Claire* told her family she was gay and has been estranged from them since.
She’s trying to work out whether she can still love people who won’t accept her. The old ways of hurting herself have come back, and her OCD tendencies have sharpened.
BecomeKnown
Trauma Therapy for Adults
Who've Done the Work and
Know Something Is Still Unhealed
Online Throughout Illinois,
Michigan, and Indiana
You Already Know You Need Something Different
You found ways to cope with the pains of your past. You developed strategies that keep away the bad feelings. They worked for a while, but they no longer provide the same relief.
Now you know you need more. Something different. Something permanent.
Memories float through your head and you feel helpless to them.
The relationship that should have been the safest one in your life did damage instead, and now you're rebuilding yourself out of the wreckage.
It's human to build strategies that suppress pain. Sometimes those strategies do harm of their own.
Everything You've Learned Still Hasn't Reached the Root
You've read the books. Van der Kolk, Pete Walker, whatever you found after those.
The podcasts on narcissistic parents got you through a year of commutes. CBT gave you real skills. DBT gave you more, and you still use them.
And the thing you came to therapy for is sitting exactly where you left it.
Trusting Anyone Feels Like a Risk You Can't Take
Your relationship with your parent taught you that another person can cause a lot of harm to your internal world.
So you keep everyone at a measured distance. Let someone in and they get the same access.
You're lonely inside that arrangement. Some days you wonder whether you're unlovable.
And you're still negotiating the boundary with your parent, still running the same quiet calculation about whether to cut off the relationship for good.
Four People Who Reached the Edge
Where You're Standing
Ben* grew up in a small town where the entire community devoted itself to one religion.
He never questioned his faith until he left for a university many miles away. His whole world changed.
Everything he thought he knew is up for question now, and he looks back on his religious upbringing very differently.
Tegan* has been in therapy since she was an adolescent.
She was adopted by a strict, and what felt like an unloving family. As a result, she has tried to educate herself with podcasts and books on narcissistic parenting.
None of it reached the root. It wasn’t working.
Joy* believes she's forever helpless to picking avoidant, unloving partners.
Every woman she’s dated has turned out uncaring and selfish. She knows how it connects to her mother, and to how badly she wanted a mother who was calm, loving, and patient.
What she can’t see yet is that she’s grieving a mother she never had.
*The above names and stories are fictionalized composites
of real clients I've supported.
Once You Understand,
You Can Choose
Nobody ever taught you how to handle any of this. Struggling is the natural result.
Awareness provides opportunity. When you let information in, you get the power to choose and to make change.
It's Time to Talk
Hi, I'm Angela.
I’ve been working as a therapist for 20 years.
Like a lot of counselors, I came to this work because I’m endlessly intrigued by why people function the way they do. I also went through my own trauma recovery, and I’ll be grateful for it for the rest of my life.
My personal growth has been pivotal in how I practice.
Therapy works if you work hard in it. Therapy is not a medication that works just because you attend. It takes true commitment and a real desire to do the hard thing in order to heal.
If that sounds like a lot to ask, it is. It’s also the reason the results hold.
The approach I trust most works with the different parts of who you are. The part that gets angry. The part that shuts down. The part that’s been ashamed since you were small.
Rather than fighting those parts, I help each one feel understood. When a part knows it’s been heard, it tends to settle down.
Protectors are the branches our tree. The wounds are the roots from which the protectors grew. Identifying, meeting with, and healing the root is the purpose of counseling.
That work lets you become your own source of compassion. Once you’ve learned to be curious and caring toward yourself, you’re ready to meet whatever comes next. That’s where confidence comes from, and gratitude for the life you’re actually in.
More About Me
Every One of Them Wanted the Same Thing You Do
Claire* wants to talk with someone who understands. She wants to make decisions about her life and her relationships and feel confident in them, even when those decisions cause other people pain.
Ben* needs a place that lets him decide for himself about religion. Somewhere he can be angry at the people he loves who harmed him in the name of God.
Tegan* came looking to heal the wounds of her past and feel free with the person she's become. Her history will never change. What she yearns for is that it stop casting a shadow in her present life.
Leslie* needs room to feel the full size of grieving something she believes is every human being's birthright. She wants to learn how to find a caring partner, having never had a caring parent.
Underneath every one of these sits the same question:
Can I be loved
exactly as I am?
It's Time to BECOME KNOWN
You already know that if you don’t unburden the harms of your past, you’ll keep running from the emotional pain of it.
The running puts more distance between you and the people you love, more distance between you and yourself, and pushes you further into the coping that breeds more shame.
In our work together, we’ll build insight into who you are. Why you function the way you do. How to change the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings that no longer feel helpful.
To yourself, and to the people you love: it’s time to BECOME KNOWN.
Something different. Something permanent. That's what this is.
Unburden the harms of your past and live a life where you truly like who you are.
Call me at (269) 921-6953. We’ll talk by phone first, at no cost, and you can decide from there.
Free 15-minute phone consultation. Online throughout Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana.