Therapists in Portland, Maine

Our first meeting is far less daunting than the word 'therapy' might lead you to expect. You will not be handed a symptom questionnaire or asked to summarize the worst thing that has happened to you in under an hour.

Therapy works when the method matches the problem. General support is a fine thing, but it is not what shifts this, and years of thoughtful conversation can leave the mechanism completely untouched.

What if the problem isn't that you feel too much, but that no one ever showed you what to do with it? Sit with that question for a moment before you read on.

Years of sitting with people have taught me that most suffering is not exotic. It is ordinary life, compounded: small hurts unexamined, decisions deferred, overthinking mistaken for control.

You are perhaps here because something arrives uninvited and there is nothing you have found that reliably stops it once it has started. Most people have tried a great many sensible things by the time they reach me, and the failure of those attempts has usually been interpreted as a personal shortcoming.

The one thing I would tell every new client is that you are allowed to want the old arrangement back, even if you would not actually return to it. People treat that wish as evidence of a mistake and it is nothing of the sort.