• Process Medical Trauma

Medical trauma can result from repeated hospital visits, misdiagnoses, invasive procedures, or feeling dismissed or gaslighted by healthcare providers. Over time, these experiences can leave deep emotional wounds — leading to anxiety, hypervigilance, and distrust of the medical system.

Therapy offers a safe space to gently process the fear, anger, and helplessness that may have built up over years of medical invalidation. Using trauma-informed and body-based approaches, we can work to restore a sense of safety, agency, and self-trust — so you’re no longer reliving past trauma every time a new symptom appears.

• Calm Your Nervous System

Living with MCAS, POTS, dysautonomia, EDS, or Long COVID often means your nervous system is in a state of chronic stress. This can show up as anxiety, emotional reactivity, shutdown, or an inability to relax — even when you try.

Therapy can help regulate your nervous system by working with your body rather than pushing through or avoiding symptoms. Through somatic and polyvagal-informed tools like Brainspotting, tapping, breathwork, and grounding practices, we’ll support your system in moving out of fight-or-flight and toward greater rest, resilience, and recovery.

• Build a Relationship with Your Body That’s Less Fear-Based

When symptoms feel unpredictable or life-disrupting, it’s common to develop fear or even resentment toward your body. You may feel disconnected, betrayed, or constantly on edge, waiting for the next flare.

In therapy, we’ll create space to gently explore this relationship — without blame, pressure, or toxic positivity. You’ll learn how to listen to your body’s signals with curiosity instead of fear, practice compassion instead of frustration, and rebuild a sense of partnership with your physical self, even in the presence of ongoing symptoms.

• Validate Your Experiences (Even If Others Haven’t)

One of the most painful aspects of living with an invisible or complex illness is being misunderstood. Whether it’s friends, doctors, or even loved ones minimizing your reality, this lack of validation can lead to deep loneliness and self-doubt.

Therapy offers the kind of witnessing and affirmation you may have never received. I bring a deep understanding of chronic illness and neurodivergence, so you don’t have to waste energy explaining or justifying your pain. Together, we’ll name your truth — and help you internalize that your experience is real, valid, and worthy of care.

• Grieve, Cope, and Reconnect with Who You Are

Chronic illness often involves losses — of identity, career, energy, mobility, or even dreams for the future. These losses are real, and they deserve space to be acknowledged and grieved.

In therapy, we honor this grief while also supporting your capacity to adapt and reconnect with the parts of you that remain — your values, your creativity, your intuition, your resilience. It’s possible to hold both grief and hope, pain and purpose, illness and selfhood. Therapy can help you feel more whole again — even in an uncertain body.