Therapy for people who live public lives

People who become famous endure a multitude of very challenging realities in particular ways that others do not face. Projections, pedestals, judgments, dehumanizing treatment, others' jealousies or mis-assumptions, odd expectations, and loneliness are some. Each of those is its own problem, and they compound. Being placed on a pedestal and being treated as less than human are the same gesture from two directions: in both, the actual person is missing.

Projection is the one that wears people down most quietly. Strangers arrive with a fully formed version of you already assembled, and they are not wrong enough to argue with or right enough to inhabit. You are thanked for things you did not intend and blamed for things you did not do. Over years this makes the question “who am I when no one is watching” genuinely hard to answer, rather than a nice thing to journal about.

Then there is the loneliness, which usually surprises people, because the calendar is full and the affection is real. But the number of people who can hear that you are frightened, or bored with your own success, or grieving in the middle of a good year, tends to be very small. Some of the people closest to you are paid, and you love them anyway, and the arrangement still shapes what you can say. Some cannot hear it because your struggle threatens the story they need about you.

I have my own years in public view — television, seminars, radio, books and columns — and that gives me direct insight into this rather than sympathy from outside. I know what it is like to be looked at, to be publicly agreed with, to be publicly wrong. It means we can skip the part where you explain that the good fortune is real and the difficulty is also real. Both are simply assumed here.

What we actually do is ordinary therapy, done with a discretion that matches your life. Anxiety, sleep, grief, a marriage, a body, a childhood, the fear of the thing ending, the fear of it continuing. You are not a category to me. You are a person who arrived at a particular hour, and for that hour nobody needs anything from you.

I want to be concrete about this rather than reassuring, because vague reassurance is exactly what your audience of one has learned not to trust. I do not confirm or deny to anybody that a given person is a client. I keep no notes beyond what care requires. I do not name clients, and I do not describe them by category either — not “a musician” or “someone you would know,” because that is a clue rather than a courtesy. There are no testimonials, reviews or client quotes anywhere on this site, by design.

The legal limits are the ordinary ones and I will state them plainly in the first session: a serious risk to your life or someone else's, abuse of a child or a dependent adult, or a valid court order. Nothing else. If someone from your team, your family or a production asks me anything, the answer is that I cannot discuss whether anyone is a client, and I will tell you that it was asked.

Practically: we plan your end of the call as carefully as mine — a room with a door, headphones, your own device, a calendar entry that names nothing. Email and text are convenient and not secure, so we keep them to logistics only. We start with a free 20-minute consult; there is no waiting room, no front desk and no one else in the building.

The clinical work itself uses Internal Family Systems, somatic and mindfulness practice, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, my own Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning, EMDR where trauma is still live — I am EMDR certified — and hypnotherapy as a certified hypnotherapist. My PhD is in expressive arts psychology, so movement, voice, writing, art and drama are available when words have been overused.

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.