You sit with grief that has no words. You witness betrayal, trauma, childhood wounds, anxiety, depression, heartbreak, and the stories people have sometimes never told another person.
You help your clients understand their attachment patterns, and notice the moment their nervous system shifts. You recognize their protective parts immediately when they enter the room. You help people slow down, feel what they have spent years avoiding, and reconnect with themselves.
And then you close your office door and go home.
But the therapist part of you doesn't always stay at the office.
Sometimes you come home and realize you don't want anyone to need anything else from you. Your partner asks a simple question and you feel irritated. Your children want your attention and you find yourself longing for silence. You finally get a day off, but instead of feeling restored, you realize how deeply tired you actually are.
You're starting to realize that maybe your work isn't the problem.
Maybe you're neglecting your own marriage, or your relationship with a parent that still activates you more than you want to admit. Grief you haven't made room for, or the perfectionism that helped you build a successful career but won't allow you to rest. Or maybe it's an old attachment wound you understand beautifully on paper and still cannot seem to stop living from.
You know what you would tell a client sitting across from you. But knowing and doing are two different things.
There is a difference between knowing the path and walking it.
I offer therapy intensives for therapists in California who are ready to step out of the therapist role for a while and do their own deeper work.
The Next Step
Therapy Intensives for Therapists Ready for the Next Step
Being a therapist can make being a therapy client surprisingly difficult because you know the language, understand attachment, know about protective parts, trauma responses, nervous system regulation, boundaries, projection, and countertransference. You are able to trace one of your reactions directly back to childhood before your therapist has finished asking the question.
Insight isn't usually the problem but it often becomes another form of protection.
You can explain why you chose the partner you chose and identify exactly why conflict activates you. You understand why you people-please, overwork, shut down, become hyper-independent, or struggle to tolerate someone else's disappointment.
You have spent years understanding yourself.
But your body still braces. You become reactive when the person you love says the thing you hate. You still struggle to set the boundary you know you need, and you still feel responsible for everyone around you.
You still question yourself even after years of experience, and find yourself repeating patterns you've already analyzed from every possible angle.
All of these patterns create a particular kind of frustration for therapists:
I know why I do this. Why am I still doing it?
Because understanding something and healing it are not always the same thing.
The next layer of your work isn't more information.
It's an experience.
From the Neck Up
I Know What It's Like to Live From the Neck Up
For many years, I lived primarily in my head.
I knew how to think about feelings and understand patterns, make connections, and explain why I was the way I was. I had years of education and training in human behavior, and I spent my days helping other people understand themselves.
I had insight.
But insight alone did not change my life.
My life began to change when I stopped approaching healing as something I could think my way through and began allowing myself to actually experience it.
Over many years of my own healing work, I began learning how to move out of my mind and into relationship with my body, my heart, my intuition, and my own deeper knowing.
I learned that there were parts of me that did not need to be analyzed or explained. They actually just needed the space to be felt. They also needed compassion, and sometimes, they needed me to stop trying so hard to understand them.
That journey has taken me far beyond what I learned in graduate school.
My approach today has been shaped by years of my own personal healing, clinical training in Brainspotting and Internal Family Systems, somatic work, psychedelic therapy and integration, personal experiences with plant medicines, and teachings and wisdom drawn from Indigenous traditions.
I approach these teachings with deep respect for the cultures and lineages they come from and the people who have preserved them.
Together, these experiences have fundamentally changed the way I understand healing.
They have also changed my life - not just who I am as a therapist.
All of it.
They have changed the way I relate to myself and how I show up in my relationships. They have changed the way I listen to my body and move through fear and uncertainty as well as the way I understand my intuition.
The way I hold other people's pain and trust myself is also very different. And so is the way I sit across from another human being in the therapy room.
I no longer believe our minds are meant to carry the entire responsibility for healing us, but I think therapists are particularly vulnerable to trying.
Your mind is an extraordinary resource. But it is just one source of wisdom.
Think Less · Listen More
You Already Know How to Think. I Want to Help You Learn How to Listen.
We're taught to conceptualize, analyze, diagnose, assess and look for patterns. Then we form hypotheses and choose appropriate interventions.
Those are beautiful and necessary skills.
But somewhere along the way, many of us become so practiced at understanding experience that we lose touch with actually having one.
When you can explain your attachment wounds without feeling what's underneath, or identify your protective part while remaining completely blended with it your healing becomes stalled.
You can become an expert on healing without allowing yourself to fully experience your own, and it's not because you don't want to, it's because you've never actually been taught how to.
The work I do with therapists is about changing the way you show up for yourself.
I want to help you come down from your head and back into your body, your heart, and into the parts of yourself that know things you can't always explain.
This doesn't mean abandoning your intellect. Your mind is an extraordinary resource. But it is just one source of wisdom and this work is about opening yourself to the richness that comes with connecting to the wisdom of your body, heart, and soul so that your mind is no longer the only source you trust.
This is where I believe some of our most profound healing becomes possible.
Experiential Work
You Don't Need Another Place to Perform Being Self-Aware
You can leave therapy feeling deeply understood and still walk back into your life carrying the same patterns.
That is why my work with therapists is experiential.
I am less interested in spending hours helping you develop another explanation for why you are the way you are and more interested in helping you slow down enough to discover what is happening underneath everything you already know.
That is where our work begins.
Not Always Burnout
Sometimes the Pain Doesn't Look Like Burnout
You may still love being a therapist.
You may have a full practice, meaningful relationships with your clients, good boundaries, and work you're proud of.
And something may still feel off.
Maybe you're beginning to notice that certain clients affect you differently. A client's marriage sounds a little too much like your own, or someone's grief awakens something you thought you'd already processed. You become unusually protective of one client and impatient with another.
You find yourself wanting someone to make the decision you believe they should make because sitting with their uncertainty is activating something inside of you.
Or maybe what is happening has nothing obvious to do with your clients.
- You're successful but can't stop striving.
- You're exhausted but don't know how to rest without feeling guilty.
- You're the person everyone comes to, but you have no idea who you would call if you fell apart.
- You teach people to trust themselves while second-guessing your own decisions.
- You help clients build healthier relationships while struggling inside your own.
- You can offer enormous compassion to the person sitting across from you while the voice inside your own head remains relentless.
Sometimes the hardest part of being a therapist is recognizing that the strategies that made you exceptionally good at caring for everyone else may also be the strategies keeping you disconnected from yourself.
Strengths & Protection
When Your Strengths Become Your Protection
Therapists tend to be very capable people.
You learned how to pay attention and anticipate what other people need. How to read a room, stay calm when someone else is falling apart, and to understand multiple perspectives. How to push through discomfort and keep functioning.
Those qualities may have helped you long before you ever became a therapist, and they may have helped you build a beautiful career.
But sometimes what we experience as our greatest strengths are also protective strategies we've relied on for a very long time.
Independence
Your independence may make it difficult to receive.
Empathy
Your empathy may make it difficult to know what you want.
Perspective
Your ability to understand everyone else's perspective may make it difficult to remain connected to your own.
Determination
Your determination may have taught you to override your body.
Competence
Your competence may make asking for help feel surprisingly vulnerable.
Perfectionism
Your perfectionism may look like professionalism right up until the moment it becomes impossible to turn off.
The goal of therapy isn't to take those parts away.
It's to become curious about what they have been doing for you, what they have been protecting, and whether you still need them to work quite so hard.
Beneath the Surface
Therapy Intensives for Therapists: Time to Go Beneath the Surface
Weekly therapy can be incredibly valuable, but it isn't the only way to do meaningful therapeutic work.
For many therapists, adding another weekly appointment to an already full schedule feels like one more obligation.
And then there is the rhythm of the 50-minute hour.
The rhythm of the 50-minute hour
You arrive carrying the momentum of your day, you talk, and catch your therapist up on what happened since the last session. Your nervous system begins to settle, and you finally move underneath the story and into something that feels important.
And suddenly time is up.
You gather yourself, walk out the door, and return to your clients, family, inbox, or responsibilities.
A week later, you begin again.
Therapy intensives create a different kind of space.
Instead of repeatedly opening and closing the work, we have time to stay with it.
There is room for your nervous system to settle, for you to move past the part of you that already understands everything, and notice what is happening in your body instead of immediately explaining it. There's room for emotion to emerge without needing to package it neatly before the session ends.
We aren't racing the clock just as something meaningful begins to surface.
For therapists who have spent years living from the neck up, that additional time can make an enormous difference.
The goal isn't to spend hours talking, the goal is to create enough time and safety for you to stop performing therapy and actually experience it.
The Doorways
This Is Why My Work With Therapists Is Experiential
When you work with me, I'm not interested in proving how much either of us knows about psychology.
You already know a lot.
I am much more interested in what happens when we create enough time and safety for you to stop analyzing yourself.
Doorway OneBrainspotting
We may use Brainspotting to follow something your body is holding that doesn't have language yet.
Doorway TwoInternal Family Systems
We may use IFS to become curious about a part of you that has been working incredibly hard to protect you.
Doorway ThreeSlowing Down & Noticing
We may slow down and notice sensation, emotion, imagery, impulses, or memories without immediately trying to interpret them.
Doorway FourKetamine-Assisted Psychotherapy
When appropriate, we may use Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy and psychedelic integration as another way of exploring parts of you that have remained outside ordinary awareness.
But the modalities are not the healing. They are doorways.
The deeper work is learning to trust that there is wisdom inside of you that does not originate solely in your thinking mind. This distinction has changed my own life forever, and it is at the heart of the way I work with other therapists.
I don't want to help you become better at explaining yourself, I want to help you experience yourself.
And to discover what becomes possible when your mind, body, heart, and soul are finally allowed to be part of the same conversation.
Our Own Healing
Your Clients May Not Be the Only Ones Who Need You to Do This Work
There is another reason our own healing matters as therapists.
Our nervous systems enter the therapy room with us and clients experience more than our training. They experience our capacity to remain curious, how comfortable we are with grief, anger, uncertainty, shame, silence, and conflict.
Eventually, clients bring us to the edges of our own healing.
- If I cannot tolerate my own grief, there will be places I struggle to follow a client into theirs.
- If I need people to like me, there may be moments I hesitate to challenge someone.
- If uncertainty makes me anxious, I may rush toward an intervention rather than staying present.
- If my worth is tied to being helpful, I may begin taking responsibility for whether my clients change.
This isn't about becoming a perfectly healed therapist, because there is no such thing.
It is about knowing ourselves well enough to recognize when our own material has entered the room—and being willing to return to our own work when it does.
Our clients don't need therapists who have healed every wound, but they need therapists who are willing to remain in relationship with their own healing.
An Invitation
Therapy for Therapists in California Who Are Ready to Go Deeper
If you've been searching for therapy for therapists in California and want something deeper than another hour of talking about what you already understand, I invite you to schedule a complimentary phone consultation.
We'll talk about what is bringing you here, what you hope might change, and whether a therapy intensive feels like the right fit.
You spend so much of your life creating a space where other people are allowed to be fully human.
There should be a place where you get to be human, too.
Healing is a return.