Therapy for Women
Therapy for Women in Santa Monica and Across California
A great many of the women I work with arrive having been the capable one for a very long time. The person other people call. The one who notices the temperature of a room and adjusts before anybody asks. It is a real skill, it is frequently a trauma adaptation, and it is exhausting in a way that is difficult to explain to anyone benefiting from it.
What brings them in is rarely framed as a crisis. It is more often a slow accumulation, plus one specific moment where the composure slipped and frightened them.
What Comes In
The things that tend to have gone unsaid
Anger, most often. Anger in women is so heavily policed — by family, by workplaces, by the women themselves — that it usually arrives disguised as guilt, exhaustion, or a headache. A significant part of the early work is simply allowing it to be named accurately in a room where nothing happens as a result.
Then the relational pattern. Attentive to someone who is not attentive back, over-functioning in a partnership and resenting it, or a friendship that runs entirely in one direction. When the cast changes and the plot does not, we look at the plot. That usually means going back to what you learned about how affection was earned.
Trauma histories come up in a substantial proportion of this work, and not always as the presenting problem. Someone books about sleep or panic, and eight sessions in, a history arrives that has never been said out loud to anybody in those words. That moves at whatever pace you set, and I will not push it faster.
There is also the specific weariness of managing everyone else's emotional weather while being told, in various ways, that this is simply what you are like.
In the Room
Where the work tends to concentrate
Competence as camouflage
The performance is flawless and nobody has any idea. Being seen accurately is often more uncomfortable than the original problem, and we go at that carefully.
Boundaries that do not survive contact
You can state one clearly. The difficulty is the twenty minutes after, when the other person is displeased and everything in you wants to undo it. That twenty minutes is the actual work.
Anger with nowhere legitimate to go
Not a problem to be eliminated. Usually accurate information about a boundary that has been crossed for years, arriving in the only form available to it.
How This Runs
Direct, warm, and willing to say the unflattering thing
I am not a neutral presence who reflects your sentences back to you. You will know what I think, including when I think you are being unfair to yourself and when I think you are being unfair to somebody else. A lot of women have had therapy that was kind and produced no friction, and found it pleasant and inert.
If therapy has felt judgmental or disappointing before, that history is welcome material here. Tell me what went wrong last time and we will work to avoid repeating the shape of it.
Sessions run by video anywhere in California, or in person at the Santa Monica office. Fees are three hundred dollars for fifty minutes and four hundred for the intake, out of network.
Honest Limits
Plain notes
I hold a California license and can only work with people who are physically in California during a session. That is a legal boundary rather than a preference, and it applies to video as much as to the office.
I will also not promise outcomes. Trauma and attachment work in particular takes longer than anyone wants, we review whether it is doing anything, and pausing or ending is a decision we make out loud rather than drift into.
Where to Next
Related areas of the work
Free Consultation
Start with a conversation, not a commitment.
The first step is a free consultation call. We talk about what brings you here, what you have already tried, and whether working together makes sense. If I am not the right fit, I will say so and point you somewhere better.
- · You request a time on the form, and I confirm by email
- · Telehealth anywhere in California, or in person in Santa Monica
- · Private pay, with superbills for out-of-network reimbursement
- · 48 hours' notice for changes or cancellations
Or call the office at (213) 761-8555.