Specialty · highly sensitive people
Therapy for highly sensitive people
You notice everything. The shift in someone's tone, the hum of the light, what was not said in the meeting. You come home from an ordinary day needing an hour of quiet before you can speak, and somewhere along the line you were told to toughen up — which was never useful advice, because there is nothing here that needs toughening.
Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.
What this work looks like with me
Let me be precise about the framing, because it changes everything about the work. High sensitivity is a trait: a nervous system that registers more input and processes it more deeply. It is not a disorder, not a diagnosis, and not a deficiency in resilience. Nothing in this work is aimed at making you less sensitive. It is aimed at making sensitivity cost less — through pacing, boundaries and nervous-system regulation — so the trait can be an asset rather than a running tax.
The daily reality usually includes absorbing other people's moods. You walk into a room and know within seconds that something happened before you arrived, and you often cannot tell where your own state ends and the room's begins. That porousness is the same faculty that makes you unusually accurate about people; it just has no filter attached by default. A good deal of our work is on that filter — noticing whose feeling you are holding, and putting it down.
Then there is overload. Loud, bright, crowded environments do not merely annoy a sensitive system, they saturate it, and once saturated you get irritability, tears, shutdown, or the flat exhaustion that arrives out of proportion to the day. Recovery time is not indulgence, it is the mechanism that clears the queue. Most of the sensitive people I work with have been rationing that time out of embarrassment, and paying for it in overwhelm later.
Alongside all of it runs a rich inner life: deep responses to music and landscape and language, layered thinking, strong empathy, a low tolerance for shallowness. People often reach me after years of treating the difficult half as the whole truth about themselves. We hold both — the depth and the load — without pretending one cancels the other.
High sensitivity is a trait. It is not a disorder and it is not a diagnosis.
What sensitive people bring here
Sensory overload
Open-plan offices, supermarkets, restaurants, fluorescent light. We work on thresholds, exits and recovery, not on endurance.
Absorbing other people
Carrying moods home that were never yours. Learning where you end, in the body rather than in theory.
Recovery time
The hour of quiet after an ordinary day, treated as a scheduled requirement rather than a weakness.
“Toughen up”
Years of hearing that you are too much or too soft. We look at what that instruction cost, and at what replaces it.
Boundaries without guilt
Leaving early, declining the loud thing, asking for the quieter option — without a paragraph of justification.
Anxiety and depletion
What tends to build up around an unpaced sensitive system. Workable, and distinct from the trait itself.
How we would work
We start with a free 20-minute consult, at your pace and with no follow-up from me if it is not a fit. Sessions are by secure video anywhere in California, which sensitive clients tend to find easier: your own room, your own light, no waiting room, and no drive home while you are still open.
The core of the work is somatic and mindfulness-based, because a sensitive system responds to what it can feel far more than to what it has been told. We map your particular early signals of saturation — the ones that appear well before the point of no return — and what genuinely settles you rather than what is supposed to. We build pacing into a real week: the recovery windows, the shape of a working day, what happens after a demanding evening.
From there we work on boundaries as a practical skill, on the self-criticism that grew up around being called too much, and on the specific environments that keep costing you the most. Where old experiences have left the system quicker to overload than it needs to be, I am EMDR certified and a certified hypnotherapist, and we would only go there at a pace you set.
I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I do not treat bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, and I am not a crisis service. If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911.
- Somatic and nervous-system regulation
- Mindfulness practice
- Pacing and boundary work
- Internal Family Systems (IFS)
- Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning
- EMDR certified, and certified hypnotherapist
Questions sensitive people ask
- Is being highly sensitive a diagnosis?
- No. High sensitivity is a trait, not a disorder and not a diagnosis — a nervous system that takes in more detail and processes it more deeply. It is not in the diagnostic manual and there is nothing about it that needs treating. What sometimes does need attention is the wear that accumulates when a sensitive system spends years in environments built for a different one, or the anxiety and exhaustion that build up around it. That is what we work on, not the trait itself.
- Can therapy make me less sensitive?
- That is not the aim, and I would be wary of anyone offering it. Sensitivity is not a defect with a repair; it comes bundled with the things you probably value about how you experience your life — the depth, the noticing, the aesthetic response, the accuracy about people. Trying to blunt it usually means numbing generally, which costs you the good part along with the tiring part. The workable change is in pacing, environment, boundaries and regulation, so that the same sensitivity costs you much less to carry.
- Why am I so tired after normal days?
- Because the day was not neutral input for your system. A shared office, a bright store, a commute, four conversations where you tracked everyone's mood — each of those was processed in more detail than the people around you processed them, and detail is metabolically expensive. The tiredness is not laziness or poor stamina; it is the bill for the processing. Once you can see it that way, recovery time becomes something you schedule on purpose rather than something you feel guilty about needing.
- Is video better or worse for someone sensitive?
- For most sensitive people it is a genuine advantage, and I say that as someone who works only this way. You are in your own room, with your own light and temperature and your own chair. There is no waiting room with other people's tension in it, no fluorescent hallway, no drive home while you are still open from the session. You control the sensory conditions, which means more of your capacity is available for the actual work.
Work paced for your system
If ordinary days have been costing more than they should, book a free 20-minute consult or send a text. Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.