Rachel Carlson
Counselor - LPC
While in some ways you had a good childhood, you also sense that something was not quite right. Maybe one of your parents was depressed or absent from the home. Whatever the case, you remember feeling a lot as a child, and having to handle those feelings alone.
Maybe your siblings teased you for being so sensitive. In fact, you have probably heard “you are too sensitive” as a refrain throughout your life. It is something people have said that adds to your sense that something is wrong with you. You don’t want what people say to affect you, but you can’t seem to help it.
As an adult you work very hard to be a person with integrity. You thought that this would mean you would feel happy and satisfied. Maybe you thought that in time these negative thoughts about yourself would go away. But they haven’t. In fact, they may have gotten worse.
Now there may be people counting on you—who look up to you. Sometimes you feel like the stress is too much and you want to run and hide. You look around at the people and wonder if they can see inside you. Despite getting good feedback—underneath you worry that there is something wrong with you. You feel like an imposter, and suspect you might in fact, be fatally flawed.
Maybe what you want is to feel comfortable with yourself, in your own skin. There is so much in life you know you should feel grateful for. You know you should be happy but instead you feel empty, lost and stressed. You want to be able to feel your life and to enjoy your relationships. You want to slow down, and take a breath. But at the moment that feels a little dangerous.
It’s possible that you had very well meaning parents, but that they just weren’t able to reflect your feelings back to you, so that you knew that those feelings were normal, and okay. You deserve to know that you are okay in this moment, but as long as you carry these old beliefs around, you can’t.
This is where holistic talk therapy and EMDR come in. Holistic therapy focuses on every facet of your life, so that you feel 100 percent listened to, and accepted. While we will spend time making connections to the past, so that we can undo the negative beliefs you collected as a child, our primary focus is on you in the present moment—making life more satisfying, more enjoyable, so that you can feel more connected, and successful, inside, as well as out.
Skills and Expertise
Anxiety
Communication Problems
codependency-2
Cyclothymia
Depression
Emptiness
Highly Sensitive Persons
Inadequacy
Loss or Grief
Treatment Orientation
EMDR
Eclectic
Gestalt
IFS
Psychodynamic
Modality