When your body changes the story.

A diagnosis can divide life into before and after. Chronic illness can ask you to keep rearranging your days around what your body will allow. Pain may take up room you once gave to work, relationships, creativity, or rest. An injury may limit the ways you have known how to cope.

And alongside the appointments, treatments, and practical decisions, there is everything happening inside you.

Perhaps you are waiting for results, juggling appointments, trying to make plans around uncertainty, or tired of answering “How are you?” when the honest answer is complicated. You may look well and feel anything but. You may be grateful to be alive and grieving what it has cost.

There is room here for all of it.

More than a medical story

Illness can reach into your sense of who you are: your independence, sexuality, work, faith, relationships, and imagined future. You may miss the ease you once felt in your body, or wonder whether you ever had that ease to begin with.

Sometimes the loneliness comes from what others cannot see. The effort behind an ordinary day. The fear that returns before a scan. The exhaustion of explaining your limits. The pressure to remain hopeful when you need somewhere to be frightened, angry, or sad. You do not have to find a lesson in this before you can speak about what hurts.

A place to bring what you have been carrying

I offer therapy for people navigating cancer, acute and chronic illness, chronic pain, infertility, injury, and changes in health that accompany aging. I also welcome caregivers holding the needs of someone they love alongside their own uncertainty, fatigue, and grief.

Our work can make room to:

• Grieve changes in your body, abilities, roles, or plans.

• Explore fear and uncertainty without having to rush toward reassurance.

• Find words for what you need from loved ones and medical providers.

• Understand patterns of over-giving, withdrawing, or pushing beyond your limits.

• Attend to questions of identity, intimacy, meaning, and belonging.

• Explore what feels sustaining, pleasurable, or possible within your present circumstances.

How we work together

My approach is relational, psychodynamic, narrative, and trauma-informed. We attend to what is happening now and to the histories that shape how you ask for help, respond to vulnerability, and understand yourself.

We can become curious about the stories illness has introduced, about strength, dependence, worth, or what your life is supposed to look like, and consider which ones leave room for your whole humanity.

Some days, therapy may mean finding language for a difficult conversation. Other days, it may mean having somewhere to lay down the effort of holding everything together.

You are a whole person whose life includes this experience. Your care should have room for that whole person, too.

If you are looking for a place to bring the emotional and relational weight of illness or caregiving, you are welcome to reach out. You are not meant to do it alone.