregivers help children stay tethered to that inner world while learning how to navigate the outer one. An attuned caregiver might help a child notice what is happening inside rather than immediately defining the experience for them. They might wonder with the child about what they're feeling, notice a change in their body, invite their opinion, or communicate that they are allowed to have an experience that is different from someone else's. Through interactions like these, a child gradually learns: What happens inside me is worth noticing. Not everyone receives that kind of consistent attunement. Some children become much more practiced at reading the external environment. They learn to monitor someone's mood, anticipate what might happen next, determine what answer another person wants, or figure out what version of themselves will create the least amount of disruption. That ability to read other people can become incredibly sophisticated while the ability to hear oneself becomes quieter. Years later, that child may become an adult who genuinely doesn't know what they want. They may wonder whether they're overreacting, question their memories, look to other people to make decisions, or assume that someone else's certainty must be more trustworthy than their own experience. Rebuilding Your Inner Authority This is why I don't think rebuilding self-trust is simply about becoming more confident. For me, it is about reconnecting with what I think of as your inner authority. I love the connection between authority and author. Part of this work is developing the ability to author your own story rather than continually looking outside yourself for someone else to tell you what is real, acceptable, important, or true about your experience. That doesn't mean believing that everything we think or feel is objectively correct. Our perceptions can be incomplete. We can misunderstand other people. Trauma can cause something in the present to feel threatening because it resembles something that was threatening in the past. Healthy self-trust leaves room for curiosity, reflection, new information, and even changing our minds. The difference is that our own experience gets a seat at the table. Instead of immediately asking what everyone else thinks, we can begin turning inward with curiosity. What am I noticing? What emotion is here? What is happening in my body? What do I actually want? Does something about this feel wrong to me? What matters to me here? And sometimes, an especially revealing question is: What might I choose if I weren't organizing this decision entirely around someone else's response? How to Rebuild Self-Trust Rebuilding self-trust often happens through small, ordinary experiences rather than one dramatic breakthrough. It can mean choosing what you actually want instead of automatically saying, “I don't care.” It can mean noticing you're tired before you reach complete depletion or acknowledging that something hurt even when the other person didn't intend to hurt you. It might mean allowing yourself to dislike something without building a case for why you're entitled to dislike it. You might practice expressing a preference, changing your mind, setting a boundary, or saying no without first determining whether someone else believes your reason is good enough. It also means learning to listen to your body. Sometimes tension, anxiety, anger, heaviness, or the urge to pull away contains information worth exploring. We don't have to obey every feeling or sensation, but we can become curious about what it might be communicating instead of immediately overriding it. Each of these experiences helps strengthen the connection between what happens inside of you and the choices you make in your outer life. How Therapy Can Help You Trust Yourself Again Therapy can provide a space to practice this reconnection. I don't see my role as becoming another authority who tells you who you are or what you should do. Instead, therapy can help you become increasingly able to hear and understand yourself. Sometimes that means examining old narratives and messages you've carried for years. Sometimes it means developing greater awareness of emotions and body sensations that you learned to override. For others, it may involve processing traumatic experiences that continue to influence how safe it feels to trust their own perceptions. It can also mean learning to tolerate uncertainty. Self-trust doesn't require absolute certainty before we make a choice. Sometimes it means gathering the information available to us, listening inward, making the best decision we can, and trusting ourselves to respond to whatever comes next. Over time, you may begin to notice that you aren't explaining yourself quite as much. Decisions may come a little more easily. You may recognize your needs sooner, use your voice more readily, or discover that another person's disappointment doesn't automatically mean you've done something wrong. Perhaps rebuilding self-trust isn't about reaching a place where you never doubt yourself again. It is learning that when doubt arrives, you don't have to abandon yourself. You can listen to yourself, remain curious, gather information and change your mind when new information warrants it. Through all of that, you can stay connected to your own inner authority. You can become the author of your own life. Therapy for Self-Trust, Trauma and Anxiety in Rhode Island If you recognize yourself in this and are looking for support rebuilding self-trust, reconnecting with your emotions, understanding old patterns, or feeling more grounded in who you are, therapy can be a place to begin. My approach is warm, relational and trauma-informed, integrating EMDR, somatic work, attachment-focused therapy and other mind-body approaches. Together, we can explore not only the patterns that are showing up now, but also what shaped them and what may help you reconnect with yourself. I currently offer in-person therapy in Cranston and North Kingstown, Rhode Island, as well as virtual therapy throughout Rhode Island. Ready to explore working together? Schedule a complimentary 15-minute consultation here so we can talk about what you're looking for, answer a few initial questions, and see whether we might be a good fit. Want to learn a little more first? You can explore my therapy services or contact me with a question.

For years, I refused to stop and ask for directions. Even when I was hopelessly lost, something in me would tighten at the thought of pulling over, rolling down the window, and admitting I didn’t know. It wasn’t just about finding the right road—it was about what it meant to be seen in uncertainty. Underneath it all was a quiet, crushing shame that said: "You should already know this." (And yes, this was before the days of GPS—when asking a stranger was often the only way to reroute.) 🧠 When Knowing = Safety This isn't just about directions. It’s about survival. I see this belief show up all the time in my work with clients—especially those who grew up in high-pressure, emotionally unpredictable, or chaotic. In those systems, not knowing often meant being criticized, overlooked, or left behind. So a part of you stepped up. A part that learned to anticipate, research, prepare, stay two steps ahead. A part that became the one who knew. In many families—especially larger ones—children were quietly deputized into the emotional labor of the household. They became caregivers, organizers, emotional buffers. They figured things out, because someone had to. Because their parents were overwhelmed, under-supported, and often trying to survive themselves. This is a personal wound with a systemic backdrop: A culture that fails to support parents especially mothers. A society that glorifies self-sacrifice. A system that doesn’t make space for asking, resting, or not knowing. Over time, knowing became your role. And your worth got tangled up in it. 🎭 The Part That Carries It All This part is often praised. It looks like high functioning. It sounds like “You’re so organized,” or “You always know what to do.” But inside, it can feel like pressure. Perfectionism. Exhaustion. And it’s usually protecting something much younger and more tender: The child who was left to figure it out alone. The teen who was praised for maturity but never allowed to be messy. The one who learned: if I don’t know, I don’t belong. This part isn't bad. It’s brilliant. It adapted. It kept you safe. It gave you something to hold onto. But it’s tired now. And it may be time to ask: What if you didn’t have to hold it all anymore? 💻 When the Internet Feeds the Fear In today’s culture of constant input, this part has endless ways to stay activated. There’s always another podcast. Another expert. Another post that says this is the thing you’ve been missing. And while information can be empowering, it can also be addictive—especially when it’s trying to soothe an unhealed wound. The more you feed this part, the more it craves because it’s not really hungry for knowledge. It’s hungry for relief, for permission to rest and for someone to say: You don’t have to earn your place by having all the answers. 💬 A Gentle Invitation If this resonates, I invite you to pause—not to fix, solve, or research—but simply to notice. Bring to mind something uncertain in your life right now. Something unresolved. Something foggy. Ask yourself with compassion: – Is there a part of me that feels responsible for knowing? – What is it afraid would happen if I didn’t? – How long has it carried this role? – Has it ever been praised or rewarded for its knowing? Then gently shift to your body: – Where do I feel this pressure to know? – Is there a tightness, a buzzing, a bracing? – What happens if I thank this part—not for being right, but for trying so hard? Let yourself pause. Let the question hang. Let this moment be enough. 🌙 In the Space of Not Knowing You don’t need to know everything. You don’t need to be everything. You get to be here, in the mystery. Not-knowing is not failure. It’s not weakness. It’s space. Its presence. It’s the quiet breath between chapters. Sometimes, the part of you that doesn’t know is the one that finally gets to rest. So let this part rest. Let this part lay it all down. Let this part feel held, not hurried. I'm rooting for you- Shaelyn

It's not just emotional—it's neurological. You know you should set the boundary. You even want to set the boundary. But the words catch in your throat.Your chest tightens. Your whole body tenses like you’re doing something dangerous. Here’s the thing: to your nervous system, you might be. Why Saying No Feels So Hard (Even When It’s Right) We tend to think of boundaries as a mindset—something we just need to “get better at.” But in truth, boundaries are deeply embodied. They live in the nervous system, shaped by past experiences and old survival patterns. If you grew up in an environment where: Saying no led to conflict, disconnection, or punishment You were praised for being selfless, quiet, or “easy” You felt responsible for the emotions or needs of others Then your nervous system may have learned that saying no = threat. And your body remembers. Even if you now know better, your nervous system still whispers: “This could be dangerous.” The Science Behind It When we perceive a boundary as a threat, our brain activates the amygdala—the part responsible for scanning for danger. It cues the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response to keep us safe. In this case, "safe" might mean staying likable, avoiding rejection, or minimizing discomfort for others. Your vagus nerve, which plays a big role in regulation, might go offline in those moments. Instead of calm clarity, you feel disoriented, anxious, or frozen. This doesn’t mean you’re broken.It means your system is doing what it was wired to do: protect connection—even at the cost of self. 🧠✨ Boundary Language Breakdown A quick guide to what we really mean when we talk about boundaries. Term What It Is Example Boundary A personal limit based on your needs, values, or capacity. “I don’t check work emails after 6pm.” Limit A firm no—something you won’t do or allow. “I’m not available for conversations when I’m being yelled at.” Expectation A belief or hope about how someone will behave—often unspoken or assumed. “I expect my partner to text if they’ll be late.” Request A direct ask that leaves space for yes or no. “Can you give me a heads-up next time plans change?” 🌿 Boundaries are about what you will do. Expectations are about what others might do. Requests are how you bridge the two. What Helps 1. Normalize the Response There’s nothing wrong with you. This is not about weakness or lack of willpower. It’s about safety. When you start to understand that your resistance to boundaries is protective, you can meet it with compassion. Try saying: “Of course this feels hard. My body is trying to keep me safe.” 2. Start Small + Practice Safety You don’t have to start with your most triggering relationship. Choose a lower-stakes “no” and notice how your body responds. Support yourself with grounding tools or co-regulation if needed. Somatic support: Try holding your heart and belly while saying, “It’s safe to speak my truth, even gently.” 3. Rewire Through Repetition + Repair Each time you set a boundary and survive it, you build new evidence for your nervous system:“I can say no and still belong.” and “I can hold my truth and still be loved.” Over time, your brain learns that safety can include self-honoring. You Can Have Boundaries and Belonging Boundaries aren’t walls. They’re bridges. They allow us to show up more honestly, love more fully, and stay connected to ourselves and others. So if saying no feels like a threat—you're not failing. You're awakening. You're untangling. You're learning how to be safe being you. One boundary, one breath, one brave yes/no at a time. Sources:• The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.• Polyvagal Theory – Stephen Porges, Ph.D.• Set Boundaries, Find Peace – Nedra Glover Tawwab, LCSW• Attached – Amir Levine, M.D. & Rachel Heller• The Drama of the Gifted Child – Alice Miller

Do you feel guilty saying no? Do you worry about disappointing people, even when you're doing what is best for you? Do you find yourself overexplaining, overcommitting, or putting other people's needs ahead of your own, only to feel exhausted, resentful, or disconnected from yourself? If so, you may be struggling with people pleasing. People pleasing is often talked about as a personality trait. Something that means you're nice, caring, or thoughtful. While those qualities may be present, I think people pleasing is often something deeper. What Is People Pleasing, Really? At its core, people pleasing is usually a form of self-protection. It is a strategy we learn to keep ourselves safe. If I can keep you happy, maybe you won't be angry. If I can meet your needs, maybe you won't reject me. If I can avoid disappointing you, maybe I won't have to feel guilty, ashamed, anxious, or responsible for your feelings. From the outside, it looks like the focus is on the other person. Underneath, the focus is often on avoiding our own discomfort. In that way, people pleasing is less about pleasing others and more about protecting ourselves from difficult emotions. For many people, this pattern begins early in life. Perhaps there was conflict in your home, a parent was emotionally unpredictable, love felt conditional or being agreeable, helpful, and easy-going earned approval and connection. Over time, your nervous system learned an important lesson: it is safer to manage other people's emotions than it is to feel my own. The challenge is that what once helped us survive can eventually keep us stuck. People pleasing can make it difficult to know what we want, difficult to say no, difficult to set boundaries, and difficult to trust ourselves. Eventually, many people find themselves asking: Why do I feel disconnected from myself? Why Do I Feel Guilty When I Set Boundaries? One of the biggest obstacles to healing people pleasing is guilt. Many people know exactly what boundary they need to set. They know they need more rest. They know they need to say no. They know they cannot keep carrying what they have been carrying. Yet the moment they imagine disappointing someone, guilt rushes in. If you've ever wondered why you feel guilty saying no or guilty after setting boundaries, you're not alone. What often surprises my clients is that not all guilt is the same. Healthy Guilt vs. Toxic Guilt Healthy guilt occurs when we step outside of our own values. If I value kindness and say something hurtful, I may feel guilty. If I value honesty and tell a lie, I may feel guilty. This kind of guilt serves an important purpose. It helps us recognize when our behavior is out of alignment and motivates us to make repair. Healthy guilt says: "This isn't who I want to be." But many people pleasers are not experiencing this kind of guilt. They have not violated their own values. They have violated someone else's expectations. And those are very different things. Have You Violated Your Values or Someone Else's Expectations? This is one of my favorite questions to explore with clients: Have I violated my values, or have I violated someone else's expectations? Sometimes what we call guilt is actually something else entirely. Sometimes it is the discomfort of disappointing someone. Sometimes it is fear, grief, anxiety or the vulnerability of being seen differently than we have been seen before. Imagine you grew up in a family where saying no was viewed as selfish. Where everyone was expected to be available, boundaries were interpreted as rejection, and/or emotional closeness depended on compliance and caretaking. In a system like that, choosing yourself may feel wrong. Not because it is wrong but because it is unfamiliar. If your family values enmeshment and you value freedom, autonomy, or individuality, stepping toward your values may create discomfort. Yet discomfort is not always evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes it is evidence that something is changing. How Therapy Can Help You Stop People Pleasing In my work with clients, we often slow down and get curious about what people pleasing is trying to protect. Together, we explore the fears underneath the behavior: fear of conflict, rejection, abandonment, disapproval, or being seen as selfish. We reconnect to your values, needs, and desires because many people pleasers have become experts at tracking everyone else's inner world while losing touch with their own. We explore questions such as: What am I afraid will happen if I disappoint someone? What feeling am I trying to avoid? Where did I learn that other people's needs mattered more than my own? What does this part of me believe would happen if I chose myself? The goal is not to stop caring about others. The goal is to care about yourself, too. The Real Work of Healing People Pleasing Healing people pleasing is not about becoming less caring. It is not about becoming selfish. And it is certainly not about stopping kindness. The work is learning to stay connected to yourself while someone else is disappointed, learning to tolerate the feelings you once worked so hard to avoid and recognizing that another person's reaction is not always evidence that you have done something wrong. Sometimes the guilt you feel is not a sign that you have violated your values. Sometimes it is simply the growing pains of living in alignment with them. You can be kind without abandoning yourself. You can be compassionate without carrying responsibility for everyone else's feelings. You can disappoint someone and still be a good person. And perhaps most importantly, you can remain true to yourself, even when others wish you would choose differently. If people pleasing, difficulty setting boundaries, anxiety, perfectionism, or relationship patterns are keeping you stuck, therapy can help you reconnect with your values, strengthen your sense of self, and learn new ways of relating to yourself and others. You don't have to earn connection through self-abandonment. You May Also Enjoy Beyond People Pleasing: Understanding the Fawn Response and Reconnecting to Self How Emotional Caregiving Shapes Us and How We Begin to Reclaim Ourselves: Healing the Parentified Daughter Naming What Was Missing | Understanding the Mother Wound and Mother Hunger How to Stay Connected in Conflict: Alignment, Boundaries, and Curiosity

A trauma-informed reflection on healing the shame around being a highly sensitive person For many people, sensitivity was not just misunderstood growing up—it was subtly or overtly shamed. A sigh when they cried, a sarcastic comment when they got overwhelmed, or an accusation of being dramatic or too emotional. Over time, these moments send a message: your way of feeling the world is wrong. In my work as a trauma therapist and coach, I meet so many clients who have internalized the idea that their sensitivity is a flaw. They come in exhausted, confused, and often carrying a deep belief that they are too much. But more often than not, what they are carrying is not a problem within them. It is a response to being a highly sensitive person in a world that has not always known how to meet them. A highly sensitive person (HSP) is someone with a more finely tuned nervous system. Research by Dr. Elaine Aron shows that about 15 to 20 percent of people fall into this category. HSPs process sensory input and emotional information more deeply. They tend to notice subtleties in their environment, feel more affected by relational conflict, and often need more rest and nervous system support after stimulation. Sensitivity is not a disorder. It is a trait. But when that trait is met with invalidation, shame often takes hold. When a sensitive child grows up in an environment that discourages emotional expression, they may begin to believe they are the problem. Instead of receiving co-regulation, they are told to stop crying, calm down, or toughen up. Their authentic reactions are dismissed or mocked, and they begin to internalize a harmful belief: “If I feel this much, there must be something wrong with me.” Over time, this leads to emotional suppression, perfectionism, or people-pleasing. These are protective strategies, often developed unconsciously, to avoid rejection and stay safe in relationships. In trauma healing work, we explore how these early experiences shape nervous system responses and relational patterns. Many highly sensitive people struggle with emotional regulation not because they are weak or unstable, but because their early environments taught them to distrust their internal cues. Somatic therapy helps people reconnect with their body’s wisdom. It allows space to notice how shame feels in the body, where it lives, and how it may still influence present-day thoughts, choices, and relationships. Releasing shame begins with curiosity. Instead of asking, “Why am I like this?” we begin to ask, “Where did I learn this about myself?” Clients often discover that what they believed were personal flaws were actually adaptive responses to invalidating or emotionally neglectful environments. This awareness can be both painful and liberating. It opens the door to practicing self-compassion and building nervous system regulation from a place of respect, not rejection. Healing does not require that we become less sensitive. It invites us to become more supported. With the right tools and relationships, sensitivity can become a strength. Sensitive people often have deep capacity for empathy, creativity, and connection. When they are no longer carrying the weight of shame, they begin to thrive. They learn how to discern what is theirs to feel and what is not. They learn how to set boundaries without guilt. They learn how to regulate their emotions without disconnecting from them. They learn how to live in their bodies with a sense of safety and choice. If you recognize yourself in this, know that you are not alone. There is nothing wrong with the way you feel. Sensitivity is not a flaw to fix, but a trait to honor. You are allowed to feel deeply and still be grounded. You are allowed to set limits and still be kind. You are allowed to be sensitive and strong. If you would like support in learning how to work with your sensitivity rather than against it, I offer trauma-informed therapy and somatic coaching for highly sensitive people. Together, we can explore the roots of your patterns, support your nervous system, and help you reclaim sensitivity as a source of strength. If you're interested in learning more about how we can work together, I invite you to book a free consultation session. It would be an honor to support you on your healing path.

A soulful reflection for those who know how to disappear behind doing, and who are ready to be seen in their full humanity. As children, we played hide and seek with squeals and laughter, hearts pounding behind couch cushions or trees, waiting to be found. It was a game of presence and pursuit—of disappearing and then being discovered. But for many of us, the game never really ended. We learned to hide in different ways. Behind achievement. Behind our smiles. Behind the to-do list, the role, the mask. We buried ourselves beneath what was expected of us—quietly struggling, quietly striving, quietly wondering if anyone saw the fullness of who we really were. And yet, even in all that hiding, there’s always been a seeker inside. The one who devoured self-help books before knowing what healing truly meant. The one who took every quiz in Seventeen, explored Enneagram types, Human Design, horoscopes, natal charts, or pulled Tarot cards in quiet moments—falling down online rabbit holes just trying to understand, why am I the way I am? The one who tucked spiritual podcasts into morning commutes, the one who journaled late at night trying to make sense of it all. The hiders I work with are seekers, too. They always have been. They are the quiet cycle-breakers. The ones who began self-reflecting before they even had language for their pain. The ones who thought if they could just improve enough, fix enough, figure it all out, they could finally earn peace. By the time they find their way to me, they’ve been riding the self-improvement train for years. And something in them is tired. Not in a defeated way—In a wise, soul-weary, ready-for-something-real kind of way. Together, we begin to play a different game. One not about hiding or even seeking. But about being seen. It’s not about fixing what's “wrong” with you. It’s about finally getting to know what’s true about you. This is the tender work of self-knowing and self-acceptance. Of honoring your quirks, your rhythms, your emotions, your longings. Of building a life that supports your sensitivities, instead of asking you to hide them. A life that honors your needs instead of overriding them. A life that doesn’t demand perfection—but invites you to belong to yourself. This is the game I know well. Because I’ve played it, too. I’ve hidden. I’ve sought. I’ve softened. And now, I hold the lantern for others. So if you’re someone who’s hidden behind strength or silence and still finds yourself seeking. Come closer. There’s another way. Not hide and seek. But see and be seen. And you don’t have to play it alone. rooting for you, Shaelyn