Specialty
Codependency
For losing track of where you end and someone else begins.
Codependency gets used as an insult often enough that people are reluctant to claim it. What it usually describes is someone who learned, early and for good reason, that other people’s needs were the safest thing to pay attention to.
That is a skill. It is also exhausting, and it tends to produce relationships in which you are indispensable and unknown.
What this can look like
- Knowing what everyone else wants for dinner and not what you want
- Feeling responsible for moods that are not yours
- Saying yes and resenting it
- Anxiety when someone is upset with you that is out of proportion to the stakes
- Being drawn to people who need fixing
How I work with this
We look at where this was learned and what it was for — because it was for something. Then, slowly, at what it is like to have a preference and say it out loud, which for many people is genuinely harder than it sounds.
Approaches I draw on
Relational Therapy
Using what happens between us as real information about what happens everywhere else.
Psychodynamic Therapy
Looking at where a pattern came from, not only at how to manage it.
Strengths-Based Therapy
Starting from what you already survived and already know how to do.
Interested in working together?
Online sessions for adults in Pennsylvania and Virginia.