who i work with

I work with adults who have experienced a severance from themselves, the kind that happens when someone or something needed you to shrink and fit in and be less than who you fully are.

I have an interest, though not exclusively, in two particular routes to this.

The first is religious abuse. Cults, high control groups, evangelical belief systems that demand obedience in place of your own thoughts and opinions, teaching you that your own instincts are not to be trusted. If this shaped you from childhood, it may be the only version of you you've ever known.

The second is abuse within close relationships. A parent, a caregiver, a partner, anyone whose love came with conditions you learned to meet in order to stay safe, accepted, connected. This can happen at any age, including well into adulthood and to people who felt they already knew who they were before it all began to change.

Often in my experience, it's both, a system built on rigid beliefs and then a relationship later in life that repeats the same messages, only this time it wears a different face.

the thread that runs through it

The impact is the same whether the hands that shaped you belonged to one person, or many. Control uses the same methods regardless of scale: isolation, the slow erosion and questioning of your own judgement, the sense that safety depends on you becoming smaller and compliant.

What I see most often, is a profound disconnect from the Self. A difficulty knowing what you feel and then not being able to trust yourself once you feel it. A sense of self that feels transparent, borrowed or entirely absent. Choices feel impossible to make because you're unsure of how to make a choice that's fully yours without the influence of past learning or approval.

If any of this sounds familiar, you are not broken and you are not alone in it. This is simply where the learning and unlearning begins.

if you're not sure this is you

You don't need a clear diagnosis or the right words to introduce yourself. Many people arrive here without either. What matters more is the feeling underneath it, a sense that you've lost touch with something that used to be yours, or maybe you never felt you had in the first place.