Specialty · therapy for therapists
Therapy for therapists
You are the one who holds the room. You know what a good question does, you know what you would say to a client in your position, and none of that is helping you at eight o'clock on a Tuesday when the house is quiet and you are the one who needs somewhere to put it down.
Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.
What this work looks like with me
Therapists often like to collaborate in their growth work. I have worked effectively with many therapists and other practitioners of wellness and healing, respecting their own genius while adding my own facilitation to their optimum benefit. That is the posture I take with you. You are not a naive consumer of therapy and I am not going to treat you as one. You are also not on duty here, which is the part that takes most therapists a session or two to believe.
The particular difficulty of this work is that you are always the person who holds the room. You track affect, you regulate someone else's nervous system with your own, you carry the endings and the ones who stopped coming without saying why. Then you close the laptop and are expected to be a spouse or a parent or a friend with the same equipment. Most of the therapists who reach me are not in crisis. They are simply tired in a specific way that people outside the field tend to hear as complaining.
There is also the strangeness of being assessed while you are the one being helped. You know what I am listening for. You can hear yourself producing a well-organized history, and you notice the moment you reach for the clinical word instead of the true one. I say that out loud when it happens, without making it a gotcha, because the well-organized version is usually the armor rather than the material. What you came for is generally underneath it.
And there is the small-community problem. In California's clinical world the circles overlap constantly — the same trainings, the same consultation groups, the same referral chains. Dual-relationship awareness is not an abstraction for you; it is the reason you may have put off calling anyone at all. We handle it directly in the consult rather than hoping it does not come up, and if an overlap makes me the wrong person, I will say so and help you find a better fit.
The fear underneath a lot of it is being seen as impaired by peers. Not being reported — being quietly reclassified in someone's mind as the one who is struggling. I take that seriously. Being in your own therapy is a sign of professional seriousness, not of a fitness problem, and nothing about our work is anyone else's business.
This work is also for other practitioners of wellness and healing: bodyworkers, acupuncturists, coaches, chaplains and clergy, nurses, midwives, doulas, hospice workers. The specifics differ and the shape does not. You are trained to be the steady one in someone else's worst hour, and that costs something real.
Therapists often like to collaborate in their growth work. I respect your own genius while adding my own facilitation to your optimum benefit.
Related reading: expressive arts therapy for when talking about it has stopped moving it, and grief — including the losses you carry from your own caseload.
What practitioners bring here
Burnout and compassion fatigue
The flatness that arrives before the tiredness does. Dreading a client you used to like. Doing competent work with nothing left over for your own life.
Holding the room, always
Being the regulated one for a living, then coming home with the same nervous system your family needs. We work on what actually restores you, not what should.
Dual relationships and small circles
Shared trainings, shared supervisors, shared referral networks. Named in the consult, handled by agreement, revisited whenever it changes.
The fear of being seen as impaired
Not the licensing board — your peers. The quiet reclassification. We look at that fear plainly, and at who actually gets to know anything.
Being assessed while being helped
You can hear yourself producing a tidy history. I name it when the clinical word arrives instead of the true one, and we go under it.
Your own grief and history
The losses, the marriage, the childhood that made you good at this. The material your clients keep brushing against without knowing it.
How we would work
We begin with a free 20-minute consult. In it we cover the overlap question early — who we both know, which trainings and consultation groups you sit in — and how any of that would be handled. If it cannot be handled well, I will tell you and point you elsewhere. There is no follow-up from me if you decide against it.
Sessions are 50 minutes by secure video anywhere in California. The instruments are the ones you would recognize: Internal Family Systems, somatic and mindfulness work, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy where it earns its place, and my own Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning. I am EMDR certified for trauma that is still live, I am a certified hypnotherapist, and my PhD is in expressive arts psychology, which gives us movement, voice, writing, art and drama when talking about a thing has stopped moving it.
We keep the line between therapy and consultation visible. Your work is one of the places your own material appears, so it belongs in the room — but if what you need is clinical consultation on a case, I will name that rather than sell you therapy for it.
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.
- Internal Family Systems (IFS)
- Somatic and mindfulness work
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and CBT
- Positive Re-Narrative and Repatterning
- EMDR certified, and certified hypnotherapist
- Expressive arts — my PhD is in expressive arts psychology
Questions therapists ask
- Do therapists have therapists?
- Many of us do, and it is ordinary rather than remarkable. Some of my colleagues have been in their own therapy continuously for years; some come back for a season when something in their own life asks for it — a death, a divorce, a diagnosis, a caseload that has grown heavier than it used to be. Knowing how the work goes does not exempt you from needing it. If anything, sitting with other people's pain for a living is a good argument for having somewhere of your own to put yours down.
- Will you treat me like a colleague or like a client?
- Both, and I try to be honest about the difference. Your training is real and I am not going to pretend you do not know what I am doing when I do it — that would be tiresome for you and a waste of the hour. But you came here to be helped, not to co-facilitate, so I hold the frame and you get to stop holding it. Therapists often like to collaborate in their growth work, and I welcome that. I have worked with many therapists and other practitioners of wellness and healing, and I respect their own genius while adding my own facilitation to their optimum benefit.
- What if we move in the same professional circles?
- We name it early and we keep naming it. In a professional community this size, shared trainings, shared referral networks and shared supervisors are common, and pretending otherwise is worse than acknowledging it. In the consult I will ask directly about overlaps, and if one of them would compromise your privacy or my ability to be useful to you, I will say so and help you find someone better placed. Where the overlap is manageable, we agree in advance how it is handled — what happens if we end up in the same training room, and what I do at a conference, which is nothing unless you speak first.
- Is this therapy or consultation?
- Therapy, unless we deliberately agree otherwise. They are different instruments. Consultation looks at your work: a case that is stuck, a countertransference you cannot see around, an ethical question. Therapy looks at you: your grief, your marriage, your history, the part of you that learned early to be the capable one. The two blur easily, because your work is genuinely one of the places your own material shows up, so we track the line out loud. If what you actually need is clinical consultation, I will tell you that plainly rather than bill it as therapy.
Somewhere to put it down
If you have been meaning to do this for a year, 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.