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
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. And for a long time, it did. But something underneath has started asking for attention.
Maybe it's a passage that brought you here—becoming a parent, or watching the last child go; a relationship ending, or the slow unraveling of one; a parent aging, or facing your own aging; retirement, or a birthday that landed harder than you expected. Maybe it’s more subtle than any of that, just a growing sense that you can’t keep living the way you have been. Whatever the form, what used to carry you doesn’t anymore, and you’re left looking around at a life that should feel like yours, wondering whether it still is.
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 you learned early to be easy, to keep the peace, to not need too much, and you got so good at doing things 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.
It rarely takes 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 aim isn't to quell a symptom and send you on your way. It's 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 becoming capable of living without one.
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’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 to hold complexity, to honor the messy, contradictory truths in 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.