The deep end of ordinary life
Depth-oriented therapy for adults with a settled life and unsettled depths—anxiety that never fully explains itself, life passages that bring it to the surface, inherited patterns, and the questions of meaning beneath them. Online across Washington.
When the usual way stops working
Often something has shifted—a change you chose or one that chose you—and the ways of coping that carried you this far have stopped doing the job. From the outside the life works, and for a long time it did.
Sometimes a passage brings you here: a child born or a child leaving, a marriage ending or slowly coming apart, a parent aging or a confrontation with your own aging, a grief that doesn’t have a script, a birthday that landed harder than you expected.
Or it’s an anxiety that has hummed along without ever fully explaining itself, so constant you’ve mistaken it for who you are.
Or it’s a lifetime of keeping the peace and not needing too much, until you got so good at knowing what everyone else needs that you lost track of what you want.
And sometimes there’s simply the sense that there’s more underneath: more honesty, more aliveness, more of yourself.
You may already understand yourself quite well, and even know where some of these patterns began. But knowing and living differently, as it turns out, are not necessarily the same thing.
It doesn’t always take a catastrophe, but it usually takes a crack: a moment when what you’ve always done stops being enough. Whether that arrived all at once or built slowly over years, this is a place to start.
How the work happens
Therapy with me is collaborative and unhurried. We build a relationship you can trust, and from there we look together at the patterns you inherited, the coping that once made sense, and the questions that haven't had anywhere to go. The patterns tend to show up between us, too, which gives us the rare chance to see them up close, in motion, with someone whose only agenda is understanding them with you.
Managing a symptom can bring real relief, and sometimes that’s exactly what’s needed. But relief doesn’t always answer the deeper question, so it returns or moves or trades itself for another symptom. We stay with what hurts long enough to understand what it’s for. The aim is to help you relate differently to what you’re carrying, until your life feels like your own. I can’t offer a blueprint for what comes next. The work is learning to live without one.
I also believe that not everything that hurts is a problem inside you, and part of the work is sorting out what’s yours to change and what you were handed to carry.
My approach is depth-oriented and relational, drawing on existential, humanistic, and psychodynamic traditions, and shaped around you.
"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 came to this work the long way around, through “discovering” existentialism in high school, a detour into philosophy, a master’s in psychology with clinical training, and then a doctorate (the scholarly kind), because I knew I wanted to be a therapist but didn’t feel ready yet. That long apprenticeship taught me to make room for complexity, to honor the messy, contradictory truths in all of us, and to stay 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 suggests that the single greatest predictor of a successful outcome in therapy 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 an easy way to find out whether we might be a good match to work together.