Individual Therapy
Anxiety, depression, grief, trauma and the patterns you keep repeating.
Not every relationship problem is a two-person problem, and not everything that brings someone to therapy is about a relationship at all.
I see individual clients for anxiety, depression, grief, self-esteem, and the patterns that keep repeating across relationships no matter who the other person is. Sometimes that work stands entirely on its own. Sometimes it runs alongside couples work, because one partner is carrying something that keeps landing in the middle of the marriage.
What people come in with
- Anxiety. The running commentary that doesn't shut off, the physical symptoms, the exhausting work of anticipating everything
- Depression. Flatness, loss of interest, the sense of moving through the day at a distance from it
- Grief. Including losses that didn't come with a funeral: a marriage, a role, a version of the future you'd planned on
- Relationship patterns. Choosing the same kind of partner, losing yourself inside relationships, or leaving before you can be left
- Trauma. Recent or long past, where EMDR is often the most direct route
- Self-esteem. The internal voice that speaks to you in a way you'd never speak to anyone else
- Life transitions. Divorce, a career change, becoming a parent, becoming a caregiver
How I work
My approach is person-centered, and I mean that in its original sense rather than as a pleasant phrase to put on a website. The premise is simple: you are the expert on your own life. You have lived every day of it and I have not. Whatever brought you here, you already carry more information about it than I ever will. A great deal of what feels like being stuck turns out to be not having had anywhere safe to think out loud.
So I won't hand you a diagnosis and a worksheet in the first twenty minutes, and I won't decide what your real problem is and steer you toward it. You choose what we talk about, and you set the pace. If it takes a few sessions of circling something before you can say it, that circling is part of the work rather than a delay before the work starts.
What I bring is a particular quality of attention. I try to understand your experience the way you actually live it, rather than the way I might interpret it from the outside, and I tell you honestly what I'm hearing. Carl Rogers, who developed this approach, believed that people move toward growth on their own when the conditions are right: being genuinely understood, not judged, and met by someone willing to be real with them. In my experience that holds far more often than not.
None of that means sessions drift. I ask questions, I notice patterns out loud, and where it would help I draw on other approaches: cognitive behavioral work when it's useful to look at the thinking underneath a feeling, EMDR when something traumatic is driving the symptoms, and trauma-informed practice throughout, which mostly means we move at a pace your nervous system can actually tolerate rather than the pace either of us might prefer. Those are things I offer rather than impose. The center of the work stays with you.
Mindfulness runs through a good deal of my work. Not as a wellness add-on, but because so much of anxiety, and so many of the patterns people most want to change, move faster than thought does. Learning to notice what is happening in your body in the moment, without immediately judging it or rushing to fix it, gives you somewhere to stand. It fits naturally with a person-centered approach, because the aim isn't to control what you feel. It's to be able to stay with it long enough to understand what it's telling you.
A note on individual work during marriage difficulties. I can see you individually, or I can see you and your partner as a couple. What I won't do is see one partner individually and then take on the couple, because it compromises my neutrality in the room. If you're not sure which you need, say so at the consultation and we'll work it out.
Ready to start?
I'm accepting new clients for in-person sessions in Conway and telehealth across Arkansas.