Therapy for Mental Health Professionals, Healers & Life Coaches

You spend your days holding space for other people's inner worlds. You are trained to notice, to attune, to sit with difficulty without flinching. And yet — when it comes to your own inner life, you may find yourself doing what many helpers do: intellectualizing, analyzing, staying just slightly above the feeling rather than in it.

Knowing how therapy works does not protect you from needing it. Sometimes it makes it harder.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes with being a helper. You understand the defenses you use. You can name your patterns almost before they finish forming. And yet that self-awareness, as valuable as it is, can become its own obstacle — a way of staying one step removed from the vulnerability that real change requires. You may have tried therapy before and found yourself subtly performing insight, or felt that the therapist wasn't quite tracking at the level you needed, or noticed yourself holding back because you didn't want to overwhelm someone who was supposed to be helping you.

My work is psychoanalytic and tailored entirely to you — not to a protocol or a set of techniques. For clinicians, coaches, and healers especially, that matters. You are not looking for psychoeducation or CBT worksheets. You are looking for a space where your full complexity can be held — where you can stop being the one who understands everything and simply be the one who is trying to understand yourself.

This is one of the most meaningful populations I work with. There is something uniquely powerful about a helper finally being helped — deeply, seriously, and without performance.

What Brings Helpers to Therapy

I have extensive experience working with the following:

  • Compassion fatigue, burnout, and the emotional cost of caregiving

  • Difficulty separating your own emotional experience from your clients'

  • Imposter syndrome and the persistent sense of not being enough despite your training

  • Using your professional knowledge to stay one step ahead of your own vulnerability

  • Struggles with dependency — difficulty receiving care, leaning on others, or admitting need

  • The particular loneliness of a role that requires you to hold others while rarely being held yourself

  • Vicarious trauma and the cumulative weight of witnessing suffering

  • Difficulty being a patient — performing insight, staying too cerebral, or feeling like you should be further along

  • Existential questions about meaning, identity, and whether the work you do is sustainable

  • Personal material that keeps showing up in your clinical work and deserves its own space

  • Relationship difficulties — intimacy, conflict, the ways your relational patterns show up outside the consulting room

  • The tension between who you help people become and who you are when no one is watching

Many helpers come to therapy not because something has broken down, but because they want more — more depth, more freedom, more access to their own inner life. I work with mental health professionals, coaches, and healers both in-person in downtown San Luis Obispo, CA and virtually throughout California and worldwide.

A NOTE ON CONFIDENTIALITY

I understand that seeking therapy as a clinician can feel complicated — questions about confidentiality, about being known in a professional community (especially a small community like SLO), about what it means to be seen as someone who needs support. These concerns are real and worth naming. My practice is entirely confidential, and I bring particular care to working with colleagues who are navigating both a personal and a professional relationship to this work. If you have concerns, I welcome you to raise them in our initial consultation call.

Take the next step

Complete the following form to schedule a brief consultation call where I can answer any questions you have and talk about next steps.