About Therapy with Me

Therapy doesn’t have to be traumatizing.

If you’re being re-traumatized or forced to talk only about your worst experiences, your therapist is doing it wrong.

Therapy should focus on building safety for you first – in your head, body, and relationship with your therapist.

Therapy should feel like you’re curled up in your favorite spot on the most comfortable couch, in the most tattered but most comfortable pajamas, talking to a person who you know will appreciate how soft the over-worn fabric is, who finds their corner of the couch to sink into facing you and who puts their phone face-down on the coffee table to spend time with you and hear everything you’re about to share.

Building trust is critical.

It’s a therapist’s job to make sure that you are safe – not by doing the “this is a safe space” speech. The therapist will show up by getting comfortable on the couch with you and let their mouth fall open when you share things that can only make a person say “Wait! WHAT?” The therapist will support you in building up your ability to trust yourself as much as you’ve trusted others or as much as you trust them.

Your therapist must trust you, too, because you are an expert on your own life. You’ve lived it and are the one who has gotten yourself through the battles, and your therapist must trust that strength and wisdom you have.

It’s possible that there are blind spots you have, or that there are ways to avoid the battles, or that you’re not giving yourself enough credit. In that case, your therapist should jump in with their knowledge and expertise to help you lift the fog on those blind spots, teach you the shortcuts or new routes that lead away from the battles, and be your biggest cheerleader to remind you of how amazing you are.

And all that should always be done while the therapist is still sitting on the same couch as you, not while standing over you, checking email and telling you that you should stand up, change your clothes, and walk.

Through trust comes change.

Once you’ve gotten to the point where it feels easy to sit on that couch with your therapist, you can also sit with yourself safely, grounded, and empowered. You won’t have thoughts, feelings, and memories to run from anymore, and you’ll have a teammate there to walk you back to safety on days when it feels too hard to find your way there on your own.

With the right therapist, you’ll feel as comfy at work or school, with friends or on a date, with chosen or blood family, as you do on that couch in those pajamas. There is no way to avoid getting uncomfortable on the couch. Sometimes, it will just require finding a different way to sit, your therapist giving you another pillow, or telling you about the new way of sitting they learned about that’s been proven to minimize discomfort.

Even with the right therapist and all the tools – maybe even especially with the right therapist – your legs will start to fall asleep, and you’ll get increasingly uncomfortable. You’ll have to stand up, stretch, walk to the other room, sit silently, or eat a snack.

If your therapist doesn’t let you stretch, doesn’t let you take a break to show them a funny video, doesn’t let you take care of yourself with a snack – they aren’t supporting you the way they should because that’s all part of it. You must pay attention to the discomfort to take care of it. Ignoring it or masking it has gotten you here.

So now it’s time to face it with safety and support.

“Wait! Veronica, are you the therapist sitting on the couch with me in this long, drawn-out scenario?”

I am! I’ve had therapists who made me never want to sit on a couch with them or anyone else ever again, and I care deeply about making sure that no one else is made to feel like that.

I have sat with people far too often, hearing horror stories. I’m not even talking about their trauma – I’m talking about their interactions with therapists or other people in their lives who have sought to pass judgment on them, to pathologize them, or to make them feel like the trauma they’ve endured is somehow their fault.

There are so few things that I can promise you, but I know for sure that I will not make you feel these things. I will never think this way about you – the same way I would never think these things about all the people I care about – my clients, friends, family, and myself.

I believe I work for you – you are the boss and know best, and I will always take my job seriously to do right by you. I actively partner with you in therapy to help you make peace together. I won’t leave you alone on that couch.

The therapy with me is about YOU.

I’ve been fortunate enough to be trained in many ways of doing therapy and to have worked in many places and with many types of people. This experience helps inform our work together, but ultimately, I take my cue from you and apply a cut-and-paste approach to the technical things I’ve learned so that useful tools like EMDR are tailored to your unique circumstances.

I will always want to hear about the things that make you who you are – the new recipe you tried, the new restaurant you ate at (I promise I care about non-food things, too), the new song or show you’re thinking about, the trip you want to take, or the hilarious thing your pet or child did yesterday.

And I will always be open to answering your questions about me.