The deep end of ordinary life
Depth-oriented therapy for adults with a settled life and unsettled depths—anxiety that never fully explains itself, the transitions chosen and unchosen that bring it to the surface, inherited patterns, and the questions of meaning beneath them. Online across Washington.
For the ones who hold it all together
The people I work with are often the ones who seem fine. The dependable one. The one others rely on. The one who thinks things through, tries to get things right, and has gotten very good at holding it all together. From the outside, the life works.
You may have become very good at managing your life without ever quite learning how to inhabit it.
But something underneath has started asking for attention.
Maybe it’s an anxiety that's hummed beneath everything for as long as you can remember, the quiet fuel you've been running on.
Maybe it's a transition, chosen or not, that has made the usual way of holding it together stop working—a loss, a role that's ending, a milestone birthday, a child leaving, a marriage that's shifting—and left you looking around at a life that should feel like yours, wondering whether it is.
Maybe you learned early to be easy, to keep the peace, to not need too much, and you got so good at holding things together for everyone else that you lost the thread of what you want. You can be remarkably good at knowing what everyone else needs and still have no idea what you need.
You may already understand yourself quite well. You may even know where some of these patterns came from. Understanding them and knowing how to live differently, though, are not always the same thing.
You don't need a crisis to begin. Part of the work is sorting out what's genuinely yours and what you were handed to carry. Sometimes the question is simply: How did I end up here, and is this actually the life I want?
How the work happens
Therapy with me is collaborative and unhurried. From the foundation of a trusting relationship, we look together at the patterns you inherited, the coping that once made sense, and the questions that haven't had anywhere to go.
You may have become very good at managing your life—keeping things moving, meeting expectations, thinking ahead, taking care of what needs taking care of—without necessarily feeling fully at home in the life you're managing.
The aim isn't to quiet a symptom and send you on your way. It's to help you relate differently: to the anxiety, to the circumstances you didn't choose, to the people around you, and to what you actually value, until your life feels like your own.
My approach is depth-oriented and relational, drawing on existential, humanistic, and psychodynamic traditions—tailored, always, to you rather than to a method.
"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…Live the questions now." —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Meet Michelle
I’ve spent my adult life studying the big questions. I started with a philosophy degree, then a master's in psychology with clinical training, then a doctorate (the scholarly kind). That long apprenticeship taught me the habit of holding complexity—of honoring the messy, contradictory truths that exist within all of us. And I’ve learned to sit with the liminal: that unsettling space between what once was and what is yet to be, where life’s deepest transitions happen. That’s the work now: sitting with one person at a time, in a relationship built to hold what the rest of life can't.
Finding the right therapist matters more than finding one quickly
Research is consistent on this: The strongest predictor of therapy's success is the quality of the relationship between client and therapist. So I encourage you to talk with as many therapists as it takes to find someone you connect with, whether or not that's me. If what you've read here resonates, a free 15-minute consultation is a low-stakes way to find out.
I’m currently scheduling free 15-minute calls for my September 2026 launch. This is a space for us to connect, discuss how to get started, and see if we’re a good match for the work you’re looking to do.