Individual Therapy
When Life Feels Heavier Than You Want to Carry Alone
Why does disappointing someone feel so uncomfortable? Why does conflict make you shut down, become overwhelmed, or feel desperate to make things right? Why does part of you long for closeness while another part works to keep you away from it?
These questions have been circling for a long time, and you’ve mostly circled them alone.
You agree to things you don’t really want, then feel resentful or depleted afterward. You worry about disappointing people, second-guess yourself, and hear a critical voice that’s always ready to point out where you’re falling short.
Wherever you are when you come in, we can start there.
We’ll Get Curious About What’s Underneath
Difficult feelings carry information, and it’s my job to help you understand what yours are telling you.
So we’ll explore your emotions, relationships, experiences, beliefs, and protective patterns with curiosity and compassion. We’ll pay attention to what happens in your body, too, because sometimes we understand something intellectually long before it feels different inside.
Depending on what you need, we’ll draw on Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy and Compassion-Focused Therapy, together with Somatic and Attachment-Focused EMDR, Internal Family Systems parts work, and somatic and mindfulness-based approaches.
Which of those we use matters less than what happens between us. I’m interested in the structure underneath the symptom, and I’m not in a hurry to move you past anything.
It’s Hard to Know What You Need
Years of paying close attention to everyone around you can leave you less certain about yourself.
What do you want? What do you need? Where’s the line between caring for someone and losing yourself in the relationship? Why is it so much easier to offer compassion to other people than to yourself?
What’s bringing you in might be anxiety or depression, self-esteem, boundaries, perfectionism, people-pleasing, loneliness, relationship difficulties, or a major life change. Or you can’t name it, and you just know something doesn’t feel right and what you’ve been doing isn’t working anymore.
Sometimes the Patterns Have a Longer Story
You read a room before you walk into it. You know what someone else needs before they say it, and you’ve edited the sentence twice before it leaves your mouth.
The same attention shows up as waiting to hear what the other person wants before you let yourself know what you want. And how you see yourself gets built out of all that watching: fine as long as you’re useful.
If something from back then is shaping how you feel about yourself, your relationships, or your life today, we can make room for it.
Life Can Begin to Feel More Like Your Own
Change is usually quieter than you’d expect, and it sounds like saying what you actually mean instead of what you think someone wants to hear. It’s having a difficult feeling without becoming consumed by it.
Why does disappointing someone feel so uncomfortable? Over time that question gets an answer, the answer turns out to be yours, and someone’s disappointment stops working as evidence against you.
Trust in yourself can grow, and old experiences can lose some of their grip on the present. Relationships can start to feel more mutual, with more room for boundaries, connection, rest, and the parts of yourself that went quiet somewhere along the way.
We’ll start with what’s here and work toward what you want to be different. Start with a free consultation, and come as you are, without a tidy explanation of what’s wrong.
Let’s meet for a free consultation, and we’ll start from where you are.
- Call(707) 953-0790
- Emailesmith@woodsongtherapy.net
- Office659 Cherry Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95404